Item: ny times attacking Amazon.  I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to start writing “ny times” without caps, because they’re continually showing their small-mindedness.  I’ve already stopped reading their Sunday Book Review—their bestseller lists are completely meaningless and should be ignored for multiple reasons.  When Hachette caved to Amazon, the newspaper lost a cause they’d been hammering, so now they’ve come out against Amazon by declaring that they aren’t needed by online buyers in a recent article.

All I can say is, “Huh?”  Online retailers are never “needed”—they’re simply a convenience for many shoppers.  I made many purchases from Amazon this Christmas because they offered the same products at lower prices.  When that doesn’t happen, I go to another website…or (horrors!) to a store.  There are certain items I don’t even like to buy online—computers, TVs, cars, appliances, and so forth, even shoes (I need to try them on).

While I don’t “need” Amazon in general for online buying, I often use it for that.  But, most of all, as an author—and this is true for ANY author—I can’t ignore Amazon.  No author should.  They’re still the best place to sell my books.  Smashwords and its associated retailers are a distant second—I have to focus on my ebooks that are available in both places.  Maybe that’s just me (I don’t sell many books in total, so my stats might be biased).

In many recent articles, the times’ staffers, led infamously by David Streitfeld, have waged war on Amazon, most notably with respect to the Hachette case, but his last article took a new twist.  He claimed that indie authors (the ny times insists on using the more pejorative “self-published authors”) are unhappy with Amazon.  They highlight some cases.  There are always cases, but I need to underline the fact that the KDP Select features of ebook “borrowing” and the Unlimited program for Prime members are successful with consumers, so much so that Smashwords closed a similar deal with Scribd recently so that people can borrow Smashwords’ ebooks.

Maybe some authors were upset by the reduction in royalties implied in the borrowing process at Amazon. The fault doesn’t lie with that consumer option, though; it also doesn’t lie with indie writers, because midlist authors with traditional contracts will suffer from ebook borrowing programs as well if they take advantage of KDP Select (they often don’t because their publishers take away the freedom to determine prices, making many of their ebooks non-competitive).  Bottom line: Streitfeld’s article is an attack on indie writers; he and his newspaper want to return to the good old days where what consumers read was dictated by the Big Five pubbers—censoring agents and editors; only “the chosen” authors, no newbies; and intolerably high prices for ebooks.

The decline in sales of those authors featured in Streitfeld’s article is due to one fact only: indie publishing has put more new, fresh, and exciting books into the marketplace and allowed readers to find more interesting authors, young authors (at least, new to the marketplace like me) compared to the old stallions in the Big Five stables who are ready for the glue factory.  It’s a reader’s marketplace, not an author’s.  Streitfeld is right—more people are writing books now—but consumers benefit from that.  But he’s also wrong—not anyone can write a book.

For fiction, a good book, publicly recognized or not, still requires that the author tell a good story.  For non-fiction, and some fiction, an author still has to do the required historical, technical, or scientific research.  Readers know quality.  They also know they can find it almost anywhere now—among Big Five authors (if you go beyond the stale ones) and many midlist and indie authors waiting for you to discover them.  And, in these economic times, readers are also looking for a good deal, something the Big Five don’t often provide.

The ny times has a vendetta-policy against Amazon, but Amazon will have the last laugh.  The ny times will be long gone and Amazon will still be around.  It won’t be “needed” for online buying because, with time, it will have more competitors—it will just “be there,” doing its own thing.  In ten years, the ny times daily edition for Kindle will be all that’s left of that newspaper—by the way, it’s sold right now on Amazon!

Item: Books on writing.  The only Stephen King book that really impressed me was his book on writing, cleverly titled On Writing.  Otherwise, I prefer Dean Koontz in that sci-fi/horror genre (although he slipped lately with his take on the Frankenstein legend).  (I didn’t identify with King’s wannabe prom queen from the start, and The Dead Zone was his last good story.  Yeah, I know, I’m bucking the fad.)  King’s book On Writing and Card’s Characters and Viewpoint should be on every writer’s bookshelf, however.  If a newbie author adds a few more books dedicated to her genres, she is set—she otherwise shouldn’t spend a lot of money or time on these writing books.  In fact, she should spend her money and time on writing (time for the prose and money for people who will offload her so she can write, like editors, cover artists, and formatters).

Some of the offloading can be done by your publisher and its staff, of course, if you go the traditional route.  You’ll still have to do your own PR and marketing, unless you’re King or Koontz or some other Big Five-anointed author.  But please note that I don’t consider PR and marketing books as books on writing.  PR and marketing books are mostly useless, in fact.  You can pick up all the ideas you need in forums, chat sessions, and discussion groups.  Books on PR and marketing—“I can guarantee you a bestseller”—are in the same class as those get-rich-quick self-help books—“I can make you a millionaire in sixty days or less.”

