[Note from Steve: This is my “official newsletter” that appears most Fridays.  It often contains acerbic comments about reading, writing, and the writing business, as well as some self-promotion—why not?  As always, read at your own risk…and comment when you feel like it.]

Item: Those clever devils!  In my last newsletter, I mentioned Michael Connelly’s book The Burning Room (a Harry Bosch novel).  I confirmed I paid $3.99 for it, although at the time of the newsletter it was up to $4.99.  It’s back to $3.99 (12/9/14).  Lee Child’s Personal (a Jack Reacher novel) is $9.99 (just squeezing under my $10 limit), but I bought it for $3.25 (also confirmed).  Either the Big Five are playing retail pricing games, or Amazon’s taking their well-deserved victory lap and jockeying prices up and down to drive the Big Five nuts—probably both.  My conclusion: my new limit is $5.  When I see a big name author’s ebook between $2.99 and $4.99, I’ll probably buy it.  That way I won’t feel swindled when I don’t like the book (Child’s) and will be pleased when I do (Connelly’s).

Item: Do the Brits really know English?  Lee Child is a Brit (born in Coventry), but sometimes he seems linguistically challenged (any writer is at times, of course).  In Personal (see above), he has Reacher make the self-appraisal that he speaks (and presumably writes) as a man of the world, an international crime fighter with no discernible accent, whereas his platonic partner, Casey Nice (Child channeling Ian Fleming with the antithesis of Pussy Galore?), is hobbled in London with her Midwestern American accent.  I found that whole charade hilarious—probably not Child’s intention.  Remember that Jack Reacher is the character who suffers from chronic diarrhea of conjunctions, or unfamiliarity with commas, depending on your point of view, because “and” is likely to appear so many times in his sentences.  So here’s my question: Is Child a typical Brit?  Do they really have trouble with the language?  Or, do they just stumble when trying to sound like Yanks?

Item.  French hypocrisy?  Speaking of language difficulties, ever been to Paris and try to speak French to Parisians?  I once asked a bus driver for the time, and he pointed angrily to a clock tower we were passing, not wanting to respond like a normal, civilized person (my French, at the time, was a whole lot better than Bush’s Spanish, enough to make a report in a police station to indifferent and lazy gendarmes who didn’t give a rat’s ass that I’d been mugged).  It’s better outside Paris, of course, but Parisians make New Yorkers seem like the most polite people on the planet.  With their famous l’Academie, they try to preserve the purity of the language too, even though “le weekend” and other Frenchified anglo-saxon words make that an impossible task.   I just wish they’d try to speak and write English correctly as much as they insist that we try to speak and write French correctly.

As an example, last Tuesday a full-page Times ad for BNP Paribas (Banque Nationale de Paris + Paribas?) stated: We’re close by to help you go further (italics mine).  Sure, I understand the message—they’re just my friendly neighborhood bank (never mind that I’d never heard of them—maybe why they feel they need the ad?).  They even used a contraction as we Yanks are prone to do.  But “close by” and “go” imply distance measurement and motion.  “Farther” is the correct word; “further” should be applied in more abstract non-spatial situations:  His dissertation on WIMPs took that theoretical conjecture even further.  Bet that ad doesn’t run in Britain!  Nitpicking?  Sure!  Why not?  A writer has to have some fun.

Item: Paying for reviews.  If you’re a writer, don’t.  Today (12/9/14) I received yet another email/ad where I can get a book review if I’m willing to pay.  Spend a little on PR and marketing if you want (it might do some good, but probably not—see below), but don’t add book reviews to that cost center.  Think of it this way: you’re already giving the reviewer a book in exchange for an honest review.  It’s quid pro quo—a barter system.  You’ve already paid him, and he has the implicit commitment to write the review.  You might not like what they say (“honest review” means they should really discuss the good, bad, and ugly, although some reviewers legitimately assume the right to withhold a review if they can’t say something good about the book), so the reviewer is already getting a good deal.  Simon Royale, at his Indie View website, is adamant about this, so you should report any reviewer listed there who wants to charge you—I did.

