I've sold over 100 copies of Trang TODAY. Huh. When Amazon kicks in for you, it kicks in hard, no?
ETA: And Christ, I'm now #5 on the science fiction: series paid list, and actually cracked the top 100 (#73) for science fiction in general. (No, I never show up on the science fiction: space opera list, because that is for paper books.) (EATA: Actually, now I think I'm wrong about the paper book thing, but I don't know.)
So, these past few weeks haven't been a very productive time. Some of it is the kids, some of it is the issue of being bored with a beta task but not with-it enough to write.
And some of it, I must confess, is k-drama.
What is that? Korean telenovelas. This all started after I read this article and decided that, if other people are destroying their lives by watching 28 hour-long episodes of Shining Inheritance in a row, why shouldn't I?
So I popped some Korean dramas into my Netflix queue and got on with life, ignoring the little time bombs I had set for myself.
Well, I never watched more than one episode of Shining Inheritance (it reminded me too much of Dallas and Dynasty). The problem is that I started with a much more dangerous show: My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho.
What's a gumiho? Oh, you can find out about that here. You can also find out what an oppa and a noona are, and the difference between jondaemal and banmal. Oh, and what are mania dramas? What's the live-shoot system? Did you know that the Korean wave now so dominates Asian entertainment that there are dating services in Japan specializing in Korean men?
You see the problem? It's not just a show, it's a research project. Add on the facts that Gumiho is rather like Buffy, that I am apparently a natural fan of the Hong sisters, and that Netflix is pulling a bunch of these shows off streaming March 1st (A DEADLINE! AIIIIGGGGGHHHH!!!), and I've got the perfect storm of time-suckage.
Really, who needs crack?
So, I started with Gumiho, went on to Secret Garden, and then had to make some tough choices because there was no way I'd get more than one series in by March 1st. So I went with another Hong sisters drama, You Are Beautiful, and now I want to watch that one again but there just isn't time! (The DVDs are fricking $110 a set, too. Way to price yourselves out of the market, idiots.)
Instead, I've been thinking about why the shows are compelling, even when they're kind of disappointing. (The live-shoot system basically means that the quality of the show is guaranteed to degrade in the later episodes, which really works against the strength of a telenovela in my opinion. One nice thing about the Hong sisters is that they plot things out in advance--and whether they like it or not, the fact that their shows aren't popular enough to get a few extra episodes tacked on to the end at the last minute is also helpful. I think Secret Garden would have been a much better show if it hadn't done so well in the ratings.)
Certain conventions in Korean dramas seem...odd to me. For example, they use soliloquies, which strikes me as a little unnecessary because the acting is usually quite good. A lot of tears get shed: You get about three-quarters of the way through and everyone's just weeping and weeping and weeping. These are romances, but they can't show a lot of physical intimacy, so guys demonstrate their interest in girls by grabbing their forearms and dragging them around like they were a sack of beans. (Honestly, girls, just do the "wax on" thing, OK? That's an easy hold to break.)
But thinking about why I like these shows (despite not being too crazy about romances), is that they tend to be in the Pride and Prejudice school of romance-as-a-mutually-beneficial-partnership, rather than the Twilight school of romance-as-salvation-for-the-woman.
In other words, in the k-dramas I found compelling (and even in the one I didn't), the guys need work. There's certainly a fantasy element to the men (they're typically rich and/or famous, plus good looking and capable of eventually becoming a worthwhile and stable partner), but at the beginning, they tend to be pretty seriously damaged. They need to learn some life lessons and become better people. Likewise the woman typically needs help and/or work, which she receives from the guy.
It is simply more gratifying to me to see a partnership develop where both parties have something to offer and both are improved. You don't have this useless wad of a gal sitting around feeling sorry for herself until Mr. Wonderful rides in on his white horse and wooshes her away to his magic castle.
I really don't like the notion that it's someone else's job to fix you--in my experience, you either fix yourself, or you stay broken. That's probably the core of my discomfort with romance, because these days the barriers tend to be internal, which usually means that there's a damaged person there who needs to be fixed.
But--and I realize this sounds like a subtle distinction--I don't mind it when a character is motivated to fix themselves in order to obtain a romantic goal (or any other kind of goal).
