In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author L.J. Sellers talks about the author’s challenge, of using social media effectively while still allowing one’s unique personality and perspectives to come through to readers.

Several recent blogs made me think about the writer’s role and how social media has made us all so likable and homogenous.

First there was Sandra Parshall’s great piece on Poe’s Deadly Daughters in which she asked the question: Should writers keep their opinions to themselves online so they don’t offend readers? She mentioned instances in which readers said they would never read so-and-so’s work again because of something they had posted on Facebook or Twitter. I’m guessing it was something political, and the readers were of the other persuasion.

This has weighed on my mind because I have succumbed to self-censorship. Every day, I make a choice to not post links to liberal commentaries I enjoyed. When others post political statements I agree with, I’ll click the Like button but typically won’t comment. My thinking is that conservatives buy novels too, so why offend them? But it also makes me cringe. Until this point in my life—when I became a very public person—I’ve always spoken freely and said what I thought. Maybe too much so, I hear my husband say in my head.

I even moved The Sex Club—my bestseller and a book readers loved—out of my Jackson series and into the standalone thriller list, because the book is political and I didn’t want to lose readers before they even gave the series a chance. But now Amazon wants to market it as part of the series, and I said yes. I’m a little worried about the backlash, but I’m also happy to take ownership of my politics again.

The other interesting post that dovetailed into this discussion was in Slate magazine and subtitled The Epidemic of Niceness in Online Book Culture. The author made the point that when writers friend, support, and Like! everyone, it becomes nearly impossible to give an honest critique of their work. How can you say something even mildly critical about a novel if the author just gave you an online hug?

In my experience, most writers are by nature really nice people. We’re typically very supportive. We want to help each other, and post great reviews on Amazon, and retweet book links. And l love it. I’m part of that culture. But is it honest? If I were a professional book reviewer who didn’t know some these authors personally, would I have a different assessment of their work? In that scenario, my loyalty would be to readers, to give them a full honest appraisal of the book.

If I post on Twitter than I’m reading a particular book and someone asks me if I like it—and by then I’ve stopped reading it—what do I say? If I post that it was too slow for me, I risk offending several people and maybe that reader will decide we must like different books so they won’t bother to try mine.

This is why I don’t read much fiction or talk about what I read—unless I love it. And I turn down almost all requests to review novels. My nature is to be supportive—often to an extreme—but I also have a loyalty to my readers, and I shouldn’t steer them toward books just because those writers are my friends whom I have great affection for.

I love social media and connecting with people and I’ll keep doing what I can to cultivate friends and encourage people to like me. But some days, the self-censorship makes me not like myself.

What do you think? Is the online writer community too nice? Do you ever wish you could cut loose and say something critical or political—without losing readers or friends?

– by L.J. Sellers, author of provocative mysteries & thrillers

This is a reprint from the Crime Fiction Collective blog, and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

 

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author L.J. Sellers talks about the positive review dilution effect – when fake positive reviews come to light, it can cast a shadow of doubt on every positive review.

This week we learned that John Locke—one of the first indie authors to sell a million books—paid for hundreds of reviews at a now-defunct paid-review site that didn’t require its reviewers to read the books, just to crank out the stars. Because the story made the NY Times, one expert estimates that a third of all Amazon reviews are fake.

This pisses me off, breaks my heart, and makes me—and the other terrific and honest indie authors on this site—look bad. That is, if we have too many great reviews.

GalleyCat weighed in on this issue with this blog post, listing several bestsellers that each have more than 150 one-star reviews. The point of the short piece is that real bestsellers have lots of bad reviews as well as many good ones. The unspoken point is that books with too many good reviews and few bad ones must not be a real bestsellers, that those reviews must have been paid for or written by marketers or friends.

I resent this! Without good reviews, you’re treated like a hack and can’t sell books. Too many good reviews and not enough dogs, and you look like a phony. Obviously some authors—and publishers—resort to these tactics. But many of the books on Amazon’s bestselling and top-rated lists come by their reviews honestly.

