Talk Is Cheap, Book Promotion Isn't

Recently I got a newsletter from some site talking about book promotions and it says:

Book promotion, when it is done effectively, isn’t cheap. And a question we hear all the time is “is it worth me spending the money?”  If you have to ask the question whether it’s worth spending money to get your book into the hands of readers then the answer is no. Effective promotion gets your book noticed by new readers, the more the better, but if you don’t have the confidence in what you have written that it will then be embraced, and that those readers will go on and recommend your book to their friends and so-on, perhaps it’s time to think again about your future as an author.

 

This is one of those salesperson tricks of challenging someone's pride.  It's like you go to a car dealer and say you want the sensible sedan instead of the convertible and the salesperson says, "Well if you think that's too much car for you..."  Thus challenging my pride so I'll get the convertible to avoid looking like a wimp.

In this case, I ask if it's worth spending the money because if I'm spending $100-$500 I don't want it to go for a banner ad that will be ignored or blocked.  Or an ad on a site that only gets 50 views a day--and all from robots.  Or a professional "review" that will be published on the back page of some rag no one will ever read.

It's not because I don't have confidence in what I wrote.  Acting like this is what people typically mean is a salesperson's trick.  "Oh, well, if you don't think your book is good enough..."  It's horseshit.  Only someone really dumb or really insecure (or both) is going to be baited into parting with hundreds of dollars on such passive-aggressive taunting.

Early on I was stupid enough to pay for ads.  I bought a Goodreads ad and I have no idea if anyone ever saw it or not.  It was a complete waste of $100.  Because of that I've never bothered with Amazon ads or Facebook ads.

Recently too some crummy website mentioned they were promoting Eric Filler's Transformed for St. Patrick's Day.  And then suggested I should pay them to promote other books.  I checked and I sold 0 copies of that book in that time frame.  So I asked why I would want to pay considering I hadn't sold any books?  They gave me some BS answer.  Finally I told them to unsubscribe me.  Seriously, if your site doesn't sell any of my books, what good is it?

The thing is the Internet is a big, almost infinite place so anyone can start a website to promote books.  That doesn't mean anyone will actually GO there except the people suckered into buying ads.

My philosophy on ads is pretty simple:  when was the last time you bought a book because of an ad?  Maybe if it's a sale; most of the books on my Kindle came from Amazon's Daily Deals or sales from Open Road Media or some other publisher.  Otherwise I don't click on ads.  I doubt most people click on ads, just as if given the chance people won't watch commercials on TV; that's why people like Netflix.  That's why Hulu allows people to pay more to NOT watch ads.  Except during the Super Bowl people don't like ads.  And yet advertisers keep plugging away, so I guess on some level they might work.

Notable idiot Guy Kawasaki said you should spend a minimum of $15,000 on promoting your book.  Maybe if you throw around that kind of cash you can generate some sales, but probably not enough to make back your money.  Unless you can afford to buy prime time TV ad time or billboards in a well-traveled area or get a stadium or bowl game named for your book, it's not going to do much good.  Not because your book is bad, but because people aren't going to take notice in enough numbers for it to be profitable. 

People who say "you have to spend money to make money" are either people who have money to waste or the ones wanting to take your money.  There are plenty of shysters out there; it's up to the author to be careful.

A Far More Epic Old Man Logan Movie Idea

Wednesday I posted a review of Logan and compared it to the comic book series Old Man Logan.  While Logan was a decent movie it's a lot less epic than OML.  The problem with OML is that it includes a lot of characters not owned by Fox, so I was trying to think of how to do a much bigger story with characters Fox owns.

First off, I like the comic book version of Wolverine having a farm and a wife and kids.  It humanizes him more than being a chauffeur who occasionally slaughters people trying to steal his limo.  And the vow of nonviolence (or at least not popping his claws) is another good part of that so I'd retain that too.

For background lets say it's 30 years or so after The Wolverine.  All of the X-Men are dead (presumably) and an entity called Onslaught has taken over America and split it among a Brotherhood of Mutants.  Since we don't have the Hulk, I thought Sabretooth would make a good landlord for Wolverine but we've already killed him twice so then I was thinking maybe it could be clones of Sabretooth to take the place of the Hulk's redneck kids. You could use the Reavers or whatever if you want.

Anyway, the rent is coming due and Wolverine needs money.  Then one day a car shows up and behind the wheel is none other than Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool.  Wade needs someone to help him take some McGuffin to resistance elements in NYC and he'll pay Wolverine the money he needs to go along.  Reluctantly Logan agrees to do it.

