News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #110…
[Sorry, this is a wee bit verbose, but it’s been awhile. I was busy getting the manuscript for Rogue Planet (see below) ready to send to beta-readers. Cherry pick those items that grab your attention first. You can always come back to this newsletter later—they’re all in the archive.]
Item. Wise words? I’ve started a new series of posts titled “Monday Words of Wisdom”—words of advice, a bit of humor, forced rhymes, whatever you want to call them. Why bother? The number one reason is that people’s Mondays are often bleak—returning to that day job on Monday is often a drag—so a little bit of humor might do as much for you as caramel topping on your latté. Second, finding words that rhyme and using them logically exercises my mind—maybe not as much as a crossword puzzle, but it’s a wee bit more creative. Third, I don’t sell many of my books, so maybe I can get a side job with Hallmark. It would beat working as a Walmart greeter.
Item. The course on fiction writing. It’s almost done. Phew! Readers who took the opportunity to learn about the book writing business hopefully enjoyed my personal spin on it. Call it the indie viewpoint. I don’t like traditional publishers—their treatment of authors is terrible—but I hope I also provided some thoughts for frustrated authors working in that paradigm who are thinking of going indie. Next week will be the last lesson. I imagine it will make some PR and marketing people angry with me (see below for an example)—I don’t have much love for most of them either.
I suppose many readers and writers might say I have some nerve pretending to write a complement to King’s On Writing. Say what you will, I’ve written many books. King started earlier and won the lottery, so I ignore a comparison of number of books published. And he completely ignores indie books, probably disparages them, in fact, ignoring his personal startup pains described in his book. If only for that reason, his book needs an update to consider the problems of indie writers.
Item. Books with graphics content. Paper books, especially pop science and textbooks, often have fancy graphics. They’re probably a major factor contributing to the cost of a book, especially an academic textbook, inflating the cost beyond the traditional publisher’s greedy desire to exploit starving students. Of course, there are also those coffee table books that are mostly pictures. People think they’re conversation starters. (One conversation might be about how expensive they are. Or, why anyone would ever buy them.)
But I’ve often argued that the ebook offers a great opportunity for inventive authors to go multimedia (probably indies, because there’s nothing inventive about traditional publishing). One can envision a great and interesting combination of graphics, sound, even videos and odors. Whether we’d still call that an ebook is beside the point. (And thinking about a version of Fifty Shades of Gray like that might gross some people out, including me.)
About the graphics, though. I recently reviewed a book that had a lot of them. Many people have Paper White Kindles. Color graphics often don’t translate well to many shades of gray (even if there are fifty). Authors and publishers should think about that. Especially for textbooks (if you’re depending on a reader to distinguish two curves in a graph, one black and the other blue, the results might be disappointing on the Kindle).
I’m more a traditionalist when it comes to book reading. A history of the French Revolution doesn’t need to be embellished with pictures of heads rolling into baskets, the swishing sound as Madame Guillotine falls, or the odors of new and old blood and cartilage. I can imagine all that and without many descriptive words either. Moreover, as a writer, I write—I’m not good at producing a multimedia presentation. Although many of my novels probably would make a good movie, I think a team of people handles that better, and I certainly can’t afford to hire them (see above). What’s your opinion about multimedia ebooks? Readers, especially, weigh in.
Item. Contradictions. The number of visitors to this blog is increasing, but all my 2015 books have had disappointing sales. Huh? Sort of contradicts the adage that an author should have an active website in order to sell books. Maybe I should have more links to the Amazon pages of my books (I don’t sell directly from here)? Maybe I need more paper editions? I have fun writing both blog posts, and novels and short stories, but maybe one detracts from the other? People might read a post and get pissed, so they don’t buy my books? (It doesn’t seem to go the other way.) Or, am I just part of the dying tradition of storytellers, so it doesn’t matter how good a story I tell? Weigh in with your opinions. I have a thick skin, and maybe you will make a suggestion that turns things around. (Note: I’m speaking to readers and writers here. PR and marketing people need not write me because their suggestions never seem to work. I’ve tried most of them by now.)
Item. Insulting emails. I won’t name names, but I recently received an email from a PR and marketing “guru” that indicated he was due for an anger management course…or maybe a straitjacket? He threatened to remove me from an email newsletter because I never interacted with him (I seem to remember he runs webinars he’s always inviting me to…for a charge, of course). The curious thing? I never requested to receive his newsletter. I did read it occasionally (even fished it out of the spam sometimes) and always decided what he was asking/offering would be a bloody waste of time, so I’d hit the delete button. It’s odd that a PR and marketing expert would write something so hostile. If that’s the new marketing paradigm, I want nothing to do with it. Verbally bludgeoning potential customers seems a wee bit counterproductive. Again, what’s your opinion?
Item. Amazon’s gift to traditional publishers? Amazon just announced that they’ll give a warning on a book’s page if they consider a book badly edited or formatted. There are many things wrong with that concept, but one is that I’ve seen traditionally published ebooks that are lacking in this way because traditional publishers prefer to sell you expensive paper books (that’s why their ebooks are priced so high) and neglect the ebook versions, especially if they’re reprints.
