Item. 99 Cent Sale!  These will occur periodically through the rest of 2015.  The first deal occurs for Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”; it will be on sale for $0.99 on Amazon June 1-June 7.  That leaves you only a few days to take advantage of this reduced price—this ebook reverts to its original price is $2.99 at the end of this period.  The elevator pitch: Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!

Item. Facebook ads.  After my experience examining what Bookbub offers (a lot of nothing for an expensive price), I decided I’d promote my Kindle Countdown Deal (see above) on Facebook (it’s an order of magnitude less than Bookbub and supposedly FB targets potential readers).  Wrote a comment describing the deal on my FB page, clicked on the boost button, filled out the usual crap, and submitted.  The acknowledgment email arrives welcoming me as an FB advertiser (oh joy!), telling me that their gurus (computers?) will censor me (you can’t use FB for Facebook and other evil things, for example), and informing me they’ll tell me what they think in 15 minutes.

I never received the results of their censorship study, but FB started boosting that post from my FB page.  This is a big experiment for me.  Even though FB is an order of magnitude more reasonable than Bookbub, I’ll still need to sell many ebooks to pay for that little campaign.  You can help me out here: $0.99 for an ebook is the same price as a dollar meal at McDonald’s and a lot healthier for you (I’m surprised that got through the FB censors, by the way).

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For all the words spoken and written about changin’ times in the book industry, you’d think the seas a writer sails would be really rough.  I don’t see roiling waves at all.  I’m a bit frustrated I don’t have more readers, but what the hell—I’m having a lot of fun doing what I’m doing, what I’ve always wanted to do, as a matter of fact.  I’m a full-time writer, and I write at all levels, from op-ed blog posts that probably anger some people and amuse others, to short stories and novels, and to social media, where I mostly lurk but comment when I have something to say.

I see smooth sailing in calm seas.  Many writers want to make a rogue wave, that phenomenon that rises out of relative calm and makes its presence known in a big way.  I’m OK with putting my name on a few eddies and accompanying froth here and there.  My character Castilblanco has become a Zen Buddhist; I have a bit of that philosophy in me, an attitude expressed more succinctly in that Spanish song “Que será, será.”  (I read Alan Watts in college but gave up on Zen when I couldn’t get into the lotus position.)  Perhaps less mystical is the observation that applies to many artistic activities: not everyone can win the lottery, but you can’t win if you don’t play the game.  Given that experimental fact, I’d add some rules to live by if you’re a writer.  (Readers might want to avoid writers who don’t live by them, but remember: even a jerk can tell a good story, and the story’s the thing.)

Rule 1. Be nice.  I’ll have to admit that online you can get all types, from rascally reviewers to big, bad bigots.  I have an Irish temper, so my knee-jerk reaction sometimes is to mount a verbal attack (believe me, I can do it—I had a rep in my day job for not suffering fools gladly).  I’ve learned to bow out, though.  My German side is stubborn, but I’ve also learned to let the offender have the last word.  S/he’ll often put her/his foot in the mouth, and sometimes the most egregious offenders write something that becomes a learning experience for me as a writer.  At the very least, don’t go beyond, “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” because your goal’s not about winning an argument, it’s about sharing reading and writing experiences.  Above all, value your readers.  I love you all.  There are so many ebooks out there, I feel honored if you read one of mine.  Even more so if you give me a review.

Rule 2. Don’t waffle.  This seems contradictory to rule 1, but if I have reasoned opinions about something, I stick by them, resorting to that agree-to-disagree if discussions really get testy.  I try to accept that others’ opinions can be just as valuable as my own, and, if they’re strong opinions, I’m probably not going to change them, but I expect people to do the same for me.  Again, respect your readers.  Having just one reader makes your ebook a success.  More creates that eddy, and thousands create a rogue wave.  Note that I’m saying that my readers are creating those disturbances on the relatively calm seas.  They’re the action; I’ve only put my name on that eddy or wave.  Readers rule.

Rule 3. Be accessible.  This is part of being nice, of course.  I try to answer every email and comment to blog posts.  Once I’m involved in a discussion thread, I try to keep it going as long as there seems to be interest (or, until it completely runs off-track).  The recluse writer is a stereotype, but many stereotypes have some truth to them.  I try not to be a recluse, at least online.  Take Big Five writers, or any VIPs in any activity, for that matter.  In general, the more famous they are, the more they become inaccessible, unless they have staffs answering letters and emails for them.

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Tomorrowland. Dir. Brad Bird.  I guess many reviewers (Sandy Keenan, ABC News; A. O. Scott, NY Times; Stephen Whitty, NJ Star Ledger; Justin Chang, Variety; Christopher Orr, The Atlantic; and others) won’t be receiving one of those little medallions for being a genius!  Clearly they didn’t understand this film.  It’s very Clooneyesque: there can be a bright future for the human race if we only get off our butts, get our act together, and do something about making it happen.  That’s the important message these reviewers missed.

