News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #80…
[Aren’t you the lucky one? This newsletter, after eighty editions, still isn’t cluttering up your email box. It never will. In particular, I’ll never use it to collect readers’ email addresses, so, if you feel guilty about reading my books, you’ll still be able to do so in anonymity. It’s a feature most Friday’s right here at this blog, where I regularly talk about reading and writing…and books, others and my own.]
Item: Sequel? Prequel? So, they found Harper Lee’s lost MS, Go Set a Watchman, attached to an old copy of her famous novel, and now Harper Collins wants to make millions off it? Beyond the dollars of profit involved, I can’t say whether publishing the book will be a valuable contribution to the reading world because I haven’t read the MS, but it might be pretty good if it comes anywhere close to To Kill a Mockingbird. Word is out that maybe Ms. Lee never wanted this to be published because she didn’t think anything could hit the big time as well as Mockingbird. With lawyers and traditional publishers involved and her health status, I’m suspicious that greed is the only driving factor here, and it doesn’t reside in Ms. Harper.
To not dwell on conspiracy theories, let me say that I’m told Ms. Lee wrote the book before Mockingbird, so addicts of semantical nuances will debate whether it’s a prequel or sequel. I’ll throw in my own two virtual dollars and muddy the categorization waters by stating that we have to change the label of Mockingbird instead—her famous novel now becomes a flashback to this new novel, a whole book’s worth, in fact. I’m not rushing to get my pre-order in, taking a wait-and-see attitude—the wait because the HC price will probably be exorbitant (what else is new?) and the see because I never buy books anymore without assessing the author’s prose, not even Ms. Lee’s (aka using the Amazon “peek inside” feature). I used a similar tactic on J. K. Rowling’s detective novel—consequently, I never bought it.
Item: Damning indictment of traditional publishing? Quote from Harper Lee about not releasing this “new book” years ago: “I was a first-time writer, so I did what I was told.” While traditional publishers would like to continue that subservient attitude by authors, times have changed. Most writers today aren’t so quick to bow and kiss the jack-booted feet of big publishing conglomerates and their bloated bureaucracies. Mind you, I feel no ill will against authors who accept those advances and contracts that amount to indentured slavery. I feel compassion. I was lucky. (It’s hard to even maintain a dislike for the Big Five, corporations that prove that a company isn’t a person. Any impersonal corporation is always a moving target, and I’d hate to see employees who need their jobs and benefits in the crossfire. Fortunately, whatever I say, won’t matter much.)
I went indie for the best of reasons—I’m addicted to writing, and the traditional publishing circus wouldn’t let me do it. Ms. Lee didn’t have the choices I had. In that time before our wild indie paradigm shift in publishing, it was bad for authors because publishers were in control. We’re now living in a different era. Whether an author feels good about it, there are many more opportunities—a writer can be in the driver’s seat more, even if he’s driving a Fiat (his own book business) and not riding on the back of a huge semi headed for a terrible crash (a major publishing conglomerate). Readers will benefit too.
Item: Cameos. I recently reviewed Harlan Coben’s The Stranger on Bookpleasures. It’s a rather long review—I’m a Coben fan, even though his books are expensive (not Harlan’s fault, I suppose)—but one thing I didn’t comment on there was his use of fans’ names for characters. Those are cameos. I like that idea. Prince Harry (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan) and several other European royals (Aristocrats and Assassins) have cameos in my books. There’ll be one in the new Mary Jo novel, Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By (not a royal, but a VIP, to be sure).
Now you can hobnob with royalty and/or pretend you’re Hitchcock (famous for his cameos) by having your very own cameo. In my sci-fi novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion (see below), I’ll include five readers’ names as character names (unlike the royals, this is voluntary, of course). You will live a long life and prosper as a character. Just use my contact page or drop an email to steve@stevenmmoore.com, and answer the question: How many books are in a trilogy? By the way, by having your email address, I can send you a free copy of the ebook via Amazon when it comes out so you can show friends and family you’re famous. (I’ll not keep the email after that, so don’t worry.)