On the other hand, an author shouldn’t be a schmuck.  Reviewing tastes, like reading tastes, are subjective.  One person’s ecstatic delight with a book can become another’s desire to vomit.  In a sense, that’s a celebration of the diversity of human nature.  Above all, an author shouldn’t badger a reviewer.  Whether he’s just reviewing on his own or he’s connected to a review website (like I am with Bookpleasures), it’s voluntary.  The person’s an avid reader who gives something back to the community of readers and writers by reviewing (my motivation, anyway, which is why I even review books I read casually—Child’s, for example, although that book already had some 5000 (!) reviews).  Give the reviewer time.  And, if he’s a jerk who just says he’s a reviewer to get free books, maybe you should think of it as a more targeted way to increase name recognition than blindly using the free Amazon KDP Select give-away option (which no longer works, by the way).

Item: Do reviews really do anything for authors?  If you happen to scan through reviews on Amazon (I rarely do for book purchases, trusting my “peek inside” and blurb reading to make a buying decision), you’ll note that the percentage of “atta-boys” (or “atta-girls”) and “this book sucks” are high.  In other words, either readers don’t have time to write a real review (the politically correct indictment), or they have some ulterior, personal motive for being curt by writing only enough words to make Amazon’s minimum (maybe feeling a civic responsibility but wanting it to end sooner than later?).

Doesn’t really matter to me.  I appreciate the time it takes you to go to Amazon and write a little something, even though I might never get around to reading what that is.  But fair warning: I keep two lists of reviewers I’ve queried who receive a freebie in exchange for an honest review, sort of like Santa’s, that is, naughty and nice—or, as I prefer to say it, those deserving bad karma or good karma in whatever afterlife they have.  The critical list, naughty or bad karma, is now so long that I won’t query for reviews anymore.  If you want to review one of my ebooks, drop me an email via my contact page.  You’ll receive the ebook in exchange for an honest review.  And I expect you to keep your part of the bargain!

Item: Prepaid orders and book bundling.  Do they work?  While reviews probably don’t, I’m also waiting to hear from other authors before trying either one of these.  Joe Konrath champions them both.  I’m dubious.  Consider the latter.  Suppose I bundle three novels together (my “Clones and Mutants Trilogy,” for example) and sale the bundle for the price of one of them.  Isn’t that the same as marking each one down to a third of the price?  A bundle is just another book sale.  Fair warning to readers too: I once bought a bundle of six books, all by different authors, and only liked one of the books in the bundle—in other words, the bundle was a waste of my money.

For prepaid orders, the negatives are many, because Amazon’s KDP Select puts so many restrictions on how you do it (beginning with exclusivity)—for their convenience and benefit, of course, not yours.  In particular, you have to have your MS in such pristine form, and you can’t make any changes, that you might as well just format the damn ebook and release it.  That gets your ebook out there faster too.  For pbooks, it’s a bit different, though, or if you’re doing both.  (I can’t recommend that, if only from the POV of killing forests.)  I might change my mind about this if Amazon came up with some ploy to combine the prepaid orders with an inexpensive PR and marketing program, but I can see how that could get messy.  Maybe both these options, prepaid orders and bundling, are a way of solving the next problem, though.

Item: Sales are flat.  Do I care?  Not really, and probably not as much as some authors.  I write to entertain others…and myself, of course.  I don’t have to make a living with my writing.  I guess that’s the only way I can consider myself in the same class as Child and Connelly, although they probably go out to dinner more often and drive a better car!  Sure, I’d like to cover costs and make a wee bit of spare change so we could afford to go to a movie more often too, but I can go with the flow.  That flow sucks big time right now, though.

It’s a readers market.  Unlike real estate, I’m affected by both extremes: I might not sale many books as a writer, but I can sure find a lot of good quality reading, more than I can really handle.  There are so many good books out there written by very entertaining and original authors—indie, small press, and Big Five (higher priced and relatively fewer than the latter every month, though)—that readers have a lot to choose from.  For a writer, that’s a problem.  Of course, there’s a lot of crap too—maybe Sturgeon’s law worth (don’t know Sturgeon’s law?  Look it up!)—and the crap can be found in the indie, small press, and Big Five books too.  Readers have to choose carefully by paying attention to benefit v. cost; writers have to be worried about being discovered.  It’s one hell of an exciting time!

In libris libertas….       

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2014 at 4:00 am and is filed under News and Notices from the Writing Trenches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.