Clooney does a fine acting job too as the old geek Frank, a super-MacGyver who screwed up a few things along the way.  Hugh Laurie tries to shrug off his Dr. House role and does a good job as the evil Gov. Nix.  The child actors are fine too (Thomas Robinson as young Frank, Britt Robertson as Casey Newton, and Raffey Cassidy as Athena the Android), but I had trouble understanding Raffey at times and Britt was a bit too histrionic.

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Item. 99 Cent Sale!  These will occur periodically through the rest of 2015, even though you almost have to be a member of the Bolshoi to dance through the 90-day Kindle Select periods.  (Don’t retain that image of me in a tutu, please!  Probably not quite as bad as me in a speedo, because there’s music associated, but people receive enough bad images for a lifetime from reality shows.)  The first deal occurs for Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”; it will be on sale for $0.99 on Amazon June 1-7.  The elevator pitch: Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!

Item. Bookbub.  Many authors recommend it, including Joe Konrath.  I’m setting up some Kindle Countdown deals (see above), so I thought I’d try it.  Yeah, I know that was illogical.  I’d be reducing my ebook’s price and paying Bookbub dearly to tell readers about it.  I guess those recommending authors are one-percenters who have the money to burn?  Bookbub’s business model also charges more for popular genres too.  Between paying Bookbub for advertising and Kirkus for reviews, most indies with my number of ebooks would go broke.  $20K isn’t chump change!  Pox on Bookbub’s house.  Besides this newsletter, I’ll stick with Goodreads, thank you—it’ free, and I can directly reach out to readers.

Item. Goodreads.  Lord knows if I’m using it correctly, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.  The basic problem I see, beyond an interface that’s far from user friendly, is that it’s primarily for readers with author services tacked on.  Being primarily for readers is good, by the way: First, that makes it a better social media site than Facebook.  FB purposely limits your author fan page posts to 1 to 5% of FB members, and too many of those people aren’t readers.  Second, I read a lot more than I write, so I want to hang online with readers.  Third, as an author, I want to reach out to people who are readers and are potentially interested in my ebooks.  There are millions of readers on Goodreads.

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Will any amount of skill compensate for an author’s zero creativity?  Will readers read a creative and inspired story when the writer has no skill?  The answer to both questions is no.  Good storytelling needs both creative talent and good skill in spinning the yarn.  Although writing genre fiction might not be called an art form by some, it is, and it’s similar to other art forms.  Mozart was a creative genius, but he was also a skillful composer and pianist.  Most musicians aren’t in Mozart’s league.  Just look at the number of revisions Beethoven made to the end of the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.  But Beethoven was both creative and skillful too, of course.  Writing is like that—we all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Developing skills is the easy part.  In most cases, it just means practice, practice, practice, which in writing means sitting down and pounding the keys a bit every day.  That’s blood, sweat, and tears.  And then doing it all over again.  When you’re not doing that, you should be reading about what it takes to write genre fiction.  I’ve probably done my part in blog posts you will find in the category “Writing.”  Don’t look for these to tell you how to write the next NY Times bestseller, though—they won’t, because otherwise I’d make them Top Secret and use them myself!  No, they just tell you about things that I think are important in writing fiction—the skill term in the storytelling equation.  You can also read books like Stephen King’s On Writing (probably his best book, by the way!) and Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint.  There are also many other writing blogs with advice pieces—mine tend to be unconventional, so caveat emptor (of course, my advice is the best kind—it’s free!).

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(Thomas Waite, Trident Code, 47North (Amazon), 2015, ISBN 978-1477828403)

This novel is either a good thriller or so-so sci-fi.  Some might call it a techno-thriller.  I’m ambivalent.  Generally speaking, it’s the kind of book I like to read and write.  First, the positives: Waite follows Clancy’s advice and just tells the damn story, so fasten your seatbelt and hold on to your whiskey glass.  With only a few exceptions noted below, it’s an entertaining and breathless ride.  The negatives: My perception about who’s the protagonist doesn’t match Waite’s.  And his theme of cyber warfare doesn’t work well here either because it’s a major distraction and not the real issue.  But read on.

Meet the antagonist: Oleg Dernov is a brilliant psychotic sociopath, meaning he’s crazy smart and full of himself.  He has Daddy problems.  He’s a narcissistic SOB who manipulates people, especially women.  But he believes he’s a Russian patriot who can ensure his country will dominate the world by controlling all the Arctic’s oil and natural gas reserves.  Historical spoiler alert: that kind of thinking brought Hitler to power.