First, for the most part (there are exceptions), they’re written by people who can’t write and just want your money.  Second, if they could write, they’d go out and make their book into a bestseller, while ignoring you and certainly hiding their secrets.  (I don’t hide mine.  I’ve often stated in these posts that there are none.)  Third, the problem with hot, new ideas for PR and marketing is that they might work initially but go cold rapidly (Amazon give-aways are a case in point).

Don’t spend your hard-earned money on PR and marketing books and minimize how much you spend on those writing books.  Instead, spend like crazy buying books that you enjoy reading—all kinds of fiction and non-fiction, but especially in your genres—and then go write like that.  You might be a unique person, but many others among the millions of readers worldwide will have your same reading interests.  That’s the audience for your books.

Item: My posts on writing.  They’re free, of course.  All posts in this blog are free, and you can copy them and freely circulate them, as long as you give me credit.  I’d like to follow-up on the one I wrote not long ago about bestselling novels, “Formula for a Bestseller.”  About the time I wrote that, some kind person pointed out James W. Hall’s Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers (no, I didn’t spend my money on it—I got it as a Christmas gift).  While I can’t agree with Hall’s list of 12 bestsellers (there are some commonalities with mine), I’d like to summarize his list of “necessary features” a bestseller should contain: an offer you can’t refuse (the “hook”); hot buttons (popular topics); the big picture (aka don’t scramble in the weeds); the golden country (America and Americana—but less so every year); nothing but the facts, ma’am (readers learning new things); secret societies (and conspiracies); bumpkins versus slickers; God is great, or is He? (moral questioning); American dream/American nightmare; a dozen mavericks; fractured families; the juicy parts (sex! perversion?).

This book is easy to read (it was an edited compilation of MFA lectures, after all).  With a bit of soul-searching, I decided my novels have many of these features—why aren’t they bestsellers?  Maybe not enough of some features (the juicy parts, for example)?  Ignoring the fact that Mr. Hall chooses his list to make his points (don’t we all?), the problem I have is what I said in my post and above: If there were silver bullets that ensured writing success, we’d all be firing them from our virtual pens!  There are no sufficient conditions, or features.  It’s one big lottery.  But you only win if you play the game.

Item: New ebooks for 2015.  If everything goes as planned, you’ll see the second Mary Jo Melendez mystery novel (the first was Muddlin’ Through), the next Detectives Chen and Castilblanco novel (tentative title, Family Affairs—the last C&C novel was The Collector), and a new sci-fi novel titled More than Human: The Mensa Contagion.  I’m also thinking about bundling the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (see below).  I love to entertain you with fresh, new storytelling.  All my backlog aka previous works are still fresh and exciting entertainment too—in today’s publishing environment, I practically just wrote them!—but when I write another book in a series (the first two mentioned above), you can jump in right there and read the previous books in the series later.  My series aren’t soap operas—each is pretty much self-contained because I write them that way.  (I know readers don’t like to feel they’re missing out or hanging on a cliff at the end of a series book.)

Item: Price reductions for 2015.  Everyone likes those January sales.  Some of my ebooks will have their prices slashed too.  Here’s the Amazon list: The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, $3.99 à $2.99; No Amber Waves of Grain, $4.99 à $2.99; Soldiers of God, $4.99 à $3.99; Aristocrats and Assassins, $4.99 à $3.99; Muddlin’ Through, $4.99 à $3.99; and The Collector, $4.99 à $3.99.  Two of these books, Golden Years and No Amber are also available on Smashwords and e-retailers it distributes to, and those prices will adjust correspondingly too.  I’m also contemplating the bundling of my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” comprised of Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Samba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, but only for Amazon’s KDP Select (Prime and Unlimited).  That involves a bit more work for me, but the price will be attractive.  All of this is just a continuation of my policy of providing inexpensive and entertaining reading for my readers.

Item: Aggregating v. dissecting.  By the way, while I think bundling is a good idea for a short series like the one above—it gives readers a good bargain and a substantial introduction to an author’s oeuvre—I loathe the idea of taking a book, say Survivors of the Chaos, and dividing it up into short installments like some kind of TV miniseries (Survivors would naturally divide into three parts, though).  If an author writes an entire novel, I’d feel ripped off if he then decides to dribble it out in drips and drabs.

Benford and Niven’s two-parter, Bowl of Heaven/Ship Star, irked the hell out of me, for example.  I understand why they did it—too much B&N techno-babble!  In their haste to illustrate their hard sci-fi credentials, they offer excessive details and minimal story.  They make Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama) seem like a terse ny times’ reporter at a loss for words.  Hall’s “nothing but the facts, ma’am” (see above) is carried to the extreme.  I guess you can argue that the price-per-word is pretty good for a Big Five book, but it’s the split I find annoying.  (And you cannot read the second book without reading the first!)

In libris libertas….

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2015 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.