That's why Knocked Up didn't bother me, even thought the Seth Rogan character was, you know, a Seth Rogan character--a seemingly hopeless man-child. The Katherine Heigl character explicitly surrenders the job of fixing him. She means that in a positive way (she doesn't want him to change), but her leaving the ball in his court essentially forces him to take responsibility for his own life and his own choices for the first time.
And that's what these k-dramas get right. The guys (and the women) grow, and they grow on their own. They do it for the other person of course, but they also do it very much for themselves.
I know damned well there are people who are completely incapable of growth--the notion that people can improve themselves is in its own way something of a fantasy. But many people (sometimes some very surprising people) do grow. And I'm not such a black-hearted cynic that I can't enjoy it in fiction.
So, not shockingly given how much better this giveaway did than the others, I am actually seeing some benefits after having switched back to paid: I'm #19 on the science fiction: series paid bestseller list, which just barely puts me on that all-important front page.
I've also dropped the price to 99 cents, for two reasons. Reason number 1: I still plan to make the book free. Reason number 2: People have suggested that, if you do have a good response to your free days, dropping the price can keep the momentum going.
My previous experiment with the 99-cent price point was a bust, but this time around (when I have more reviews and better placement on the bestseller lists), it's working like a charm--I haven't gone through the old sales reports to do an exact count, but in all likelihood I've sold more copies of Trang today than I did in 2011 and 2012 combined. Of course it's impossible for me to know if I'm really making more money this way than if I'd kept the price up and took the higher royalty, but since I'm planning to make Trang free anyway, I'm OK with making 35 cents a sale if it keeps the book on the front page.
So that's all very nice for me. But I think it points to some larger lessons for all indie writers, which I shall patronizingly spell out in a numbered list because I've got a really big head right now:
1. Prepare. A lot of the stuff I did, like backmatter links, targeting the cover and description, getting into the right Amazon categories, and getting reviews did NOT pay off immediately. Clearly, it was still worth doing, because it's paying off now. (OK, it's not paying off in a financial sense yet--I still have a long way to go before I break even. But you have to crawl before you can run, and the momentum is definitely in the right direction.)
2. Experiment. Do we need to go over how much money I've wasted on marketing that did not work? It's embarrassing when that happens, and if you're me and you know you don't know much about marketing, it makes you feel like this is something you'll never really get a handle on. But if I hadn't been persistent with BookBub (and it took two tries), I wouldn't have had such a successful giveaway. And I doubt that I wouldn't have gotten into BookBub in the first place without all the work I did earlier to get reviews, have a good description, have a targeted cover, etc.
3. Believe. Recently Edward Robertson did a post on giveaways in which he says, Oh, you should be getting thousands of downloads. Which, I didn't before. But the important caveat there is that if you get your book on one of the free book sites you should get thousands of downloads. And you know, once I did, I did.
It can be hard to hear stuff by people who are better established and are saying things like, Oh, just get your book on Pixel of Ink (can't, sorry); or, Just make your book 99 cents (didn't work); or, Don't market. They're trying to be helpful, but when what works for them doesn't work for you--or doesn't work to a level that they would deem acceptable--it can make you feel like a big old loser who has written a crap book.
But there are still differences in the playing field, even on Amazon, even with e-books. Someone with a 20-year career as a novelist behind them is simply going to have an easier time finding readers. Amazon is going to help you a lot more if you've sold 20,000 copies than if you've sold 20.
It's hard starting from zero. But it doesn't mean you wrote a bad book. It doesn't that your book lacks potential. It just means that...it's hard starting from zero. True in any career.
4. Persist. Always the bottom line for writers, right? You can't win if you don't play.
So at this very microsecond Trang is the #1 free sci-fi title on Amazon! Very cool! It will fall into complete obscurity again in about 35 minutes, but I'll enjoy what I have now. That's 7,297 copies given away today (ETA: 7,344 by the end)--again, props to BookBub!
And now I feel very good indeed about the cover art and the description....
So, today's my last KDP Select free day, and the first time I've used BookBub. The BookBub ad cost $60--so slightly less than my first Facebook campaign, which was $70.
And I've gotten 10 times the downloads!
