Visitors to my website might have noted that I don’t advertise anything beyond my books here.  It’s an author’s website, after all, not The Huffington Post or Forbes.  You won’t see pop-up ads.  In fact, I hope to remove those annoying “Buy Now” buttons in a future upgrade to the website.  The interested reader will be able to click on the cover and go to the Amazon book page, I hope.  Otherwise, I’ll change “Buy Now” to “Amazon Page” or something less annoying than “Buy Now.”

As the number of real visits (not just random hits) to the website has increased, so has the number of people asking to advertise on the site.  Some of these requests are tempting because (1) the services or products sound like something I could endorse, (2) visitors to the site might be interested in them, and (3) it might bring me some badly needed funds so I can produce the next book.  My business model has always been a version of “crowd funding” (today’s parlance—I’ve been using it since day one): reinvest royalties accrued from past books into producing the next one, with hopefully enough left over to pay for website maintenance and upgrades.

But I’ve resisted the temptation of going the ad route.  I’ve always been nice about declining offers, saying something like, “Your product (or service) sounds interesting, but it’s against my policy to accept advertisements.”  Maybe that’s stupid, but that’s my policy.  Nevertheless, as I cruised around my usual social media sites last weekend, I asked myself, “Steve, what kind of ads would you accept if you did?”  The short answer is: not many.  But then I wouldn’t have a blog post, would I, if I left it at that?

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“Know your audience” is an adage that might work for Hillary Clinton when deciding to charge $33,000 per plate at a Hollywood A-listers’ campaign financing dinner (just more one-percenters in Hillary’s camp, but even Clooney said $33K was obscene), but it’s not a tactic that’s any use to a storyteller pushing her or his stories.  Here’s much better advice for writers: just tell the story you’re itching to tell and do it well.  While following either piece of advice doesn’t guarantee that Field of Dreams moment—“Build it and they will come”—trying to predict readers’ tastes or writing to a specific group of readers is next to impossible.  Readers rule, and they will always surprise you.

The incredible success of the Harry Potter series (I see Rowling returned to her wizarding ways—her detective stories flopped until she used her real name), the Fifty Shades series, Gone Girl, The Martian, and so forth were unpredictable.  Anyone who says otherwise must be smoking something pretty strong or had a recent lobotomy.  Hell, even Clancy’s incredible run was unpredictable.  That’s why traditional publishing’s agents and editors are probably wasting their efforts—they can’t choose the next big book success, so they’re moving more and more to “proven talents” AKA sure bets in their stable of old stallions and mares ready for the glue factory.

Many of the series and books just named aren’t even that well written, so maybe my “do it well” tag on my better piece of advice isn’t necessary.  If you win the lottery, you don’t even have to write well.  In any case, no author, agent, or publisher can really pretend to know and/or predict “the audience” for a book.  Two examples:  One of my readers, almost a beta-reader for most of my books, in the sense he usually reads them hot off the press and comments back to me—I’m still trying to get him to write a review—doesn’t like sci-fi much, so I predicted that he wouldn’t like my new novel Rogue Planet.  I sent him a copy anyway.  To my surprise, he liked it.  He seemed to identify with the story and characters.  That was a pleasant surprise, but I could never have predicted it.  Quite the contrary.

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Book signings, book fairs, and book clubs take second place for today’s authors.  While those three activities still offer some face-to-face possibilities locally and nationally (if you have the money to travel and the time), the internet has to be number one for any author today, whether indie or traditionally published.  (I’m discounting the Hugh Howeys and Andy Weirs, who started as indie, and all the old stallions and mares in the Big Five’s stables, who probably have a staff to do their social networking.)  This is as it should be.  The internet allows us to reach out to millions of readers and chat with more readers and authors than we would ever meet in the old days.  But social networking in particular and the internet in general have their pros and cons.

Some days ago, I was working on a novel and needed a bit of background.  While I’ve traveled a lot in Europe and South America (probably more than in the U.S., if you discount work-related travel where long trips and long meetings ended in margaritas and exhaustion), I’ve never been to Scotland, which is still part of the U.K.  The closest I’ve been is to Ireland, which is NOT part of the U.K. (in fact, 2016 is the centenary year of the Easter Rising, which led to Irish independence).  But one of my characters had just inherited a castle not far from Edinburgh, basically an old stonewalled house in disrepair (think James Bond’s place, Skyfall, but on a smaller scale).  I needed travel-like info from the internet so I could take my readers and myself there, thanks to the invitation from my character.