I know I did. Dying for Justice is the top-rated novel on two of Amazon’s lists—police procedurals and mystery series—with 54 five-star reviews, 8 four-stars, and 1 one-star (idiot). Not one was paid for or written by a marketer. My sister claims she wrote a review, but she loves my work. And I can’t find it, if she did. And I have many great reviews in print magazines—Mystery Scene, Crimespree, Spinetingler, and RT Reviews—to support those online “amateur” reviews.

Yes, I gave away the book on Goodreads, with the idea that readers would post reviews, but I took my chances that they would be in my favor. And yes, I asked readers in a blog to post reviews for the book—but always with the caveat “if you read and enjoyed the story.” I don’t want or need fake support.

Here’s a question for GalleyCat: If a book with a lot of fake five-star ratings wasn’t good, wouldn’t a lot of honest readers start to give it bad reviews? You can’t fool everybody forever. No author has that many loyal friends or fake online IDs—except maybe Stephen Leather, another example of how some big-name indie authors are making the rest of us look bad.

And I have to throw in one more issue. The site that Locke used was clearly corrupt. Reviewers were directly paid to crank out good blurbs without even reading the books. But what about sites like Book Rooster? For a $60 admin fee, the site lists your e-book internally, then their unpaid reviewers sign up to receive and read books of their choosing. In exchange for free books, they write honest reviews.

This process seems fine to me, and I used the site for The Suicide Effect, my least-read book, just to get some reviews. But there was no guarantee of how many reviews or what they would be. It was just an opportunity for exposure, and I got lucky, mostly. But now I’m wondering if that was a mistake, just because the exchange of money (for the administrative fee) might make people lump the service into a paid-review category—even though no money goes to the reviewers.

What do you think? Have you read John Locke’s work? Does he deserve his success? Are you skeptical of any books with almost entirely good reviews? Do you think Book Rooster is a legitimate service? Should Amazon take Locke’s work down to show it’s serious about the trust factor for customer reviews?

This is a cross-posting from the Crime Fiction Collective blog, and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission. Read more about the author, LJ Sellers, here.

 

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, The Independent Publishing Magazine founder Mick Rooney offers some informed predictions about the future of publishing.

Publishing Perspectives takes a reflective look over the past ten years of publishing through the eyes of John Reed, a books editor at Brooklyn Rail and also an esoterical US author of a number of novels during this period. His current novel, Snowball’s Chance, was published by a little-know literary press in 2002 and this year was republished by Melville House Books. Reed, in his article for Publishing Perspectives—Publishing in 2002 vs 2012: Better, Worse or a Stalemate?—goes as far as drawing up a chart to try and evaluate the changes. Reed’s conclusions – if you want to call them that – are of course somewhat subjective and based upon his experiences of the publishing world and the journey of one book through a passage of ten years.

The short article by Reed piqued my interest because I’ve been writing a series of extensive articles this year on The Future of Publishing 2020 and you cannot look forward into the coming ten years of publishing without continually glancing over your shoulder into the past. What struck me most about writing the 2020 articles is the realisation that it is a precarious business to label what is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ now and then.

• The Future of Publishing 2020: Control (or Jeff Bezos Stole All My Books and Ate All The Hamsters)
• The Future of Publishing 2020: Disruption
• The Future of Publishing 2020: Risk
• The Future of Publishing 2020: The Push & The Pull

PP’s Editor-in-Chief, Edward Nawotka, summaries Reed’s chart with the following:

Better in 2002: Big Presses, Distribution, Democracy of Literature, Book Coverage, Literature in Education and Copyright.

Better in 2012: Small Presses, Online Book Sales, The Writing Itself, Readership, Self-publishing, Literary Culture and Parody.

Stalemate: Editorial, State of Narrative, Economy of Writers.