So, yeah, big ups to BookBub for being a highly cost-effective way to reach readers. Other advantages: They don't shut you out if you don't have a review average of four stars, and (although it costs more and presumably would result in fewer buys) you can buy an ad with them if you simply put a title on sale as opposed to making it free, so you aren't locked into KDP Select.
Oddly, I don't seem to be moving up the Amazon bestseller list like I did in the previous two campaigns (only at #14 now in science fiction: series, but at least I'm on the front page). I'm assuming that just a lag or a glitch, since that number hasn't changed since early this morning (and yeah, you can really tell when that BookBub e-mail goes out).
(Of course, it's possible that it's not a glitch--that Amazon doesn't count the BookBub downloads when compiling its bestseller lists. Which would suggest that, once the book goes free permanently, I'd actually be better off spending $70 on Facebook, because I'd get better visibility on the lists. Interesting.)
Goodreads is still a dog that won't hunt: No clicks so far. At this rate, the $60 I pre-paid them will last into the next century.
By-the-by: Before the giveaway, sales for February were maintaining their January levels, which were substantially higher than I'd seen before (although not high in any non-relative sense).
Moving on to reviews: I picked up three reviews over the past month--all of them were five-star reviews, moving the book from two five-star reviews to five five-star reviews. I happen to believe that psychological factors play a large part in whether people think a book that they enjoyed is worth three, four, or five stars. So, before I thought anchoring was playing a large role in the average star rating on the various Web sites.
This time around I think it's actually a response to those one-star reviews. The new five-star reviews are quite short, and I think what happened is that people enjoyed the book, and decided to have a second look at it on Amazon. Then they saw those one-star reviews, and thought, "That's SO unfair! Those people didn't even read the book! And that one is such a sanctimonious asshole--ooh, this frosts my shorts!" So instead of giving they, say, four stars, they get their dudgeon up and give it five.
Which is a reminder to myself that even jackasses have their uses....
Not enough sleep + too much caffeine = very hard to concentrate. I did noise removal on a hunk of Chapter 7 of the Trang audiobook. I was hoping to finish the chapter, but I feel like I'm going to get dangerously sloppy soon, so I'm calling it quits.
OK, the kids are gone, I've gotten some sleep, and I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. Today I re-recorded lines for the second half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook (and that chapter is at last wrapped up--huzzah!), the relatively few lines of Chapter 7, and some random fixes.
I've been kind of struggling with what Lily White LeFevre dubs "time anxiety," which makes it hard to undertake large projects when I know I'll have to stop fairly soon and go help my elderly relative move. But it's going to be a couple of weeks before I have to do that, and rationally I know I can get a hunk of work done in that time.
The Passive Voice today posted an article about Patricia Cornwell, the bestselling crime writer who discovered the hard way handing all your money over to someone and saying "You take care of me" is a really bad idea.
Anyway, Cornwell realized there was a problem because she only had $13 million in the bank despite having earned at least $10 million a year for the past four years. The jury rectified the situation by awarding her $51 million.
And yeah, all that is a lot of money--I don't argue that--and there were a couple of comments suggesting that all those large sums are just kind of a blur to people.
Which is a common reaction when figures in the millions are bandied about. Most people (especially writers) think of those kinds of sums as mind-bogglingly huge. And when everything gets lumped together in the "mind-bogglingly huge" department, it all seems like it's kind of the same.
But it's not.
Why not? Well, again we get into the difference between annual income and short-term earnings, which is important for writers to be aware of because our incomes tend to swing up and down dramatically.
Cornwell had four VERY good years. But in this business, four really good years can be followed by four or fourteen or forty really crappy years. Cornwell's income could take a dive for lots of reasons: Maybe people get burned out on Bones-type stories; maybe Cornwell gets sick and can't write.
I think most people without a lot of financial experience think that when you get a windfall, you should go ahead and live off it. Which is another way of saying, spend it. But the problem with spending a windfall is that people tend to spend it all and run out of money, especially if they are younger and have a long life ahead of them. (See: Every bankrupt Hollywood star, ever.)
So I would argue that writers need to look at short-term or one-time earnings as something that they can turn into a source of regular income that will see them through the dry spells and enable them to retire.
