Here we are, in September

OK, it's September 1st already. It looks like things are more or less settling down on the family front (fingers crossed), and I did say that Trials would be coming out in 2014, so...I'm setting a goal for my self (sound trumpets): I want to get the first draft done by the end of the year! Ho!

A quick note

I've got the kids this week, but since it looked like the Science Fiction: First Contact free bestseller list was coming back up, I ran a Facebook ad just to make sure Trang would still be on the front page if and when it did. It did, and Trang didn't lose ranking, so yay.

Not that this solves the dependence issue....

I don't think I've actually sold much of anything on Kobo (impressive how well I keep on top of the business end of things, isn't it?), so I've never had a payment screwed up there, but it sounds like other people have. So I'm probably going to switch to distributing through Smashwords with them, too. If they can't cut a check properly, they're not much use, are they?

Hey, look! Amazon is unreliable!

Ever since that outage two days ago, Amazon's Top 100 Free First Contact Science Fiction list has been showing--well, yesterday it was six books, and right now it's two.

Guess what that means for sales of Trang and Trust? In an amazing coincidence, exactly two days ago they fell off a cliff and died!

As I've mentioned, I've been not paying attention to the business end of things especially hard lately, so yeah, I've set myself up to be a classic case study of what happens when you become excessively dependent on one retailer and one method of marketing. Since I don't actually count on the income from my books to live or to feed my familly, it doesn't really matter, but if I did, I'd really be up a tree right now, you know? (And I was going to make an Illuminati joke, but that link went away! Boo-hoo!)

Why did this happen? I don't know. Is it a deliberate evil plan on evil Amazon's part, or just something that will be fixed by the end of business today? I don't know. More important, it doesn't matter. This is what always happens when you become overly reliant on a single client. Always. Always. Always. Good reason; bad reason; no reason at all--all you need to know is that it will always happen. If the income matters to you, plan accordingly.

As for me, I may very well continue to ignore everything, because (as is often the case after a tragedy) I feel a need to simply my life and focus on priorities. In all honestly, selling a lot of books is just not that important to me, especially if it's going to steal focus away from writing new ones. Any advertising campaign is going to be more cost-effective if there are more books behind it, so there's a business rationale for waiting as well, assuming I want one. Of course, it's not like doing a campaign is hard, so maybe I should suck it up. We'll see.

(Oh, and as for working on the audiobook, there's one little glitch in that plan: Contractors and children are not quiet.)

Uuuuuuugh

My stomach went insane again last night (note to self: If you are fighting off a bacterial GI infection, DO NOT eat a box of cookies before you go to bed. That was just stupid), so today my big accomplishment was getting groceries without falling asleep behind the wheel. (Huzzah!) And tomorrow the contractor cometh at the crack of dawn (he's fixing the bathroom--I've decided against replacing the ceiling, BTW, because I'm probably going to sell the house this year or next). And since school is starting, next week I have the kids pretty much every day...ai-yi-yi.

Anyway, I noticed a surge in traffic to this site from The Passive Voice because ABE linked here about making audiobooks (and click the "audio" tab if that's what you're after), so now I'm thinking...audiobooks...a schedule shot to hell...audiobooks..... I couldn't tolerate the work earlier, but I'm less messed up now, so maybe I should give it a go.

I also noticed that a lot of people are coming here by Googling some combination of "minons" and "piñatas." Should that frighten me?

That dream....

Hugh Howey and Kris Rusch both have some good things to say about that fantasy that traditional publishing is gonna make you a star! 

Howey notes:

As for the 99.9% [of self-published authors] who won't see my level of success, I would point out that 99.9% of those who submit material to the traditional machine will never see a similar level of success. It isn't like our option is to self-publish OR see how well our novel does fronted out on an endcap in a bookstore. Our options are to self-publish OR spend a few years landing an agent, another year selling the book to a publisher, a year waiting for that book to come out, and then three months spine-out on dwindling bookshelves before you are out of print and nobody cares about you anymore. If you're lucky. Most likely, you'll never even get an agent. Because you aren't Snooki.

Could I agree more? No, I could not. I haven't had anywhere near the success of Howey, but I've come sooooo much further in two-and-a-half years of self-publishing than I did in the previous six years of trying to get published traditionally, it's comical. Hello--I HAVE TWO BOOKS OUT. That's two more books than I ever got out going the tradpub route. You can't sit around and say, "Your books would have sold more with a traditional publisher behind them!" because they never would have existed.

And Rusch points out that the headline earners will always be traditionally-published authors, not because they're necessarily earning the most, but because their information is being made available.

Every year, Forbes tallies up the “World’s Top-Earning Authors” and invariably, they’re all traditionally published. Why?  Well, Forbes explains it to you:

  FORBES bases its estimates on sales data, published figures and information from industry sources between June 2012 and June 2013.