While I am in broad agreement with this summary, there are a few things that could be highly debatable. Reed himself says that the kind of editing work carried out on Snowball’s Chance in 2002 is not something we would see from a small or big press today. Therein is at least one reason why I would argue that editing is probably—on the whole—worse today than it was in 2002. The scales weighing curation and nurturing talent against commercial investment, speed to market and success has long tipped in favour of the latter. Publishers’ sales and marketing departments have a greater say in what leaves the front door of the house more than ever before, but it still holds firm to a production proccess with a twelve to eighteen month span. The growth in cottage and small presses and self-publishing has attempted to counter the balance of the scales, and this has led to basement rooms filled with literary champions, cultural zealots, and authors taking a turn in the editorial and publishing chairs. They all beaver away into the twilight hours—some content to smother their lack of publishing know-how with sheer passion. But this is the price of opportunity in the new publishing landscape.

The next part in my series on The Future of Publishing 2020 will focus on discoverability. Is readership better today than it was ten years ago and will it grow in the next ten years? Readership and audience reach for an author are tied inevitably to discoverability. How do you define what readership is? I think there are more people reading today than ever before, but we need to understand what it is they are reading and why they are reading it, rather than assuming readership is about books alone. Only then can we truly evaluate what it is we mean when we talk about readership and how much books have a role to play. This may ultimately prove to be the greatest challenge for publishers in the years ahead—moving from simply being producers of books to content managers.

Reed describes Amazon as being ‘a book and crap bazaar’ in 2002, and despite the millions of dollars Amazon has poured into investment in algorithms, search and marketing tools, the more cynical might argue what has really changed in the intervening years. What has changed is that the reader—faced with a greater sea of choice—now has the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff with whatever discoverability tools are to hand.

“In 2002, you went to the bookstore and looked around. Now, people make their choices, and their choices are influenced by what they see online. Those who are able to resist the constant temptation of propaganda and idiocy are able to employ the internet to inform themselves on subjects of interest and personal aesthetics. It’s that population of people—among the what? six million writers?— that has raised the overall quality of U.S. creative writing. With distribution as is, however, there’s not much evidence of that in the marketplace.”

I would add one caveat to Reed’s Publishing Perspectives article, and perhaps it touches on what he calls ‘the economy of writers’—and that for me is a case of quantity over quality. Reed sees the economy of writers as a stalemate right now, but I think we will see this get worse. Just as readership has grown—whether you define it as reading a book or no more than reading the daily news on your iPad every evening—more readers are becoming writers in the new publishing landscape of opportunity. The pie is not getting any bigger in relative terms.

“In 2020, more than 80% of authors will operate independently and will control and manage their entire writing output with less than a quarter earning a full time living. The remaining 20% will be a combination of writers from national writing academies, independent publishing cooperatives and publishing houses owned by media /agency companies.”

From: The Future of Publishing 2020: Control or (Jeff Bezos stole all my books and ate all the hamsters!)

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s The Independent Publishing Magazine.

 

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, The Book Designer Joel Friedlander muses on the notion that all human beings are, by their very nature, storytellers.

Author Henning Mankell, writing in the New York Times  last year related how he came to live much of the time in Mozambique.  Listening to old men sitting on a bench talk, he speculates:

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer  nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo  narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is  the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys,  sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours.

 

Now, Homo sapiens means loosely “knowing person.” Homo narrans would be “storytelling person.”

Certainly we are differentiated by our intelligence, but I found Mankell’s idea magnetic.

No matter what realm we operate within, no matter what discipline we’ve learned or invented, storytelling has a central place.

For instance, it’s how we transmit the news of our discoveries, how  we describe who we are and where we want to go, how we account for what  we’ve become. In each case a personal narrative in involved. A  collection of stories that taken together create a personal history all  our own.

How did you meet your wife? Where did you go to school? Why did you  decide to start that business? How are you different from the person you  were when you graduated high school?