Meet the protagonist: Gloria Bortnik, Russian ex-Greenpeace leader seduced by Oleg, unwittingly helps him pave the road to world domination.  She learns that her infatuation with the idea of Ambient Air Capture (AAC, or the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, the Golden Fleece of environmental science) has implicated her in the murder of a Harvard prof and his wife, the former’s research having led to a practical implementation of AAC.  And that’s just the Preface!

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Item: Changes to Goodreads.  Same confusing website (watch for those links with the tiny print!), but they’ve added two useful features, one for readers and one for readers/authors.  The first allows you to download books you’ve purchased on Amazon onto your book list in one fell swoop.  Although I’m an avid reader and read many more books than I write (as it should be), I’ve always been lazy about doing this (AKA I want to spend my valuable time writing, not doing Goodreads/Amazon’s work for them).  I made the “fell swoop” occur just recently though, so authors who’ve had their books read and reviewed by me might note slightly different rankings.  I apologize for that—damned if I was going to go to Amazon to check how many stars I gave a book when I don’t believe in that ranking system anyway.  By the same token, if I couldn’t remember having read the book (even though Amazon’s computer says I did) or remembered trashing it, I generally didn’t make the transfer to Goodreads.  (You’ll see what I mean when you take advantage of this feature—it is nifty and shows one advantage of Amazon’s long tentacles.)

The number two feature for both readers and authors is that now, you dear reader, can “follow me” by finding my Goodreads profile (this link will require a log-in if you’re not logged in already) and clicking on the “Follow Author” button.  This adds another tool for authors that need to be discovered (I’m one, by the way).  Another writer (Goodreads newsletter?) mentioned that she found the RSS feature the most useful (what I do here on this site is “shared” to my friends on Goodreads and now all “followers” too).  I often write blog posts of interest to readers and writers (like this one!), so this new follow option works for both those groups.  Goodreads might be confusing as hell, but these two features are very welcome.  And I’d rather have friends or be followed on Goodreads by readers than on Facebook or Twitter.  The latter two sites have too many people who aren’t readers, and never will be, and I want to reach out to readers above all because I think I offer quality reading entertainment at a reasonable price.

Item: Book bloggers.  I recently discovered bloggersintl.blogspot.com with its bloggerindex.  Between Simon Royale’s list and this one, authors supposedly have a list of avid readers who are willing to review books.  Indie authors, though, shouldn’t get their hopes up.  Many book bloggers in Royale’s list aren’t accepting new review queries (“closed to further notice” isn’t enough to remove them from the list, I guess).  Many in the bloggerindex aren’t either.  Those who do place conditions like only pbooks (in this day of ebooks?) or traditionally published books (that’s bloggerindex—Royale’s are supposedly looking only for indies), paying authors (“our slush pile is full, but if you pay me you can speed things up”), or restrictive genres (I always get a warm and fuzzy when Google Chrome queries me if I want to continue to a website because it’s X-rated).

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I have a confession: I write to entertain readers and because I love to write.  Otherwise, I’d never keep this up.  More than Human: The Mensa Contagion will be my twentieth ebook and seventeenth novel (I have three short story collections).  But the old saw that you write the next book with the royalties from the last has NEVER been true in my case.  Sales aren’t flat; they’re abysmal.  Today it’s hard to even give ebooks away.

Amazon is partly responsible for the plight of most indie authors.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m 100% indie (otherwise I’d still be looking to publish my first book within the traditional paradigm).  Indie publishing is the most efficient way for an old storyteller like me to keep spinning his yarns and hoping to entertain readers with them.  No, I’m just a wee bit against Amazon, though.  With KDP Select they initiated the free give-away for promo purposes, people became used to freebies and downloaded them like mad, and then lost interest.  Yet the expectation for free ebooks still exists.

I participated in Amazon’s give-away program, but I got into it late.  My numbers were in the hundreds at best, instead of thousands, and probably ate into the sale numbers I might have received.  The whole process made me swear off the concept of giving away my ebooks.  I don’t do it anymore.  I’ll give away a limited number of ebooks for review purposes—you can always receive a free ebook in exchange for an honest review.  And I do limited promos—the “Señoritas Peligrosas” offer, for example.

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[Note from Steve: Every year in Montclair, NJ, during the first week of May, people in the tristate area can enjoy seeing mostly unreleased new films, meet directors, producers, and actors, and participate in Q&A discussions.  Here are the three movies from the Montclair Film Festival I chose to see this year.]