What happened was annoying.  Sure, I found the info I was looking for.  After an hour or so, I had more than I needed, in fact, because a Google search will give you opinions from ordinary people like you and me who have been there and can provide personal stories that go far beyond the travel brochures.  Fine and dandy.  I do this a lot.  You’ll have a hard time in a book determining whether I’ve been to a place or not.  I could make an error, but that error could stem from a fallible memory as well as a bad interpretation of internet info.  What happened has happened before: I almost immediately started receiving ads about travel in Scotland!  (I say “almost immediately” because they started coming through before I could close the browser.)

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That’s what many of my books represent.  I’ve had great fun scattering them along this timeline corresponding to an imagined but alternate future history for 10+ years.  You’re probably not aware of the nexus between these books.  Maybe you’ll be surprised.  “OK, you have four series,” you say.  “Aren’t those at least independent?”  One is, the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries,” a miniseries of two books so far, Muddlin’ Through and Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (the two books are on sale from April 29 to May 6, by the way).  All the books in the other three series are scattered along this long timeline that exists in my imagination.

It’s curious.  I don’t write linearly.  I can’t be constrained by a linearity like Grafton’s alphabet mysteries or Rowling’s Harry Potter stories.  Linearity is far from my thoughts when I sit down to start a new yarn.  As I go along, I might see that the story can reuse some characters and settings on that timeline, but that’s never a goal to begin with.  That’s why there are independent books like Mary Jo’s adventures and More than Human: The Mensa Contagion.  My new book, Rogue Planet, is 99% independent too.  I also hop around three genres.  One quarter you might see a sci-fi novel, another a mystery, a third a thriller, or combinations of these genres.  You can still think of me as channeling Asimov, whose extended Foundation series (that includes books beyond the Foundation trilogy) is a masterpiece of sci-fi.  Mine goes beyond sci-fi, though, and the points land on that timeline in a random fashion.

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A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.  (Seen in a church bulletin.)

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Just a reminder: Rogue Planet is now available!  Think Game of Thrones or Star Wars with high-tech magic.  Hard sci-fi, space opera, or fantasy?  You decide.  You’ll find it in all ebook formats for $2.99 (Amazon, Smashwords and its distributors) as well as paper for $10.99 (Create Space).  And, if less futuristic mystery and thrills are your preference, remember my May Day Sale: Muddlin’ Through and Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By will have a Kindle Countdown Sale April 29 through May 6; both books will be on sale for $0.99, reduced from $2.99.  That’s a lot of spring and summer reading for $5!

Smiles go miles, and a handshake trumps a milkshake.

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Just released! Rogue Planet.  Hidden away from near-Earth planets in remote spiral arms of the Galaxy are Human worlds that have lost contact with more progressive worlds and reverted to strange and primitive customs and traditions, their leaders using religion, superstition, and imported technologies to rule in tyranny.  Survey ships explored and catalogued these planets as suitable for future colonization centuries earlier, but groups with a special interest in ensuring a homogeneous and often despotic society didn’t bother applying for permission to colonize.

Following the ITUIP (Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets) Protocol, ships are restricted to observe and maintain a hands-off policy for these rogue planets, even when there is great temptation to intervene.  Eden, where a theocracy rules with an iron fist, is such a planet.  A group of rebels struggles to end the oppressive regime to forge a new future.

Set in the same universe as the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and the Dr. Carlos stories, this saga, mixing the best of hard sci-fi and swashbuckling fantasy, once again explores the never-ending battle between good and evil so prominent in my works.  It’s another surprising and entertaining addition to his already extensive collection of sci-fi, mystery, and thriller tales.

Available in all ebook formats for $2.99 (Amazon + Smashwords) and paper for $9.99 (Create Space).

Once upon a time there was a writer who spun a few good yarns.  His name was James Patterson.  Along Came a Spider was inspirational—tight plot, interesting main character and secondary characters, and a setting I was familiar with.  Nothing earth-shaking, but good storytelling nonetheless.  It was a textbook combo of mystery and thriller, I liked that cross-genre idea, and I held it up as something to aim for in my own writing.

Unfortunately, it all went downhill from there.  Not only did Patterson become formulaic, he became greedy.  He created a book assembly line and hired lesser known authors to do the hard work, signing his name to the final product.  Like any good tenured professor, he surrounded himself with acolytes willing to increase and perpetuate his fame in detriment to their own careers.  Why bother writing Star Trek knockoffs when you can become a slave for James Patterson?

He is much more than the chief schlockmeister of the publishing world because he’s a factory executive, the CEO of Patterson Inc, with suspense fiction, literary fiction, and children’s lit as that factory’s products.  Now his factory is planning another product line, thousands of novellas, short books that target non-readers–let’s call it pulp fiction.  He’s the Henry Ford of the writing world, confident that his brand name will sell anything the factory produces.  And traditional publishing goes along with it.

