News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #85…
Item: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Have you seen the proposal for the cover to Harper Lee’s “new book”? It’s terrible. I reviewed Harlan Coben’s book The Stranger and noticed that his book’s cover is poor quality too. Is traditional publishing cutting costs by not paying for a good cover? My sample isn’t very large, of course. As a reader and reviewer, I’ve never judged a book by its cover. My judgement of a cover can only be the subjective opinion of someone who knows little about graphic art (readers of The Collector probably know that from the poem at the beginning). After a lifetime of math and science tomes, my threshold is pretty low, in fact. I’ve pushed to improve my covers, though, and have hired a very good graphic artist to make them, because some readers and reviewers do judge a book by its cover. An attractive thumbnail image on Amazon can’t hurt, right? But it’s what’s in the book that counts.
Item: FaceBook woes. I think I’ve already announced this, but I no longer am active on FaceBook. They’ve made it impossible to share these blog posts. I’ll leave my author’s page up and keep the account open, but if you really want to discuss anything with me or learn about what I’m doing, this newsletter and this website’s contact page is the best place for you. (I still share these posts via RSS on Amazon, Goodreads, and LinkedIn, and with Google+, so users of those sites will still have their memories tweaked from time to time.)
Item: Fantastic Encores! As I announced earlier, this is a collection of short stories about what’s happened in the lives of some of my characters after the events of the novel; it will be released soon. They’re entertaining stories, although they represent a blatant promotion of those same novels, in a sense. They also provide you with an inexpensive introduction to the sci-fi part of my writing because they’ll be perpetually on sale at $0.99. Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java does the same for the C & C end (for those not in the know, that’s Chen and Castilblanco, my two NYPD homicide detectives). I’ve already reduced that price to $0.99.
Item: Other price reductions. ASAP, I’ll reduce all my prices to $2.99 for “standard novel length” ebooks and $3.99 for “epic sci-fi-length” ebooks, if they aren’t already there, and KDP Select doesn’t get in the way (I never remember what their 90-day rule actually requires). I’m working on second editions for The Midas Bomb (C & C #1) and Survivors of the Chaos (#1 in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”); the first will be priced at $2.99 and the second at $3.99, following the above convention.
All future ebooks will follow this convention until further notice. Think about it: you can buy four (4!) C & C novels (there are now four after The Midas Bomb) for about the price of one traditionally published James Patterson novel. (Where does the money go when you buy a Patterson book? You guessed it—the bloated bureaucracy of the Big Five! I pass on my DIY production savings to you, my reader. Buying Big Five ebooks just continues the life of the dinosaurs.)
Item: Winning a small part of the lottery. Why am I changing my prices? Readers are lucky today…they have many good books to read. Writers, not so much. There are fewer readers to read their books, many genres are highly competitive, it’s harder to be discovered, and many extraneous agents conspire against the writer who wants to be “discovered” (my expose of Joe Konrath’s little plan to control library patrons is a case in point—see Monday’s blog post). Indie and midlist writers’ fates are often determined by the internet gods—we can’t afford those swanky TV commercials and full-page ads the Big Five lavish on their old warhorses (Lord knows how really effective they are, of course—but that we can’t afford them is a fact).
I love storytelling and still have many stories to tell. The indie paradigm lets me get my stories out to the world more efficiently than I could with any publisher using the traditional paradigm (that includes so-called “indie publishers” who use the traditional paradigm—there the word “indie” just means they haven’t been gobbled up by a big publishing conglomerate…yet!). There are also production economies I can pass on to my readers.
The problem? I’ve never recovered costs. At $2.99 for an ebook, I need to sell one hundred plus (100+) copies just to recover production costs for the book (chicken feed for Big Five authors, of course), with maybe a wee bit left over to update this website periodically (you’ll note that I update the text quite often, but the ebooks’ cover thumbnails take longer to appear—I don’t know HTML). Them’s the crippling facts, folks! I love to spin a good yarn, but these days that means going a wee bit beyond Smores around a campfire.
Why is this happening? Beats the hell out of me! One reviewer of Full Medical and the entire “Clones and Mutants Series” admired the complexity of my stories. Unlike formulaic Big Five authors (Child, Coben, Deaver, King, Koontz, Patterson, Preston & Child, et al—they didn’t start as formulaic, of course), I often tackle the tough themes, different ones with each book. The Collector, C & C #5, for example, tackled sex trafficking, porn, and prostitution. Maybe readers of mysteries prefer a pleasant and innocuous Mary Higgins Clark-type mystery? Maybe readers of thrillers want simple tales about good v. evil that refrain from analyzing why the bad guy is evil and paints the good guy as a knight in shining armor? And maybe sci-fi readers think sci-fi means fantasy and want zombies, werewolves, and vampires, instead of complicated ETs and outer space? If you’re one of those readers, then I’m not your guy. (Of course, you wouldn’t be reading this then, but most of the people who read this blog don’t read my ebooks either.) I want my readers to come away from my ebook saying, “Geez, I never thought about that in that way before!”