The Armor of Light.  Dir. Abigail Disney.  This documentary is the story of Rev. Rob Schenk, a preacher who fought and is fighting to cure the schizophrenia of evangelicals who think they can love their guns as much as Jesus Christ.  The movie is full of gun fanatics, as you can imagine, but it’s also full of conscientious Christians who are beginning to recognize this mental aberration.  I keyed in on another interesting point, though: Ronald Reagan, whose Sherman’s march through American politics left a number of political sins in his wake, was responsible for another, creating the incestuous marriage between born-agains and the NRA.  Documentaries are always learning experiences, and this was no exception.  Fascinating, and a A- (the minus is because control is much more than the moral issue presented in this film).

Time Out of Mind.  Dir. Oren Maneiman, and starring Richard Gere and Ben Vereen.  This narrative film is a ponderous, painful, and powerful look at homelessness in America in general and in NYC in particular (it’s not a big-city problem, to be sure).  Gere and Vereen and other actors take you into the world of the invisible homeless.  Gere plays a homeless man so down on his luck that he often forgets who he is.  If you think homelessness isn’t a problem, you should catch this film.  I give it a B+ and not an A- or better because it’s slow but still a great example of understated acting and how fiction can point its finger at significant and serious social problems.

Holbrook/Twain.  Dir. Scott Teems.  The title is a good summary: Hal Holbrook is Mark Twain, Mark Twain has become Hal Holbrook.  This documentary is filmed in black and white to underline the historical importance of both men as much as how the actor in his one-man show has brought Mark Twain to life.  Holbrook is 90+ now and still presents the show that started in 1954 (there was a brief hiatus when his beloved Dixie Carter passed away).  The film also presents a candid look at Holbrook’s relationship with his children and step-children (one of Dixie’s kids sat in the row in front of us).  This film should be seen by everyone who wants to experience two iconic American institutions.  Moreover, it is an insightful reminder that Twain was much more than the writer of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, classic novels that nowadays might be called YA or coming-of-age.  Twain was an acerbic critic of what he saw wrong with America and the world, and many of those comments resonate today.  I’d start out with Letters from the Earth, commentaries that relate to the subject of the first film reviewed above (I “discovered” them in the eighth grade, and these, and other commentaries like “The Silent Lie” considered in the film, rank right up there with Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country as great curmudgeonly criticism)—or go see Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight.”  It’s always been on my must-see bucket list.  You guessed it: this documentary gets an A+.

In elibris libertas….  

Item: Newsletters.  I subscribe to a few.  They come via old-fashioned email.  I’ve noticed lately that some are starting to say something like “For the full graphics experience, this newsletter has a web version.” Or “This newsletter continues on our website.”  Ha!  I knew the day would come.  When I started this newsletter, I opted to make it just a regular feature in my blog (there’s no graphics experience involved either, so everything loads nicely—I don’t do HTML and I don’t make videos).

I never like to see my email in box fill up with fluff and stuff and assume other people don’t either.  Smart readers and writers know that email newsletters are often used to generate email lists and those lead to that spam avalanche (the newsletters I subscribe to don’t do that, though).  I generally don’t collect email addresses for advertising purposes.  That makes it more difficult sometimes for PR and marketing but preserves my sanity.  (If you use the contact page at this website to request a free ebook in return for an honest review, your email is used only once to gift you that ebook—for other ebooks you want to review, you have to make a separate request.)

Item: Heavy-fisted Apple.  This is non-productive whining, so you can ignore it and go on to the next item if you’re a reader (as opposed to reader/author).  I recently had to “upgrade” some covers of my ebooks on Smashwords because Apple (they’re only one retailer Smashwords distributes to, mind you) only handles ebooks now with a certain number of pixels in the book’s cover.  Amazon never complains about covers.  I don’t know why Apple can lord it over everyone else in the publishing business.  And people think Amazon’s bad!  (That perception is basically due to Big Five publishers, of course.)  Obviously, Apple gets away with what it can until the Justice Department steps in, like they did with that price-fixing collusion with the Big Five.  Pox on their house!  Hopefully the new Samsung smart phone smacks them around a bit—they’re too uppity for my taste.  (FYI: the only Apple product I use in my house is iTunes.  It’s not connected to the iStore—or whatever it’s called—because I only use it as database software for my music library.)

Item: Endorsements.  I’ve been noticing a lot of them.  Lee Child here, James Patterson there, Douglas Preston everywhere, Douglas, Douglas, Douglas, Lee, James, others….  Their endorsements are usually zero-content one-liners (most are) that NEVER influence my book buying (in fact, they just might turn me off).  Although I love to learn from reviews of my own ebooks (that assumes an honest and complete review), I generally don’t pay attention to reviews when I’m buying either.  Smart consumers of ebooks should learn to use the “peek inside” feature on Amazon—it’s there to give you a taste of the author’s style.

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