In other words, the only place Forbes gets its data is through traditional media. If you earn a million dollars on your latest indie published title, well, that’s between you and your banker. Amazon doesn’t give out the sales figures, nor would Kobo or any other e-book publisher—because that’s your proprietary information. They don’t do it with traditionally published books either.

That information is released by the publisher. So if you’re an indie published writer, and you’re making tens of millions, the only way to get on the Forbes list is to broadcast your earnings to every damn media outlet you can find. (Which I would not recommend, by the way, since you’ll discover relatives that you never knew you had.)

I'll add that if we see the "world's top-earning authors" suddenly making less money, that won't actually mean that bestselling authors or authors in general are earning less. You can't get a good picture of the whole if you only survey one part.

"I hate Strong Female Characters"

This (via Pam Stucky) is an article I really, really agree with about how unsatisfying Strong Female Characters are.

Now, to clarify, we're not talking about female characters who aren't helpless or female characters who have integrity. We're not really talking about strong female characters at all--at least, not well-written ones.

What we're talking about are Dumb Fantasy Fulfillment Characters, and yes, I happen to find them annoying even when they are carefully crafted to appeal to my demographic.

Why? Because they're 1. Dumb, 2. Violent, and 3. Unrealistic.

My personal nominee for worst Strong Female Character is Dr. Temperance Brennan from the TV show Bones. In the pilot, Dr. Brennan beats the shit out of a TSA agent. Does she get a one-way ticket to Guantánamo? Does she spend the next decade in prison for assaulting a federal law-enforcement official? Does she get into trouble with her employer, the very same federal government that employs the poor slob she just beat the hell out of?

Of course not. Say it with me: She's spunky! 

Oh, violence is so adorable, isn't it? As long as the person who kicked your teeth in to retaliate for you doing your job is female and has big blue eyes, it's just as cute as hugging a widdle baby bunny!

The extra-magical bit about Dr. Brennan is that, although she is anorexic and never, ever exercises, she can easily pound the crap out of people with combat training who are ten times her size. Why? Because she's a martial-arts master! Who never trains! Or exercises! She's just like--and I mean, exactly like--those models who just happen to stay rail-thin without dieting and have shiny hair and perfect skin and it's definitely not because there's a massive team of people working behind the scenes and Photoshopping every picture. She's just perfect, you know? Just Perfect.

The Strong Female Character is a new bottle, but it's the same old wine.

And not for nothing, but the new, seemingly-PC layer of shellac over this particular turd is not really progressive. Basically, it's valorizing violence, with the patronizing and, yes, extremely sexist twist that if a woman is violent, it's OK, because she's just so gosh-darned cute.

Violence is not cute. Where I grew up, everyone, including girls, was expected to fight--and yes, I fought boys, what choice did I have? As an adult I look back and am really shocked (those schools should have been shut down), but at the time, it was just the way of things, and you either fought back or stood there while someone punched you in the mouth.

Unlike the kids who had the misfortune of being small or disabled, I happen to be big enough that I did just fine, but I never liked it. I actually stood there and took the mouth shots on occasion because the other kid wasn't going to be able to cause me serious injury and I really didn't want to mix it up. Even if I won, I lost, so what was the point? I was hugely relieved to leave home and realize that, in other parts of the country, fist fights are not considered an acceptable method of self-expression.

Violence against women is very bad, but what kind of morality goes on to argue that violence by woman is totally cool. (And fun! And spunky! And cute!) But I've seen women just eat up the Strong Female Character thing, claiming that it's "Girl Power." Jesus. If you think power comes from being a thug, I hope you heartily enjoy the empowerment of prison.

Finally, a decent vampire show!

I mentioned being very disappointed in The Vampire Diaries (the first season is OK, but then it goes downhill in a hurry), and I abandoned True Blood after one season. A big part of the problem I had with both shows was how vague and sloppy they got about the supernatural--the only rule that seemed to get followed was, What's convenient for the writer right now?

Since I haven't been good for much lately, I decided to try another vampire show--Vampire Prosecutor. Not a promising title, but hey, it's Korean, so you can't really expect the English to be all that catchy.

Anyway, so far it's been great! Basically, it's a police procedural, and it reminds me a lot of the Lord Darcy stories. As the title suggests, the main character is a prosecutor (and the head of an investigative team) who just so happens to be a vampire (hey, stuff happens sometimes).

Why the show works is that it turns out that being a vampire isn't all that different from being a person, except for the whole pesky blood-lust thing. (And apparently once you start drinking blood out of people, you don't stop, so he has to keep that in check.) The vampire is fast and strong, but he's not unkillable--he takes a knife to the gut at one point and almost dies. He can go out in the sun, enter houses without permission, and cross water; he can't brainwash people, change form, or control animals.