The problem is, a large one-time chunk of money provides a surprisingly small annual income, which is why most retirees eventually spend through their savings, even though they receive supplemental income from the government.
A million dollars? Invested relatively conservatively, that generates an income between $20,000 and $30,000 a year. Does that sound like MILLIONAIRE!!!! money to you?
Cornwell's $13 million? Between $260,000-$390,000 a year. Much nicer, yeah. About what the average specialist physician makes. The average specialist. Not, you know, Dr. Oz or Andrew Weil or even a top doctor at a large hospital. Well, at least it's better than being a general practitioner.
If you add in the $51 million the jury awarded her, her annual income finally starts to top $1 million a year--hooray, we're finally in bling territory! Now she can afford that private helicopter and that $40,000-per-month Manhattan apartment! Except for the fact her financial advisors probably spent the money, so I'm not sure how she's going to get it back, and then she'll have to give a big chunk of it to her lawyers...yeah.
I hope Cornwell realizes that, even in Manhattan, there are cheaper apartments.
Jaye Manus has a good post on how many conventions about books--even the prevalence of the novel--are the result of the economics of the old traditional-publishing industry. Take away things like the cost of producing a physical book and the limits of shelf space, and the possible formats really open up.
And this is a fascinating article from a few months ago in The New Yorker about K-pop (a.k.a. Korean pop music). While obviously performing songs is different from writing books, I do see similarities (the article exists, after all, because digitization has made it possible for an American writer to become mildly obsessed with a K-pop girls' group). The author writes:
When an entertainment industry is young, the owners tend to have all the power. In the early days of the movie business, Hollywood studios locked up the talent in long-term contracts. In the record business, making millions off artists, many of whom ended up broke, used to be standard business practice.
Of course, traditional publishing is hardly a young industry, but I would argue that owners tend to have the power when an industry is young because they're the ones who have figured out how to work the system and sell stuff. If they can shut out artists, then the same thing happens--if the only way to sell books is to get into a bookstore, and the only way to get into a bookstore is through a traditional publisher, that gives the publisher all the power.
Anyway, the punch line for the article is that, despite all the effort to sell squeaky-clean, highly-polished K-pop internationally, the first big breakout song was Psy's "Gagnam Style." Oops. Yeah, you never do know what's going to be a hit.
There are bad movies, and then there are movies that absolutely enrage people. One of the latter is the film Reindeer Games, where Ben Affleck plays an ex-con who gets forced to do a heist.
If you haven't seen the movie, you're like, What's so infuriating? There are an awful lot of mediocre action movies about a guy who wanted to get out of the game but was pulled back in. It's like a Simpsons meme at this point.
But the thing that really seems to enrage people about Reindeer Games is that there's a twist partway through, and then toward the end there's another! shocking! twist!
Except that it's not really shocking. It's unexpected, sure, but that's because it not remotely credible. (No, he doesn't wake up and it's all a dream, but it's about as satisfying.) You look at this twist that is suppose to explain all the crap that's been going on in this mediocre movie, and you promptly downgrade the film from "mediocre" to "insulting to my intelligence."
I was thinking about that because I recently finished a book where the main character is accused of crimes that--in a shocking twist!--it turns out he didn't commit.
Now, have you ever been accused of crimes you didn't commit? I have (luckily not by anyone with the least credibility), and let me tell you, everyone who knows me has heard about it. At length.
But this guy is accused by credible sources and does have a price on his head and is estranged from his family and society at large. Why? Because he never bothers to point out to people that, you know, he didn't actually do it--at least, not before the denouement.
There's a lot of drama there, what with family members trying to hunt him down and whatnot. And I suppose it was intended to be exciting, but at the end I just found myself wondering why the hell he never spoke up for himself beforehand--it would have saved him (and his family) an awful lot of trouble.
I think twists or reveals are fine as long as they make sense. But you have to be disciplined about it. I don't like it when characters just arbitrarily decide that they need to keep certain secrets (that just happen to be convenient for the plot) from their nearest and dearest. I mean, it's not like that doesn't happen (my own father hid a cancer diagnosis from his family) but it's incredibly dysfunctional behavior (while that specific cancer didn't kill my dad, that pattern of behavior finally did).