Item: Indies v. indies. You’ve probably already read my expose of Joe Konrath’s library venture (last Monday). Joe isn’t the only indie not supporting indies. Indies Unlimited claims to support indies too, but they’re just protecting the “good indies” like Joe against the riff-raff like me. I think I commented once about their “guaranteeing indie quality” by censoring me for using “prolog” instead of “prologue,” the main excuse for rejecting my ebook for a “free promo” (of course, they’d be happy if I paid for it). Nitpicking in the service of discrimination, to be sure (both are accepted spellings). Their inimitable list of reviewers, some of whom made this genius determination, are also indie writers with a Douglas Preston agenda, of course.
Now Indies Unlimited comes out in support of SELF-e. While I don’t mind donating to public libraries (I do so, frequently), I don’t want someone else to get rich doing it (that’s pretty much SELF-e’s business model—screw the indie author to make more money for themselves). These internecine battles don’t bode well for the indie movement because greed seems to be in control. At least Joe’s EAF effort shares the spoils with the indies who can participate (not all of us can, which is my problem). All indie writers should boycott Indies Unlimited, SELF-e, and EAF.
Item: Future projects. I’m not often a whiner. However, I don’t need an MBA to know that, if a business continues to take a loss, the owner should maybe take the hint and shut it down. Well, not for a while! I’ll continue to write because I have many stories to tell. You might see more of them in serialization at this website—that’s zero cost until my server company starts charging for data storage (I guess they do already in a sense, but there’s no specific “data plan,” like in your iPhone). Readers expect freebies these days (although I can’t seem to give away my books either, at least the times I tried the give-away option on Amazon’s KDP Select). I have a bit of Don Quijote in me, I guess. There’s a part of me that says if I can entertain just one reader with just one tale, I’m a success. (That’s a bit delusional, of course, but, if I had set out to become rich, I would have folded long ago!)
I have a few projects simmering on the stove that will become ebooks if all goes well. Fantastic Encores! was mentioned above—the stories in that collection already appeared here for free, but they will be taken down when the ebook is released. More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, my new sci-fi novel, covers a lot of ground (maybe I should say space) and contains an unusual twist on an ET invasion. Family Affairs, C & C #6, considers as a theme the power of family for both good guys and bad. I’ve already mentioned second editions of The Midas Bomb and Survivors of the Chaos to lift the yoke of Infinity Publishing from around my neck (nothing wrong with Infinity per se, especially compared to places like Outskirts, Publish America, and a few other POD leftovers, but their ebooks aren’t competitive). Any or all of these, excepting the first and the last, might appear only in serialization, though, until I make enough on a previous book to pay for the next.
Item: Call me naïve. Another project I’ve been internally debating is a collection of my essays on writing, now found for free in the blog category “Writing.” Considering the above, you’ll probably think me naïve to believe that other writers will be interested in what I have to say. Well, after all these ebooks, I do know something about genre writing! The collection wouldn’t focus on PR and marketing techniques—writers have plenty of books that discuss that, and I obviously suck at it.
I’d collect together essays like “The Eight-Fold Way” that focus on the writing process itself, what I think works when spinning a yarn, and what I think entertains a reader of genre fiction. After all, I do have a few books, so readers can’t say that I don’t know what I’m talking about if they haven’t read any of them! Some writers might have fun with me turning standard advice on its head too (I’m talking indie writers, here—in general, Big Five writers think they know everything). We’ll see if I have the energy for this one. (Projects associated with pulling content off this site are a bit boring, though.)
Item: Reviews. I’ll be doing fewer of them. Writers (or their publcists), please query Bookpleasures, where I (and many others) can give your book a thorough and honest review if we select it (no guarantee of that, of course). Amazon reviews are limited to 500 words; Bookpleasures’ reviews don’t have a word limit (case in point: compare Wednesday’s review of Shadow Ritual, a reposting of my Bookpleasures review, with the shortened version on Amazon—which carries the most information for the reader and informs the authors about flaws?). They’re also more complete than your usual “atta-boy,” “atta-girl,” or “this sucks” review on Amazon (I’d guess that about 60% of Amazon reviews are versions of those—i.e. zero content—and don’t deserve the name “review”).
I prefer complete freedom to get down in the weeds—if something sucks, I’ll say why, for example—so don’t ask me to review your book outside of Bookpleasures…and definitely not your MS. While I’ve had the habit of reviewing some books I casually read too, I’ll stop doing that. I’ll also stop reviewing Big Five authors—they don’t need more reviews (although they’re usually nothing more than the above).
On the other hand, although my ebooks will no longer be free, ever, you can still read one for free by promising to give me an honest review. I can write this off as advertising cost, but when a reviewer doesn’t complete his promise, it’s just another loss. BTW, I keep track. Your name goes on a blacklist. One of these days I’ll publish it as a complement to Simon Royale’s list. (I don’t know why anyone would pull this scam, but it happens. Besides my blacklist, you’re just heaping bad karma upon yourself if you do.)
In elibris libertas…