Each question evokes a story, or a chain of stories that weave into a narrative.

We vary widely in how compellingly we tell these stories, both to  others and to ourselves. Some stories we tell internally, in our own  minds, are always accompanied by feelings, justifications, memories, the  bits and pieces left with us from our own experience and the way we’ve  processed that experience over the years.

Some of these narratives are truth in the sense that the events  described really did happen. Many many others are interpretive accounts,  colored by the passing of time and the agendas and assumptions through  which we filter our experience.

Some of the narratives are fanciful, intentionally or not. Fables,  fantasies, speculations, imaginative wanderings, all those stories have  their place too, and that’s why we have those other storytelling  magicians, the novelists.

Storytelling and Story-selling

When I watch a really accomplished marketer at work, I’m always  looking at the stories they are telling. It might surprise you to know  just how much even the most dedicated pitchmen rely on stories to reach  their audience.

Everyone loves a story, everyone wants to know how they end, what happens next: “Tell me more!”

The serialized novel, the never-ending soap opera, even the little  3-panel comic strips in your morning paper, they all rely on story and  the narrative arc to teach, entertain, to amuse.

• First panel, the setup.
• Second panel, the conundrum.
• Third panel, boom, the punchline hits from an unexpected direction.

The storyteller, no matter what her medium, knows how to surprise, to  delight, to put a twist or a bend in the road that we didn’t expect.  It’s all about keeping the attention of the reader.

Think how storytellers in the thousands of years before literacy  became widespread had to be able to hold the attention of the crowd with  only their own words.

A lot of that is still in our language and our expectations every  time we realize there’s a story to be had. Every year we tell the iconic  stories; the three wise men; the early settlers and the native peoples;  the salvation of the world.

Most religious texts are, after all, collections of stories used to amaze and teach us.

Today’s Storytellers—You and I?

Because story is at the base of our civilization and runs throughout  human endeavor, you would think that artful storytelling would be one of  the most highly respected occupations a human could aspire to.

This isn’t true, of course, although our best storytellers who also  capture the popular imagination—like movie makers, novelists,  songwriters and playwrights—become stars.

But you and I, writers who unspool our stories for far smaller groups  of people, are participating in an age-old and uniquely human activity.

Whether they are used to sell, to persuade, to inform, to entertain  or to enlighten, our stories in a way define us. And in that sense, I  guess I would agree with Mankell. Man truly is the “storytelling  person,” Homo narrans.

Finding the stories you need to tell, and telling them as best you  can, are things all writers learn. Heard any good ones lately?

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer.

 

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author and Publetariat founder / Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton muses about genre fiction, and whether readers who prefer certain genres also prefer certain writing styles.

Let me open by saying this post will contain some gross  generalizations, and I know such blanket statements can’t possibly cover  all situations and will certainly be untrue in many cases. I’m only  working with blanket statements here to address a larger topic, so  please try to bear with me on them and focus on the larger topic.

I have a writer acquaintance who writes hard-boiled detective, murder  mystery novels. He will often post excerpts from his work as a  promotional gambit (as opposed to looking for feedback), and just as  often will post about his disappointment with his sales. I read some of  his excerpts, and concluded that to my mind, what’s wrong with his work  is that it’s overwritten.

He seems never able to write something like, “She was exhausted,” when  he could write something like, “The weight of the day, the hopeless yoke  of overwork, enveloped her in a fog of somnambulant fatigue.” And he  doesn’t employ these kinds of sentences sparingly, virtually  every line appears to have been laboriously massaged, tinkered with, and  obsessed over.

Some people reading this will actually prefer the second,  lengthier sentence to the first. Some will also think it’s just fine if most  of the sentences in a given book are like the second one, and will  admire the craft that went into them. Other people—people like me—,  not so much. It got me thinking about reader tastes, and whether it  might be possible to predict them.