And I really don't like it when an antagonist who does horrible things to the protagonist turns out to have been secretly on their side all along. I'll give you a little life lesson: The people on your side act like they are on your side. The people trying to do you in are a danger to you. These two groups of people do not overlap. If someone insists that they are on you side as they try to do you in, that person has a personality disorder--which can make for some exciting reading, to be sure. I also don't mind it a bit in stories when people do bad things while trying to do the right thing. But if everything ends in hearts and flowers and puppies and rainbows and I-was-secretly-on-your-side-all-along, it's just not credible.
It's become painfully obvious that Barnes & Noble's Nook business is not living up to expectations, despite a significant effort on their part to convince everyone that everything's just dandy. And it's equally obvious that, although you can't always believe everything a CEO says, Amazon is likely doing much better than Barnes & Noble.
So now there's a flurry of stories about how Amazon is just doing AWESOME with e-books, making money hand over fist!!!!
And I'm just going to take a moment to rain on this particular parade.
I am willing to take it as a given that Amazon is doing better with e-books than the other retailers. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence to back that up (although bear in mind that some book do indeed sell better at other outlets, so please don't ignore them). I also assume that selling e-books is a profitable thing for them, if only because their self-publishing rates are set up so that they are basically ensured a 35-to-65 percent profit margin.
But HOW MUCH money are they making?
Oooh, look--a pretty chart! That sure looks scientific, doesn't it? And these stories are all filled with lots of numbers! Such precision!
There's just one problem: All of the stories--ALL of them--have a single source, and that source is a report by an analyst at Morgan Stanley.
Let me tell you something about analysts: They are not psychic. It's like estimating the e-book market--it doesn't matter how much analysis you throw at something if you don't have good underlying data.
Do analysts have special access to data? Investment banks would like you to think they have. As a business reporter who covered the bursting of the dot-com bubble, I'll tell you that it really depends.
Most analysts (although not all) in my experience work hard to cover a particular industry. They tend to know the industry quite well--who are the players, what are the larger industry trends. But when it comes down to a particular company...?
The problem is that it's never in a company's best interest to air its dirty laundry. NEVER. If people don't know where the bodies are buried, it is NEVER EVER in a company's best interest to point that out to them, especially if that person is an analyst. Who reads analysts' reports? People who are trying to decide whether or not to give a particular company money! Do companies ALWAYS want money? Yes, they do!
So analysts are subject to an even bigger blizzard of PR than everybody else. If they can, they try to get information from other sources to get a more realistic picture. So, for example, if Barnes & Noble is telling you they control 27% of a market, and examining parts orders suggest that they control only 13% of a closely related market, then you as an analyst can go, Hmmm.....
The problems I see with trying to break out how much money Amazon makes from e-books are that 1. Amazon is notoriously secretive, so getting it from them would be hard; 2. if they did give you those figures, you'd have to wonder why they did and if the numbers they gave you are accurate; and 3. where's the third party you can use to verify this? The Morgan Stanley analyst is basically claiming he knows the overall size of the e-book market and the percentage of it that Amazon controls. Those are some mighty big claims to make.
And I'm not even getting into the larger question of can you believe anything Morgan Stanley says about Amazon anyway? Which is a perfectly valid concern--it's not supposed to be, but stock analysis unfortunately often is stock PR that helps the investment bank more than individual investors.
A friend of mine is trying to start a business. Not an expensive business--something that would be part time and low overhead.
Nonetheless, the cost of starting this business is going to be, oh, three or four times what I've spent publishing over the past two years, including the times where I've basically taken a small stack of money and set it on fire. So this person is trying to raise capital, which means asking people for money.
Guess how that's going?
I was thinking about that when I read Joe Konrath's latest post about his efforts with Amazon's exclusivity program (short answer: How well it works totally varies from book to book, and no one knows why).
But Konrath is cool with that (yay, experimentation!) and toward the end of the post, he gets into goals versus dreams, writing:
I got into this business in 2002. Now, for the first time, I'm master of my own destiny, captain of my own ship. The freedom to make my own decisions is, in many ways, more important to me than money.
As always, when you run your business, you need to set your own attainable goals. "Attainable" means they are within your power. Anything that requires the "yes" or "no" from someone else isn't a goal, it's a dream.
