News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #111…
Item. The New Year. This will be my last newsletter until the New Year. To all readers, reviewers, and writers—I hope 2015 brought you joy and success, and may you all have a safe, healthy, and prosperous 2016.
Item. Goodreads. I love this site! It’s where the readers are—people who are avid readers and intensely interested in books and their authors. I’ve met some great people there, both readers and authors. It’s now my social media site of choice. Facebook has been relegated to my author page for the most part (too many narcissists and people mounting soapboxes anyway). While I still have trouble with Goodreads’ unwieldy user interface (it’s like a multitude of patches on an old inner tube), I’m learning (I have to keep a notebook on my groups and choices for them, things about my author’s page, and how to set up things). I still haven’t figured out how to say I finished the bio of Winston Churchill, for example—it still shows me on the last page…of the index!
But here’s my advice after several years of climbing the learning curve, for both readers and writers: stick with it! For readers, you’ll learn about great books and great authors—some of them will be obscure and never mentioned by the NY Times or found in B&N book barns, but great reading can be had for those who are looking for new reading entertainment. For authors, be a reader first—stick to the various author and promo sections in the different reading groups you belong to. When the moderator says no promo in a certain section, follow that rule. (Sometimes one of my own books is a good example of something in a discussion, but I try to warn readers in that case.) I recommend that authors stay away from the authors’ groups too. You’ll meet enough authors in the reading groups, and chances are they’re more interested in reading your books than those in the author groups just wanting to discuss writing and marketing techniques.
Authors can also reap other benefits by being active on Goodreads. My website had 32K+ real visitors in 2014; it had 191K+ real visitors in 2015! I count Goodreads as a contributing factor in this improvement, although having more content might have something to do with it too (there’s overlap there, because some Goodreads readers are probably drawn to the free short stories, articles on writing, book and movie reviews, and interviews). I RSS to both Amazon and Goodreads and share to Google+, so readers have various outlets that allow them to see what the daily post is about. (I’ve also tried to be more consistent about the days posts appear on—I usually take Mondays off, like a barber; op-eds about current events appear on Tuesdays; reviews and interviews appear on Wednesdays; articles on writing or the writing business on Thursdays; and this newsletter or more reviews and interviews on Fridays). I haven’t seen this helping out in book sales much, but maybe it’s too early to tell. The increase in visits to the website has to help in name recognition, though.
Try Goodreads. You’ll like it. Join groups. Interact with readers and writers. Learn about new books—they might be old but new to you! Or just be a lurker soaking in the reading/writing karma. Please note that I have no financial relationship with Goodreads. But I’ve become a fan!
The old, the not so old, and the new. Unlike cars, most books don’t really get old and rusty. When making a movie from a book, Hollywood will often fiddle around with it. In the Bourne movies, for example, the Cold War was needlessly edited out (and many other things changed). Readers will read an old book, though, even treasuring it when they stumble upon a good title (I do it all the time).
I offered you two new books this year (the not so old!), More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, and Family Affairs, #6 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” unless you also count Fantastic Encores!, a short story collection, and the second edition of The Midas Bomb, #1 in the C&C series. But I have an extensive catalog of twenty-one books. I believe they’re as fresh and entertaining as the day I wrote them. Check them out. And don’t worry about reading the books in a series in order—they’re all stand-alones because I write them that way. You won’t find cliffhangers or books broken up into incomplete parts for commercial purposes in my catalog!
For 2016, I’ll also offer you two new books: Rogue Planet, an epic sci-fi story about overthrowing an evil theocracy on a planet at the periphery of ITUIP (International Trade Union of Independent Planets); and Gaia and the Goliaths, #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.” The first is set in the same universe as the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and the Doctor Carlos Stories. The second is about environmental concerns (you probably guessed that).
My book royalties are always pumped back into producing and marketing the next book and maintaining this website. While I always will say that if each book entertains just one reader, it’s a success, I can’t keep doing this forever if I don’t start to break even at least. Help me out. Check out my books. Buy, borrow, or steal one, read it, and tell friends whether you like it. Word-of-mouth recommendations, either old-fashioned tete-a-tete or via the internet, are the best reviews I can have.
Item. Help a starving author. That last paragraph can be generalized. Most writers, even traditionally published authors, struggle. Indie writers are especially hit hard. You, the reader, have it good. You have a wealth of entertaining reading, and, if it’s indie, that wonderful entertainment is offered to you at a very reasonable price. An author generally doesn’t starve, of course—s/he would be foolish to give up her/his day-job before a major success (one on the scale of Weir’s The Martian, for example)—but readers can ensure they have all that good reading by reading more books. And be a proactive reader—talk and write about the books you’ve read and make reading recommendations. If everyone does this, we’ll never have to worry about finding a good book to read!
Item. An iconoclast examines fiction writing. Starting early in 2016, I’ll offer six lessons on writing fiction. The motivation? I went to SkillShare to see what was offered, and I decided all the writing courses were pretty anemic. Moreover, people are expected to pay! My little course will be a freebie. What are my creds? After twenty-one books, all novels and short story collections, I know something about writing fiction. I’ll go beyond just the writing, of course. You can think of the lessons as a complement to King’s On Writing to bring it up-to-date (that’s a bit of pretentiousness—we’re the same age!). The iconoclast part comes in because my opinions are maybe acerbic and probably aren’t generally accepted (I don’t take what King says as gospel, for example)—but you expected that, right? Readers and writers are invited to comment, of course, as always (just keep it clean, please).
In libris libertas…