And here’s where those gross generalizations enter the picture. It seems  to me that readers who favor certain genres may also favor certain  writing styles.

I am a near-textbook example of the Type A personality. I am  most definitely a “bottom line it for me” type, a chronic multitasker,  and a very busy person who values efficiency in most aspects of my life.  It should come as no surprise that I don’t have much patience for  flowery prose and lengthy descriptive passages. I’m not saying that  style of writing is necessarily bad, just that it’s not a good fit for me, and I suspect it’s not a good fit for most Type A people.

I have a friend who’s much more laid-back. She can spend a half hour  contemplating a painting in a gallery, and days on a road trip with no  particular destination or schedule in mind; she may not even bring a  map. She’s the type of person who will savor every word of the kinds of  passages that I find irritating.

Now, getting back to that writer acquaintance…what if *most* of his  target audience shares my sensibilities? What if the type of person  who’s most likely to seek out a detective story is Type A? Considering  that some of the defining characteristics of Type A people are that  we’re very goal-oriented, organized, attentive to details, and love  solving puzzles, it doesn’t seem like such a leap to imagine that most  of us enjoy a good murder mystery; a murder mystery is essentially a  written puzzle, after all. It may not be such a leap to imagine the  inverse is true, too: that most people who enjoy murder mysteries are  Type A.

If that’s true, then my writer acquaintance is turning off the bulk of  his target audience with his verbose, highly stylized prose. We Type A  people only want to be given relevant, or possibly relevant, pieces of  the puzzle so we can try to solve it. Anything more feels like a waste  of our time and energies.

My laid-back friend has plenty of patience for stylized prose, but for  her, most murder mysteries are little more than empty exercises in  tricky plotting and misdirection. She wants to read books that she feels  feed her soul, not just her intellect. She very well might enjoy my  writer acquaintance’s work, since it strives to rise high above plot  mechanics and even be somewhat philosophical, but she’s not likely to  ever find it since she’s not one to seek out murder mysteries or  detective novels in the first place.

So for those who write in specific genres or combo genres (e.g.,  supernatural romance, supernatural thriller), and for whom maximizing  sales is a priority, maybe give a thought [should be given] to the most likely type of  person to seek out [those] books in the first place, and what that person’s  preferences might be. I’m not trying to suggest [writers] totally engineer  [their] prose to match some kind of external template, just that appealing  to a commercial audience is always a balancing act between pleasing the  audience and pleasing yourself.

I have nothing but respect for the writer who follows his vision  regardless of whether or not it will lead to commercial success, but for  those like that detective novelist, who spends as much time worrying  over his sales as his art, writing with the eventual reader in mind may  give better results.

 

This is a reprint from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

 

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author, Kindle Fire on Kindle Nation Daily Editor in Chief and Publetariat Founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton muses on the conflict inherent in authors trying to maintain a web presence.

Writers are supposed to be passionate, communicative, and have some strong opinions. Like all artists, it’s their job to speak truth to power when others will not or cannot. In other words, they’re supposed to have something to say, and they’re supposed to say it, and they’re not supposed to give a damn what anybody thinks. It is in this that the purity of their art is grounded.

Authors are supposed to establish an online presence that’s open, welcoming, inclusive, and entirely inoffensive. Like all marketers, it’s their job to appeal to the widest demographic possible. In other words, they’re not supposed to have anything negative or controversial to say, and if they do, they’re not supposed to post it, and they’re supposed to care a great deal about what everyone thinks of anything they do post. It is in this that their online reputations are kept untarnished.

Do you see the disconnect here, the fundamental opposition of these two sets of requirements?

[palm-forehead] What were we thinking?!

For years now, I’ve been proferring the same author platform advice: carefully cultivate and maintain your image, always be nice, don’t say or do anything that could be construed as negative or controversial, and strive to avoid turning off your readers (and potential readers) at all times and at all costs. I’m beginning to think this advice is wrong.