That's exactly the problem my friend is facing: They are making starting their business contingent on getting X amount of money from someone else. Which I think is an approach that may well have to be re-evaluated, but the fact remains that X is a pretty sizeable amount of money for this person, and it's going to take a lot of effort to get it together. So imagine if X was, say, the amount of money it takes to build a prototype CT scanner or a state-of-the-art computerized warehouse: Funding this enterprise on their own would simply be impossible, and all their goals would effectively be dreams. Which would suck.
Isn't it nice that you need so much less money to get into self-publishing? And you don't even need to have all that money at once--you can start small and do more as you can afford it. I published Trang in 2011 and only started experimenting with on-line advertising this year. That lag hasn't hurt anything. Konrath ran his latest batch of marketing experiments using titles that are much older than mine--nobody cares.
And--this is important--it doesn't cost you anything to have a book sitting there, even if it's not selling. That's very different from other kinds of businesses, where unsold inventory ages out and loses value.
Extremely low capital requirements, and unsold inventory that doesn't rack up costs. Self-publishing is a very nice and very unusual business.
How unusual? Konrath's post was picked up by The Passive Voice, and in the comments Randall Wood remarked:
I was discussing Joe’s numbers with a friend the other day. I mentioned that he had hit the 1 million books sold mark, which I thought of as an accomplishment, but I then added the fact that he gave away 600,000 books to get there.
My friend snorted his beer and about choked.
My friend is a successful businessman. He commented that Joes rate-of-return was horrible. Joe thinks otherwise. I would say they are both right depending on their individual points of view.
I would say that the businessman friend is in a normal business. You know, the kind of business where if you give away a free samples, it actually costs you something. If Konrath had given away 600,000 paper books, which he'd paid for at the wholesale rate and then paid to ship, in order to sell 1 million full-price books, then the businessman friend would have a valid point. But giving away digital copies? Costs him nothing, and costs Amazon a fraction of a cent. Konrath's rate of return is just fine, because his expenses are very close to zero.
Extremely low capital requirements, inventory that doesn't rack up costs as it sits there, and samples that are free to the vendor as well as to the customer. This is a GOOD business.
I edited Chapter 7 of the Trang audiobook today. I think standing up worked really well--not only are there fewer chair sounds, but there are fewer flubbed lines caused by my being mush-mouthed. I think standing probably not only helps with voice projection but also just plain keeps me more alert.
I know I wanted to get back into writing, but I'm feeling a little under the weather right now (nothing serious). In addition, I'm going to be doing a lot of child care this week and (probably) next.
I finally finished noise removal on Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook--huzzah! God, that was a whole lot of noise removal. It wasn't just the excessive length of the chapter, but also the fact that there's a lot of dialog with the aliens, and I decided to take out all breath sounds from translated speech. I was subtle about it, so it doesn't sound as artificial as the computer's speech or the Magic Man's speech--the idea is to make it slightly nonhuman. Aesthetically, I think it works, but actually doing it is a real pain in the butt!
I find it interesting how there's this whole artistic side to the audiobook--it's not something I'd ever thought about before, but there it is. Another thing that's unique to the audiobooks is how characters pronounce "General Jesus." The diplomats all use the Spanish pronunciation of "Jesus," since presumably he was Cuban, and I think they would regard that as the correct thing to do. But the SFers all use the English pronunciation. My thinking is that that is how they would have been briefed about him--you know, using the English pronunciation to emphasize that this guy is crazy and actually thinks he's this religious figure. Their job was to kill him, so there would be no effort to show him respect by using his own pronunciation--quite the contrary, the idea would be to take him down a peg verbally. Kind of like how soldiers refer to members of the Taliban as Tabbies.
Recently I have read a spate of disappointing historical novels, and I appear to be a few chapters into yet another one (although there's still time for this one to pull it out of the fire), so I'm going to vent about unsatisfying historical fiction.
What annoys me about historical fiction? More even than preaching, or obvious anachronisms?
When the person doesn't seem to be aware that they are writing fiction!
What seems to happen with some people is that they get enthralled with a particular historical event. So they want to write a book about it. But they don't want to go to the trouble and expense of researching a nonfiction book. So they don't research it, and they call it historical fiction.