I can’t use email handles, of course—HotInternetMama or CaptainNonObvious aren’t character names, for example—so I need a real name, and make sure you tell me what version of your name you want me to use (sometimes parents saddle their kids with terrible middle names, for example, so you might not want that “out there”). First come, first serve. (If response is good, I’ll think about doing this again for other books.)
Item: More on reviews. I’m sure I’m not using the website for what it was intended for, but LinkedIn has some great discussion groups dealing with writing, writers, and the writing business. I lurk there more than elsewhere (Konrath’s posts are few and far between, for example—he’s been welcoming in 2015 for quite a while now—and Facebook groups tend to get lost in Facebook noise); occasionally, I come out of hiding and throw in some comments. A recent discussion thread went into the whole nine yards about reviewing and reviewer’s obligations (by not giving a link, I’m forcing you to check out some of the groups there).
When I started releasing books, I became a reviewer, motivated by the desire to give something back to the reading and writing community. I joined Bookpleasures (a review site—see my recent review of Harlan Coben’s The Stranger) years ago; I also tend to review books that are just casual reading (often less detailed than my Bookpleasures reviews, but they are still honest and a bit longer than the Amazon norm).
The aforementioned thread discusses many things about reviewing activities, but one point that was made struck me as important: there aren’t many standards for writing a good review. In spite of the fact that most students of HS English have to write a few book reviews, their quality, especially on Amazon, is all over the board and trends toward abysmal. That’s interesting because too many readers just count how many reviews and what the average ranking comes to, forgetting that there’s no quality control at all (Amazon is mostly responsible for this).
I’ve discussed reviews in this newsletter and elsewhere in this blog, but I’m afraid that most of that has fallen on deaf ears (or blind eyes?). The bottom line: Most reviews are worthless, especially ones that simply reduce to “atta-boy” or “atta-girl”, or “this stinks” (the most worthless ones are from Kirkus—these are paid reviews, either by traditional publishers or indie authors, and they often do little more than summarize the book and throw out a few buzzwords). If you’re a smart reader/consumer, you’ll just read the book blurb and use the peek-inside feature, and not the book’s reviews, in order to inform your buying decisions. If you’re really curious and addicted, read the book’s longer reviews (they tend to be more worthwhile and honest), both positive and negative. I’d ignore the number of reviews and the average ranking, especially on Amazon.
Item: Mary Jo is back. Have you read Muddlin’ Through? In that novel, I introduced ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo Melendez and put her through the wringer as she traveled around the world trying to clear her name after being framed. The sequel, Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By, will soon be out. Not so much globe-trotting this time for MJ, but she has to survive a stalker and two teams of U.S. and Russian agents. She also finds romance with an ex-FBI agent turned PI hired by MJ to protect her from the stalker. MJ is just your average gal from NJ, tough on the bad guys and sweet on the good, but she adapts well to the Silicon Valley of California. Coming soon!
Item: Other ebooks in the works. Barring unforeseen calamities in my life and getting through the foreseen ones (tax season is upon us, for example—we’re still recovering from a TurboTax software upgrade gone horribly wrong—why do companies do this?), I have two other projects destined for release this year. The first, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, is a new sci-fi novel that turns alien conquest upside down (here Mensa isn’t that group of brainy people who make money off puzzles and games—it’s a constellation seen in the Southern Hemisphere). I struggled with this one because I had too many ideas! One reviewer called Survivors of the Chaos the strangest sci-fi novel she’d ever read—I’ll guarantee this is even stranger.
The second new book will be Family Affairs, a new Chen and Castilblanco novel announced, complete with excerpt, in The Collector. You’ll enjoy meeting the two detectives’ families while reading this new mystery/thriller. Hint: it’s not really about their families; that’s just backstory. But it will provide more interesting background into what makes these two unusual detectives tick. If you haven’t read any of the ebooks in this series, try one out for size—each can stand alone. C & C aren’t Holmes and Watson from Elementary—they’re better! Time for you to meet them.
In libris libertas….