It’s ironic that he’s an outspoken critic of Amazon.  That company will sell almost anything; Patterson Inc will sell almost any book, but I’m waiting for new product lines like underwear, condoms, children’s toys, guns and ammo, sporting goods, and so forth.  He’s not satisfied that Amazon sells huge numbers of books spewed from his assembly line.  He wants more royalties and adoration from Jeff Bezos.  In fact, Patterson will attack anyone standing in his way, from Bezos to indie writers.  He’s the Donald Trump of the book world, a master of the publishing deal.

In abstraction, there’s nothing wrong with that, you say.  Free enterprise at work.  I call it another example of capitalism without control.  He was vocal about the DoJ case against the insidious agency model designed by Apple’s Steve Jobs in collusion with the Big Five publishers.  (They soon settled; Apple pursued appeals to the bitter end—for them.)  He has supported Writers Guild in their attacks on Amazon; Preston and Patterson led the cavalry on that one, always trumpeting the lie that the Guild represents ALL authors (they don’t).

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This post is a follow-up on my post “Book Marketing—Anecdotes v. Real Stats.”  In that article I was ranting against people treating anecdotal evidence about book sales as reliable statistics.  Now I have something else to be riled about: Jellybooks.  This reader analytics company based in London makes studies of book reading habits and passes the results off as reliable stats.  Sound harmless?  Please, please, don’t bury your head in the sand—it isn’t harmless at all!  Both readers and writers should be concerned.  All readers, not just ebook readers, and all writers, not just indie writers.

Let’s deal with the general situation first.  It always amazes me that people froth at the mouth when they read or hear that the government is allegedly violating their privacy.  The amazement comes from the fact that they let data-mining corporations and private firms peer into their private lives all the time on the internet.  Private companies also manipulate people with false advertising and false endorsements.  A recent case where Lord and Taylor paid bloggers on Instagram to rate a dress highly all at the same time created outrage, but folks, don’t be naive—that goes on all the time.  Any product endorsement is suspect these days, and book reviews are examples of this.

Data-mining firms sell—ho hum, ain’t it obvious?—data they collect about you.  They collect data about your personal lives, your consumer lives, your health histories, whatever.  So does Google, Apple, General Motors, Microsoft, almost any big firm.  (Have a gmail or Google+ account?  You’re handing over all kinds of data about yourself to Google.  Anyone online does.  Wise up.)  This process is far more insidious than what the U.S. government does.  The government’s alleged purpose (I only say “alleged” because I can imagine  abuses—I’m a mystery and thriller writer, after all) is to protect us.  The purpose in the private sector is more insidious—they want to exploit us.  That exploitation is usually associated with making money, and, because consumers in our consumer society have few protections, the perps usually get away with it.

Enter Jellybooks.  Forget the “books” part of the name; I’m tempted to call this company Jellyball, because it’s like a jellyfish with stinging tentacles that are about to grab you and do you damage.  Let’s analyze their business model, ripped right out of the data-mining firms’ playbooks.  The people in charge saw a niche.  What the hell?  That’s free enterprise, right?  They saw that traditional publishers really don’t have a clue about the readers they’re selling to or their reading habits.  Up to now, publishers didn’t give a rat’s ass because they live thirty years in the past where there wasn’t much real competition.  But Jellybooks is convincing them to care.  While the publishers obviously have data on their own sales, that data is about purchases, not how people read.  Jellybooks wants to look at readers’ reading habits in the same way the techie Billy Beane in Moneyball looked at baseball players’ habits so smart product design and sales strategies can be found (and now you know why I’m talking about balls, and they’re not Trump’s).

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This is an interesting question for readers.  Their only vote in the matter is with their purchases.  So, let’s analyze that first.  Readers rule.  They tend to reward the known more than the unknown, though.  When readers (and I’m one, so this applies to me) get comfortable with an author, they’ll pay a higher price, but only up to a certain point.  When we’re trying out a new author, we want to be rewarded for trying someone new.

That’s human nature and probably explains why authors and publishers make special offers.  In the case of some indies, in fact, giveaways.  If an author has a series s/he wants to get readers hooked on, s/he sells it at a very low price or gives it away.  The idea is that when I read the first book in a series and like it, I’m supposed to extrapolate and assume all the other books in the series are good too?  That’s a big assumption especially if preceded by the assumption that any book in the series should be readable independently from the others (a correct assumption).  Moreover, we might see the Hollywood sequel phenomenon: sequels, whether books or movies, can become “more of the same”–formulaic is the word used for books.