The result of this process is basically a picaresque novel: This happened and then that happened and then another thing happened and then something else happened. The End. It's not very satisfying because it's not really about anything--there's no arc of any kind. If you already know about the historical event (and oftentimes even if you don't), it's staggeringly dull.
The other problem is that this kind of writer rarely takes interesting risks with the characters. Either they slavishly follow real life, regardless of whether or not that works in a story, or they create a character...well, a character like Biftad Kennedy.
Who's Biftad Kennedy? He's the character I just created for my historical novel on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was going to write a nonfiction book about it, but that's too much work! Instead I'll write a novel--wait a minute? Who's going to be the main character?
Oh, it can't be John F. Kennedy or anybody who had any actual responsibility for what went on then--that's too hard. I'd have to do research, and I know whatever I write about someone like John F. Kennedy is going to piss somebody off!
So, I'll invent--Biftad! He'll be a ne'er-do-well distant cousin of the real Kennedys--you know, some loutish Roger Sterling/Paris Hilton-type who never bothered to graduate from prep school because he has a trust fund and plans to just drink his life away. He'll have no influence on anything, ever, because he didn't really exist and I don't want anything in my fiction that didn't really happen. Biftad will just occasionally stagger through the White House and say things like, "Wow, cousin, that looks important. You got any gin?"
This isn't going to be like the movie Dick, where ditzy teenagers bring down a president. This isn't going to be Happy Gilmore Saves the Free World. That would be too risky and too hard. Instead, Biftad will never do anything. The reader's experience will be: I'm reading things I already know, and I'm forced to rehash them through the point-of-view of a completely useless character who just sits around drunkenly scratching his testicles, while two doors down, the world teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Wouldn't you love 600 pages of that!
The problem as I see it is that these people are writing historical fiction because they think it's easy. They think it's easier than nonfiction, because you don't have to do any research, and they think it's easier than other genres of fiction, because you don't have to be creative.
None of that is true. Good historical fiction does not come about because the writer is lazy. It takes a lot of research, and more important, it takes the exact same amount of care given to story and to character as any other kind of fiction.
Otherwise you get the exact same thing you get with weak fantasy and science fiction: A humdinger of a setting, but nothing to engage you and carry you through the book.
I'm doing noise removal on the second half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook, yay.
I haven't gotten back into writing, which is a little annoying to me, especially since noise removal is hardly the most scintillating of tasks. Part of it is just getting back into the swing of that, and part of it is that it takes some time for me to recover from a week-and-a-half of disrupted sleep. But I went ahead and did an overall word count, and I'm at 32,550 words for Trials. So yay for that, too.
I re-recorded all the things that needed re-recording from Chapter 1 of the Trang audiobook through the first half of Chapter 6, which is now officially done. And I did a little noise removal on the second half of Chapter 6.
It sounds like things may actually happen on the out-of-state elderly relative front without my having to basically spend the entire spring there, doing every last thing myself. That would be wonderful, plus it would mean that I don't have to buy some kind of portable computing device in hopes of getting anything done, which is good. I may even be able to attend Norwescon!
I'm thinking about some beta tasks to do once the Trang audiobook is done. As it turns out, recording an audiobook is a good way to find typos (at one point Cheep is called Chip--funny how hard that is to catch when you're reading silently, but how glaringly obvious it is when you're reading aloud). So I've been marking those up as I find them, and I'll clean up the e-books when that's done with.
Of course, with the new computer, how should I do the e-book files? I think in the interest of efficiency I'll just use Calibre again--I'll save the learning curve for when I convert Trials.
Speaking of new software, I want to spend a little more quality time sorting out GIMP. Obviously, if I'm doing Norwescon, I'll do some flyers, but the other, more-sophisticated project I have in mind is to re-do the lettering on the cover of Trang and Trust. I think the author name should probably be a bit larger and easier to read, plus the title lettering could stand to look a little more elaborate (which I hope is something this program lets you do--my old program was pretty limited). The tweaking should also give me some practice with GIMP, which I'm going to need when I get around to doing the Trials cover.