How can one possibly spend half or more of the time wearing his Author hat and being a totally benign milquetoast, and the rest of it wearing his Writer hat and churning out impassioned, moving prose? Assuming it’s possible to make a habit of pretending not to care too much, or be bothered too much, by anything, is it a good idea for any artist to do so?

I’ve noticed that after about five years of doing the benign milquetoast thing, the seams on my carefully cultivated, totally benign, online effigy are starting to show sometimes. And rip open in a few places. However hard I try, when I come up against something or someone with which/whom I disagree very strongly, there are only so many times I can avert my eyes, either say nothing or just mumble something vague, and keep moving. Increasingly, I can’t seem to help going off on the things and people that bother me lately.

Maybe it’s just because election years always bring out the ignorant yahoos and smug twits in droves, and I’ve had just about enough of their nonsense. Maybe it’s that the collapsing economies all around the world have us all on edge. Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt I’ve had a well-developed enough concept to channel all that writerly angst and passion into a new novel. Maybe it’s because I’ve been (figuratively) beaten down and bloodied by a few simultaneous life crises over the past two years.

Maybe I’m just a cranky bitch.

Or maybe, just maybe…it’s because behind my carefully tended online persona, I’m a human being who’s alive, with an active mind, who has thoughts and experiences and feelings, who is imperfect, and sometimes gets angry at the wrong people or for the wrong reasons, who feels guilty or insecure every now and then, and every so often runs out of patience at precisely the wrong time.

As a writer, I’m supposed to believe—no, I NEED to believe—that all the mistakes I make, all the wrongs I either inflict or endure, inform my work. As an artist, if my art is to have any impact at all, I am supposed to wring meaning and insight from these experiences and channel it into my work.

Remember when part of the charm of celebrated authors was their other-ness? They were legendarily prickly, snarky, bohemian, drunks, or brawlers who seemed to spend their days in bed (often with multiple partners), and their nights about equally divided between scandalizing the bourgeoisie and pouring out Important Literature. Above all, they didn’t give a toss what the general public thought about them. How could they? In much the same way an actor must be totally un-self-conscious in order to really disappear into a role and be true to the material he’s been given, a writer must be totally un-self-conscious in order to disappear into the world of his stories and characters and be true to the material he’s creating.

When you’ve developed the habit of turning off your authentic self to the point that it feels effortless, how can you be sure you’re really capable of turning it back on again? If you spend so much of your time worrying about how you’re being publicly perceived, how can you prevent that insecurity from creeping into your work? If you care so much about being perceived negatively online that you’ve made it a practice to avoid posting anything that could possibly cause you to be perceived negatively, how can you be sure you’re not sanding off all the rough edges of your ideas, plots and characters as well?

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying writers should all immediately pick up some self-destructive habits and start purposely offending everyone within virtual earshot. No, no, no. But I am saying that maybe it’s not so bad to take a stand every now and then, and maybe it’s not the end of your career if it’s a poorly informed and badly executed stand. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to expose your human-ness and your passions once in a while.

Being a good little Author Platformer means putting the Ego in charge: the reasoning, detached part of the self that suppresses baser urges and animal instincts. The Id is where all base urges and instincts originate, but it’s also where insight and creativity live; chaining the Id to a post in the basement of one’s day to day life may be the worst mistake any artist can make. My Id has been locked up for too long, and it’s acting out. I’m beginning to wonder if I should’ve been letting it come out to play, and make its mistakes and messes, a little more often than I have these past five years.

Case in point: a post of mine was picked up by The Passive Voice blog, and there were a number of comments. One commenter zeroed in on one specific line in the post, and took up a real battleflag against it. And this irked me, a great deal. Straw man arguments are a pet peeve for me, but not without good reason…

I have read and personally experienced far too many cherry-picking arguments when the indie author movement was just getting off the ground, where some naysayer or other would attempt to discredit the entire notion of indie authorship by attacking or attempting to disprove one specific statement in an essay or blog post—an essay or blog post with which they could find no other particular fault. Time and again, the trolls would come forward to hold up this or that one, specific example of a failed or poor-quality indie book, and use it as the foundation for their thesis that, “therefore, all indie books are bad and virtually no one buys indie books.” So I’m pretty touchy about cherry-picking arguments.