Readers have come to expect freebies and greatly reduced prices, especially from indie writers.  It’s probably non-productive whining to say that we’re killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  I’m not helping you at all when I download your free book or sale-priced book.  It doesn’t improve your name recognition in my case—I read so many books that I often download one and start it only to realize I’ve already read it (don’t ask me why this gets by Amazon).  At best, during the download I’m thinking the author is stupid in giving away her or his hard work.

It’s also non-productive whining to say that readers are spoiled by the giveaways and reduced prices.  They’ve come to expect them and don’t seem to put any value on an author’s hard work.  But let’s be realistic: Let’s assume that the typical ebook can sell N copies (N is pretty low if you believe Amazon).  Maybe Amazon doesn’t count freebies in totaling up N, but I do—we’re actually talking about numbers of readers.  If the author gets N free downloads, that might be all s/he is getting, especially if s/he normally sells the ebook for $4.99 and returns to that price.

I’ll propose a different tactic.  It hasn’t worked for me, but it’s different (FYI: the above tactic hasn’t worked either).  I value my work.  I’d rather put ALL my ebooks at a fair price (it’s often the “sales price” of other authors) and let the chips fall where they may.  I’m pretty sure that the person who downloads it has put some thought into her or his purchase.  My idea is that smart buyers are also smart readers.  They want to stimulate their intelligence, not numb it.  Yes, they want to be entertained, but not in a trivial way by reading fluff.  I don’t write fluff.  Never have, ever since my first novel written during the summer I turned thirteen (OK, it was a bit raunchy, but it wasn’t fluff).

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As an ex-scientist, it’s always amusing for me to see other authors and book marketing gurus push various marketing techniques on the basis of anecdotal evidence.  The only source I’ve ever found who comes near to using real stats is Mark Coker of Smashwords.  Mind you, I’m not plugging Smashwords here—there are alternatives nowadays, maybe even better ones.  Smashwords offers no advertising options, for example, paid or free, leaving that for the online retailers it distributes to.  Maybe that’s why Coker once said, “Your best marketing is a book that sparks enthusiastic word of mouth….”  Of course, in “word of mouth” he’s probably including the internet, because there’s absolutely no way that an author can reach out to the entire country and the world otherwise.

It’s clear that many of the so-called gurus want you to pay them to do that, so they offer you online services and advertise themselves as the anointed who hold the keys to the kingdom of book success.  Many of these offers are limited to ebooks, charge according to genre, and require N 4- or 5-star Amazon reviews (as if a 4- or 5-star review means your ebook is any good these days).  None of them offer their services pro bono; in other words, they don’t back up their claims with willingness to share royalties over a certain period of time.  They all want their money up front.

Ignoring their hype and anecdotal testimonials, these websites follow Sturgeon’s Law pretty well.  There are no stats to prove that marketing method X really works.  For every successful author (there are only a few, by Amazon’s own admission—their stats, of course) who claims to have achieved her/his success via X, there’s a more successful author who was frankly surprised at her/his success because they did nothing special.  Consider Mr. Weir, author of The Martian, a one-book wunderkind like Harper Lee (I’m not counting her rejected MS), at least so far.  He offered a free PDF-download of the book.  Coker’s “enthusiastic word of mouth” took over.  If we call that a marketing technique, it certainly didn’t generate the enthusiasm—the readers did, not the technique per se.  In the same way, readers can kill a book, no matter how much money an author pours into PR and marketing—and certainly if s/he just offers a free PDF at her/his website.

The Martian and many other books prove Coker’s point, but no one, absolutely no one, knows how to backtrack from the readers’ exuberant enthusiasm and determine the cause of the effect.  Coker talks backtracks a little to talk about “a book that sparks.”  Writing such a book is the first necessary condition, whatever “sparks” might mean—why The Martian did so is too much like winning the lottery, though.  Moreover, any marketing guru who claims to know what causes the post-writing sparks is full of you-know-what (same for agents, of course).  You shouldn’t pay good money for you-know-what, especially when there is so much you can do DIY—in other words, spend your time, not your hard-earned money.  Note that this applies equally well to traditionally published authors.  Traditional publishers nowadays spend all their marketing dollars on the old stallions in their stables even though they’re ready for the glue factory.  Most traditionally published authors are relegated to life as a midlist author who receives no benefit from the huge royalties the traditional publishers steal from authors beyond a book cover (maybe a positive benefit) and an egregious contract (a negative benefit).
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