What else? David Gaughran had a good post about the importance of mailing lists--it's nothing that I didn't know, but I've been very lazy about creating one of those, mainly because I just don't think I have it in me to do a full-fledged newsletter. But I could just do new-book alerts and sale alerts--that sort of thing. I'll put it on the list, anyway, along with getting on Pintrest.
I periodically read WhiteWhine--it's funny, but it's also capable of completely destroying any good opinion you may have of humanity, so I try to take it in small doses. Anyway, to celebrate of Black History Month, they have the obligatory selection of "Why isn't there a White History Month?" whines.
Putting aside the fact that these people are assholes, let's rephrase that question and take it a little more seriously: Why is there only Black History Month?
Or rather: Why is that you only hear about Black History Month? Because there actually are a lot of other heritage months and days and whatnot. But they definitely don't get the same kind of press.
Why is that?
Having worked for a multicultural educational publisher, I can reveal the reason to you. As you might imagine, it's an elaborate conspiracy, masterminded by this nation's most-celebrated secret society, The Illuminati! Yup: Jay-Z, Nicky Minaj, and Black History Month--we really are a full-service secret society!
The other reason? Black people buy Black history.
Yeah, that's the real reason. It's not guilt, or political correctness, or African Americans being "superior," or what have you. It's capitalism: African Americans identify as a group with a common heritage, there's a lot of them, they have money, and they don't mind spending it to learn about or to commemorate their history. And what do you know--Black History Month is a big success! There are books and TV specials and concerts and all kinds of things, because these things attract an audience.
Hispanic Heritage Month? Not so much. Women's History Month? Oh my God, if women bought women's history the way African Americans buy African-American history, multicultural educational publishers would be rolling in dough. But they don't.
German American Heritage Month--wait, that's a joke, right? I ask only because a good chunk of my family was Not German. You know about the Not Germans, right? Their ancestors came to this country before World War I from Saxony or Bavaria or Prussia or some place that was Not Germany. Once they came to this country, they called themselves Pennsylvania Dutch or just plain old Not German. When World War I rolled around they changed their names just to make sure everyone knew that they were really, really Not German. My father the amateur genealogist found it easier to handle the revelation that his family owned slaves than he did the revelation that his family's heritage was largely German. Let's just say that I'll be surprised if German American Heritage Month ever makes the kind of splash Black History Month does.
My point is, while it might make seem like a good idea to have a lot of heritage months (especially if you publish multicultural educational books), the fact of the matter is some groups will rally around such products, and others won't.
This is true for the wider world of genre, too. Some people really identify as readers of a particular genre--they read voraciously within that genre, and they even socialize around these books. It's why you have to go to the trouble of putting things into categories, even if you think genre categories are arbitrary and kind of stupid.
And it's why you have to market your book to the categories that already exist, even if that's a little tough to figure out. As Jaye Manus wrote, "[F]ocus your book description on what the readers are actually looking for." You don't want to find yourself stuck marketing "German Pride!" to a bunch of Not Germans (who might, however, buy a book about the Pennsylvania Dutch).
So, Apple is starting to highlight self-published e-books in its store.
It's something, right? I mean, if you compare Amazon, which has been great to self-published writers, and Barnes & Noble, which has pretty much sucked for self-published writers, and you look at who is seeing more e-book growth, it might occur to you that appealing to self-published writers might be good business.
Might be!
Of course, you have to actually appeal to them, which is harder to do than saying, "We just love us some self-published writers!" To actually appeal to self-published writers, you have to make the service easy for writers to use (time is money, after all). And then you actually have to be good at attracting readers (helpful hint: hiding the free books is a bad idea), and then you have to make it easy for those readers to find and buy and read stuff, because what self-published writers really like is sales.
Apple does not have a great reputation on any of these fronts.
With Apple (and Kobo, too) it seems like they're making a lot of promising noises. And that's great--I'm glad they're thinking of moving into this sector more aggressively. I think more sales platforms are good, because then writers would have to rely less on Amazon. I think if people really gave it some thought, they could create real competition: Passive Guy has a great post on how much book discovery could be improved by making a search engine that works more like Lexis-Nexis--which is a very robust search engine, to be sure, but hardly a new technology.
But if Barnes & Noble is proving anything, it's that the devil of selling e-books is in the details. So far, I don't see a lot of retailers really nailing those details.