I do not believe this commenter is a troll, nor do I think he necessarily deserved the chilly and irritated responses he got from me. I’m sure many people have seen the exchange, and some of them thought worse of me for it. Three years ago, I would’ve been frantically working damage control and obsessing about the potential fallout. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have responded to the commenter at all. One year ago, I would’ve responded with some bland bit of mild disagreement, sure to include at least one qualifier that would welcome anyone reading my response to dismiss it completely.

Now, I’m doing nothing. I overreacted because this commenter unintentionally hit a raw nerve, but while I did go so far as to wonder “aloud” what his motivations might be for so tenaciously clinging to this one line of argument, I don’t believe I stepped over the line into being rude or hurtful. A display of poor judgment on my part? Absolutely. Obnoxious? Fine, I’ll give you that. A total meltdown? No, I think that’s going too far.

Above all else, what it was, was proof positive that I’m not just a bland…um, I mean brand. It was a demonstration that I can and do get bothered and passionate about things sometimes, even if this Author Platform lifestyle of stuffing those tendencies down for the past five years is now resulting in me getting a little too bothered and being a little too passionate about relatively unimportant things.

I’m not advocating for authors to start shooting their mouths off about anything they want to in any setting. There are such things as decorum, respect, and ‘reading the room’, after all. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not such a bad idea to be your authentic, opinionated, imperfect self now and then, at least when the stakes are low, even in the context of author platform. Some will respond well, others won’t. But those who don’t like your authentic self probably never would’ve liked your work anyway. And if constantly stifling your authentic self may also result in stifling the authenticity of your work, it’s a price that’s too high to pay.

Maybe letting your Id peek through the veil every once in a while serves to vent bile that would otherwise build up until you do have a public meltdown when some minor irritation tips the scale. I can’t say for certain. All I can say is that whatever I’ve been doing up until now ain’t working anymore.

 

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton’s Indie Author blog.

 

In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author Zoe Winters muses on what it means to be published in today’s rapidly-evolving world of publishing.
[Publetariat Editor’s note: this post contains strong language]

This is such a loaded question. Whenever somebody asks me this, I  don’t really know how to respond because I’m not sure what they are  really asking or what it is they really want to know. Are they just  making idle chit chat and don’t care one way or the other what the  answer is? Are they asking if I’m making a living–i.e. is this my job  instead of a hobby? Are they asking if some authority figure (i.e. a big  NY publisher) deemed me “worthy enough” to have my words see the light  of day? i.e. are they asking about prestige? Are they trying to figure  out if I’m a “big deal”?

I have no idea. Because a lot of non-publishing/non-author people  have a lot of serious misconceptions about the publishing world. And  even many of us IN the publishing world, have some pretty big  misconceptions at times, so how can the general public be blamed, when  the ignorance spreads so far and wide? (And by ignorance I mean a simple  lack of knowing something, not an insult.)

It’s also impossible to know what assumptions somebody is starting  out with. In the general public there seem to be two very opposite views  about authors in reference to making money. Either they think it’s  nearly “impossible” to make a living doing this and that only a lucky  handful of authors ever can or do. Or they think just being published  period means you’re raking in the big bucks. Neither situation is really  true.

Those that assume “having a publisher” means you are “making the big  bucks”, don’t grasp the economics of publishing. For many  published  authors only doing a book a year and living somewhere on the midlist,  you’re talking maybe a $5,000 to $10,000 book advance. A lot of books  don’t make the author more money than the advance. Some do. But a lot  don’t. There are foreign and audio and other rights that might also make  an author more money, so it’s not “just” the advance. But in general,  few authors, unless they are bestsellers are making a living writing one  book a year.