(One thing I liked about the movie is the idea of Logan slowly being killed by the adamantium so he's old and sick and his healing factor isn't as good.  I thought of applying the same to Deadpool, only maybe for different reasons.  Still the result would be the same that he's older looking and can't heal as fast as before.)

So off they go.  In the comic there were places like "Hammer Falls" and "Pym Falls" to represent where heroes had died.  Instead of Thor and Giant-Man (owned by Marvel) we could use X-Men characters.  Like you could have a Midwestern area that's all barren and fucked up called Storm Falls from where Storm died.  A bad guy would control that (whatever random X-Men villain) and there would be a close call or something.  Another place would be ruled by Mystique who like Logan and Wade is slowly dying and losing her powers so she would look all messed up, like a jigsaw puzzle of different people she impersonated.  Logan and Wade get captured in her territory but Mystique lets them go for old times' sake.

Along the way too they meet up with Wolverine's clone X-23 who in this would be a woman, not a little girl to sidestep the weirdness of a 10-year-old slaughtering a bunch of dudes.  They're a little skeptical of her but she proves herself in battle and comes with them to NYC.

They finally get to NYC which is all fucked up with buildings twisted like pretzels and stuff because it's where Magneto and some of the X-Men made their final stand.  They go to meet the resistance but it's a trap!  Wade heroically sacrifices himself (with appropriate quips) so Logan and X-23 can escape.

Logan is going to go home, but X-23 convinces him they should go to Washington and end Onslaught once and for all.  So they do but when they get there it turns out to be another trap!  X-23 is actually working for Onslaught.  Logan is taken to Onslaught who if you've read the comics is a combination of Xavier and Magneto.  In this case maybe it's just Xavier in a Darth Vader-type suit.  Maybe he went around the bend when humans tried to kill his mutant students one too many times and maybe they killed Moira MacTaggart as well.  The point being like Superman in the Injustice video game he's decided to use his power to take over the world and make it do his bidding.

There's all the usual chitchat where Onslaught reveals he set up the whole resistance plan to flush out those last heroes who might remain.  Bwahahahaha.  But when he's about to kill Logan, who still hasn't popped his claws or anything because at this point he'd welcome death, X-23 decides to go all Darth Vader and attacks Onslaught instead.  When Onslaught fights back and has X-23 at his mercy, Logan finally pops his claws and cuts off Onslaught's damned head.

X-23 wants Logan to stick around to help clean up and rebuild society or whatever, but he says no he has to go home.  For fun maybe he finds the old Blackbird-type plane to fly (or crash) back near his farm.  When he gets his farm he finds his family slaughtered by the Sabretooth gang or whatever.  So Logan tracks them down and slaughters them back.  He visits his family one last time and then heads out into the wilderness, riding off into the sunset.

The End...except maybe in a cookie scene we show Wade pulling himself back together and shambling off into the unknown.

Isn't that a lot more epic?  And sticks closer to the source material, though obviously a lot of changes had to be made with the licensing shit.  I thought initially to use Apocalypse but obviously they already used him as a bad guy so then I saw Comixology had a sale on the Onslaught comics and that seemed like a good direction to go, though maybe people would have a problem with making Patrick Stewart a villain.

Sure this will never get made and it'd cost $250M or more and it might be 5 hours long, but I think it'd be better.

Logan Is Both a Fitting Farewell for Hugh Jackman and a Pale Copy of Old Man Logan

First, if you haven't read the Old Man Logan comic, visit Arion's blog for a great summary of it.  It certainly helped me to remember what happened before I saw the movie.

As I said to Arion on that blog entry, Logan the movie basically only uses part of the title and the core concept of the comic book.  As kind of an FU to comic book writer Mark Millar, director James Mangold is the only one credited with the story.  Really James Mangold?  You came up with that all by yourself?  Are you sure you didn't get a little help somewhere?  Hmmm?

The core concept is that it's 2029 and Logan, aka Wolverine, and Charles Xavier, formerly the head of a school for mutants, are the only mutants left.  The rest were killed in "The Westchester Incident" that is never shown or really explained in detail.  Apparently that was going to be the first scene initially but then it was cut, probably for time and budget.  Xavier is in his 90s and suffers from dementia that he has to treat with pills or else he can send out psychic shockwaves that not only nearly kill people, but could also alert authorities to where they are.