What are his powers? Well, the vampire can smell blood, which is very helpful in his line of work. If he vamps out at the scene of a violent death, he gets flashes of how that death happened. If he drinks the blood of the dead person, he can see what they saw as they died--and then he experiences the pain of dying, which kind of sucks.

The visions can be helpful, or they can be useless (so, he just experienced the pain of dying for no reason--oops), or they can be totally misleading. Even when they're helpful, they cause problems--there's one other person on the investigative team who knows that this guy's a vampire, but everyone else is getting increasingly irritated by these seemingly-random decisions to stop investigating Viable Suspect A and to start investigating Apparent Dead End B. (And sometimes their skepticism is totally warranted, because sometimes the visions are misleading!)

Anyway, it's a great example of the benefits of putting limits and rules on magic. It also helps that, so far, there hasn't been the spread of supernatural beings that afflicted Vampire Diaries and True Blood--there are vampires, and that's it. Everything else is just normal human agency.

What's up with me?

It's been a few days of stomachache, poor sleep, and generally feeling crappy. It finally occurred to me today that it all just might be related to that food poisoning earlier this week--honestly, I'm so much slower and dumber when I haven't slept, it's terrifying. Anyway, I've started in on the probiotics and hopefully will be at 100% soon.

Proofs approved!

Life has been rearing its ugly head--I had some bad chicken last night AND the smoke detector wanted me to know that its battery was low this morning, so today I'm barely able to eat, much less write. But I did get the Trang and Trust proofs back, and they were good, so I approved them.

You never know just exactly how a cover is going to look, though, and today proved that to me again. This time the Trust cover was shifted as far to the left as possible--the jacket copy was right against the edge, the spine spilled over onto the back a little, the front copy was off-center--plus the bar code was crooked. Nothing massively horrible, just a glitchy print run this time around, but you do just have to understand that stuff like that is going to happen. (And it's not because CreateSpace is God-awful or anything; that kind of thing happens in traditional publishing all the time.) It's kind of like formatting e-books: You can't control how any given device is going to render your design, so it's best not to get too exacting.

When good story elements crop up in real life

Lily White LeFevre just did a fascinating post about a show I absolutely cannot tolerate and have never watched more than a few minutes of: The Bachelor(ette). It sounds very much like a case of the show's producers lucking into a situation that provided the show with actual emotional heft, instead of them having to manufacture it with gauze and roses.

The first season I saw of The Amazing Race was like that: It was season five, which featured a team of extremely hard-charging racers who handily won every single thing they ever did. They completely dominated the race--until the stress got to be too much, and they had a massive melt-down near the end. They came in last on that leg, which usually ensures elimination, but it turned out to be a non-elimination leg (and those two almost had a stroke when they found that out--seriously, I was worried).

The season finale was fantastic: The strongest team was last, and there were three teams in front of them. Because the last team was so good, every single team in front of them was an underdog. It was like watching three pairs of minnows trying to outswim a pair of sharks--as much as you respected the sharks, you couldn't help but root for the minnows. It was one of the most exciting shows I have ever watched, and I watched quite a few more seasons of The Amazing Race before I realized that it probably wasn't ever going to be that good again.

People respond to story points--underdogs, love triangles--whether they happen in real life or in fiction. Why am I so interested in Block B? I like the music, sure, but the characters are funny and likable, and the storyline (injustice!) is compelling. Why were the Browncoats such activists? Well, you create a show about people getting screwed by The Man, and then Firefly...gets screwed by The Man! It really isn't that shocking that the people who found the fictional show compelling found the real-life events surrounding it compelling as well.

(And of course, this is something that someone like Lance Armstrong just doesn't understand. His storyline was the underdog triumphing over adversity. The fact that he cheated to win...oooh, that just ruins everything. You don't come back from that--you can't invalidate your own storyline and expect people to still like you.)

One of the best bits of advice I got in journalism school was, "Just tell a story!" Obviously, nonfiction has to be true, but other than that, it's very much like fiction--it's about story.

And the reverse is true--if something in real life is very compelling to you, it's worth it to take some time and pick apart what it is that you're responding to. After all, it might be something you can use....

Progress report

Back at work on Trials--it's hard to do a word count because I revised and expanded the first two chapters (which used to be chapters 3 & 4, so there's a lot of exposition to put in). I'm actually feeling pretty happy right now with the way chapter 1 is turning out--it's funny, which wasn't the approach I took with the opening of Trust, but I think it works.

Uf, fonts

I got the second set of proofs back from CreateSpace today--everything looks much better, BUT the jacket copy is still a problem. Now that it's in focus, I can see that the font itself is just really hard to read as white text on a black background (and it's one of those things that looks fine on a screen). I wanted a serif font, but the font I picked has too much contrast between the thick and thin parts of the letters, so it looks like parts of the letters are missing. Back to the drawing board....