And yet… a vast majority of writers have been trained into this mode  of thinking where 1 book a year is a lot of pressure and oh my God it’s  just SO much work… and so anybody stuck at that level who doesn’t really  “break out”, is unlikely to be making a living.

It’s hard to make a living as an indie at that publishing rate as  well, but the money, for most authors isn’t “great” in traditional  publishing. And that was one of the big motivators for me going indie.  When I found out that most NY pubbed authors aren’t making a living from  their fiction, I decided I wasn’t interested in going that route. The  only reason for me to fight and claw for something like that is if it  would end in a career making career-level money just doing that. If I  wasn’t going to make a living, I wasn’t letting anybody else control any  aspect of my work, period.

Which is what a lot of “regular people” (meaning people not in this  business), don’t understand. If they didn’t understand publishing  before, they don’t understand the new shift in publishing now, for the  most part. (There are, of course, exceptions. Some people read author  blogs for their favorite authors and know a bit more about it than the  average man on the street.)

Given the very slow publishing schedules in mainstream publishing and  the fact that there is a limit to how many books  a publisher wants  from any given midlist author in a year, the money odds for “most” of us  who are not famous or breakout bestsellers… is in the indie side of  things, because we can publish on a faster timetable, while still  keeping the quality up. Remember, a lot of us aren’t buying into these  myths that were sold for so many years inside the mainstream system of  publishing.

Also, those of us labeled “prolific”, don’t necessarily have shorter  creative cycles, we just have more of them going on at once. At any  given time I have several books in various stages of production… one in  planning, one in rough draft, one in editing/with betas, one with the  copyeditor. I don’t always have irons in all those fires at once, but  just about, which is why sometimes my publishing schedule is like boom.  boom. boom.

We also can make a lot more per book sold, which means fewer copies  needed to make decent money. So making a living becomes somewhat more  probable, depending on work ethic and of course on how your audience  responds to the work you give them and if it’s compelling enough for  word of mouth to go to work. Every author, depending on popularity,  needs a different number of titles to make and maintain a living doing  this, whether they are trad pubbed or indie.

They say the best way to market your work is to write another book.  The reason is that word of mouth is king in book publishing. Sometimes  other forms of marketing and promo can get the ball rolling or help to  get a book back in people’s minds again, but it’s got to grip people  enough that they talk about it or all the advertising in the world won’t  do any good. (A lot of people complain about how their publishers won’t  market them, and they are expected to do all that themselves, but given  that it’s nearly impossible to know what the public will “go for” in a  big way, most advertising on any author who isn’t already a proven  quantity is a big financial risk. It might not seem fair, but it’s just  business.)

So that brings me back to “Are You Published?” and how to answer that  question. I usually just say yes because frankly any other answer is  going to lead into a long boring conversation (like this one) that they  probably don’t care about anyway. Then I’ve gone from “mystique” to  making their eyes glaze over. Why have a conversation that’s going to  make me less cool by the end of it?

It’s akin to the other question that drives me batshit: “How’s your  book coming?” WHICH ONE? Often this is a question some ask me every time  they see me. If I don’t see them for 6 months I wonder if they think  I’m still working on the same book. In 6 months a LOT has happened in my  publishing world and the book they’re talking about is probably in my  rear view by that point.

So when someone asks: Are you Published? I say yes. I have books out.  I’m making a living. This is my job/career. If they care about prestige  and authority figures over actual results, then I honestly don’t care  if they think I’m a liar.

And when someone asks: “How’s your book coming?” I just say fine.

I assume both questions are just small talk and the questioner  probably doesn’t really care anyway. I can tell there are times when the  person IS really genuinely interested in my job, and when that happens I  give them more than a flip monosyllabic answer, but most times Yes, and  Fine, suffice and it saves me a lot of explaining and frustration.

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.