The problem with edits, and traditional publishers have to know this, is there’s always another one needed. It’s like software—there’s always another bug (that’s why Microsoft has almost weekly updates—consumers are beta-testers now). Same for formatting errors. By giving a pass to traditional publishers, Amazon implicitly attacks indie writers and publishers, which they used to champion because their low prices lead to more sales. The belief that indie books are inferior is a myth that traditional publishers and their sycophants have been pushing for years, and Amazon has just joined them in perpetuating this myth.
This doesn’t affect me unless Amazon’s goal is to achieve absolute perfection—that will never exist, for indie or trad-pubbed books. I strive to bring the best product I can to market, whether it’s in copy editing (what Amazon is trying to enforce), content editing (what most editors can’t do, let alone Amazon), or proofing the final product (what an author should always do, but Smashwords does far better than Amazon—see below). Maybe I should refuse to review any book that has an error in it? Nah. I’ll look past a few errors if the story’s good enough, but Amazon, with their automated censoring created by some geek team’s code (they probably never read novels and could never understand the different steps in the editing process), wouldn’t know a good story if they saw one—they only count sales and somehow believe this new policy will increase them.
Amazon doesn’t realize how stupid this new policy is. Let’s say that they know a book is seriously flawed, no matter it’s origin. Why do they sell it then? Because they’ll sell anything, so they’ll just cover their ass so they don’t have any nasty lawsuits. Amazon has joined the ranks of traditional publishers in taking the quality decisions, whatever they include, away from the readers, the consumers. They ram it down our throats and still expect us to buy. As usual, readers, the consumers of these important products that gave Amazon its start online, will be the ones to suffer. But we can make Amazon and traditional publishers suffer too. ‘Nough said.
Item. Coming soon! Rogue Planet is now with my beta-readers. It was a new writing experience for me. Every book is, of course, and I don’t do formulaic, as many traditionally published authors do (especially those “best-selling” authors!). My new novel will extrapolate some of Dr. Carlos Obregon’s adventures with backward planetary societies on the starship Brendan (see Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and Fantastic Encores! for the Dr. Carlos stories)—to two of them, called Paradise and Eden. The story is about overthrowing an oppressive theocracy. A lot of it reads like fantasy—there’s even a prince and princess—but the only magic is what Clarke alluded to: a superior technology will appear like magic to a backward society (or to today’s techno-savages?).
Item. New projects. Rogue Planet is one of my projects for 2016. The second one will be #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series titled Gaia and the Goliaths, a novel that will contrast disciplined ecological protests with ecoterrorism. I’m also already well on the way to finishing another project for 2017. It features Esther Brookstone, the Scotland Yard inspector who goes after art thieves, and Bastiann van Coevorden, the Interpol agent. They will have appeared in several C&C books by the time this new book comes out, particularly Aristocrats and Assassins and The Collector.
Item. Where to find my new books? Here’s the thing: I no longer see Amazon doing much for me—and many things I don’t like (see above). In fact, I never have, beyond providing another online place to sell my books. So, be prepared. I might be going 100% Smashwords in the future for all new books. That would reduce my costs by a third. Smashwords is a retailer but also distributes to other retailers; Amazon doesn’t. You can still get your .mobi files, but from Smashwords, and I’ve seen more action with Apple and Kobo (nothing to celebrate, but more action than with Amazon).
I won’t give books away anymore, which Amazon has encouraged (they don’t value an author’s work but somehow feel that leads to sales). My books are already reasonably priced—good quality entertainment for a reasonable price. I hope to go into the black from the red sometime! Of course, I could do that by not writing anymore. My costs are low. They include producing each book and maintaining this website and blog, and that adds up. So just quitting is always an option. Readers rule, and I’m getting the message that most of you have no interest in my books. (Amazon doesn’t either.) OK. Buddhist philosophy applies here: what is, is, and I can’t change that. On the other hand, The Martian and Wool, both indies originally, provide motivation. Stay tuned….
Item. The big timeline. A discussion on Goodreads a few weeks ago motivates me to clarify and elaborate on the fictional timeline of many of my books. On Goodreads, we were discussing the difference between Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and his extended Foundation series. The first is comprised by Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. The second adds Prelude to Foundation at the beginning and ends with Foundation and Earth at the end, and sweeps up the robot novels and End of Eternity, to form one huge and masterful series.
In a similar manner, my huge timeline starts with the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” and is followed by The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” Soldiers of God, “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” The Secret Lab, many stories in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, and the stories in Fantastic Encores!. Now Rogue Planet will add another book to that timeline. Events in #1 and #2 in the “Chaos Chronicles” refer back to events in #2 in “Clones and Mutants” and Soldiers of God, for example. I don’t make a big deal of this because a reader can jump in anywhere and still enjoy each book, probably more so than with Asimov’s extended series. But Asimov wasn’t the only one who thinks on a cosmic scale—my timeline stretches from 2014 (The Midas Bomb) to thousands of years in the future (Rogue Planet). It boggles my mind, and I wrote the books!
In libris libertas….