Logan's planning to get enough money to buy a boat in Mexico and sail away with Professor X.  To do this he's driving a limo that in the first scene is nearly jacked until he slaughters some of the thieves.  Until Logan gets enough money, he and Xavier are living in secret by the Mexican border along with a former mutant tracker named Caliban, played by Stephen Marchant who I recently watched in Extras.  There is some indication that "the wall" has been built by this time.  But things start to go sour when Logan is contacted by a Mexican woman who wants him to drive her and a little girl to North Dakota so they can cross to Canada.

If Canada is a safe haven for mutants, why isn't Logan already there?  In the comics at least Wolverine is Canadian.  Xavier is British so you'd think he could get to Canada or back to England, right?

Anyway, bad guys track Logan down and so he, Xavier, and the girl hit the road to go to North Dakota.  It soon becomes clear the girl named Laura is a clone of Wolverine.  In the comics X-23 is a full grown woman but in this she's just a child.  She only has two claws on her hands instead of three like her daddy but to compensate she has a claw in each foot as well.  Xavier compares her to a lion because female lions use their front claws to attack and back to defend.  OK, sure, whatever.

They go to Oklahoma City to change cars and clothes and such, but the bad guys are soon on their tail again.  Eventually they come to the aid of a farmer (ER's Eriq la Salle--remember him?) and his family.  Of course the bad guys follow them there too.

All through this Logan is slowly dying because the adamantium that makes him so indestructible is also poisoning him and his healing factor can no longer compensate enough.  But as you might expect, he has enough left in the tank (with the help of some steroids) for one final showdown in North Dakota.  Unlike Christian Bale's Batman, Logan doesn't get to jet off to Italy with Anne Hathaway.  And it's a fitting way for him to go since he was always supposed to be like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name and aging gunfighters usually go out in a blaze of glory, right?

As far as X-Men movies go it's one of the best.  It's not nearly so stupid as the recent big ones and has an actual point to it, unlike The Wolverine.  The R rating allows it to have a more appropriate amount of blood and gore and also lets Patrick Stewart curse hilariously; this is probably his best performance of the X-Men movies, probably because he does more than use Cerebro and chat with Magneto.  He gets to have a little more range, and less so does Hugh Jackman.

I remember the late Roger Ebert criticizing Kick-Ass for 12-year-old Hit Girl beating people up and getting beat up in turn.  He'd probably be mortified with the body count Laura generates and the times she's beaten up and even harpooned through the chest once.

Anyway, on its own it's a decent movie.  But it really is a pale imitation of the Old Man Logan comic.  For one thing, since it was a comic book they could use the whole stable of Marvel characters, something rights issues between Disney and Fox would obviously prevent here.

The setup for the story is a lot different.  50 years after all the heroes have died or gone into hiding, Wolverine owns a farm and has a wife and kids.  His landlord is the Hulk and his creepy redneck sons, who insist Logan pay them rent or some bad shit's going to happen.

Then along comes Hawkeye, formerly of the Avengers, who's old and blind yet still able to drive the Spider-Mobile across the country.  He wants Logan's help to deliver something to "the resistance" to maybe save the world or something.  Logan has taken a vow against violence to the point he hasn't "popped his claws" in 50 years but he agrees to go so he can make money to save the family farm.

In the movie Xavier is the stand-in for both the family and Hawkeye.  In a way it makes sense as who else from Fox's roster would they get:  Mystique?  Jean Grey?  Cyclops?  Rogue?  Storm?  Actually I was thinking a great choice, though it would have altered the tone dramatically, would have been Deadpool.  He's got a healing factor like Wolverine and obviously kicks a lot of ass too.  But I guess then instead of a sort of Western it would have ended up as a more of a buddy comedy.  If they had cast Cable sooner he would have been a good choice too as it would then give him a reason to go back in time and hook up with Deadpool.

Anyway, in the comics they go through a few places where heroes died like "Hammer Falls" where Thor's hammer lies and "Pym Falls" where Giant-Man's skeleton lies.  They ultimately go to Washington DC, where the Red Skull has taken up residence in the White House and has superhero artifacts on display like Captain America's shield and Iron Man's armor.  By contrast going to an Oklahoma casino and a farm and North Dakota don't seem nearly so epic.

The problem is thanks to licensing and budgets and such this can't be as universe-spanning as the comic book.  But I think they lost something by Logan not having a family and not taking a vow to not kill because that really made it more important when he did finally decide to kill.  But then there wouldn't have been nearly the body count, right?

It's not quite as disappointing as watching "Flashpoint" on CW's The Flash and comparing it to the Flashpoint comic.  That barely managed to retain the core concept; it was such a pale imitation it couldn't see its own reflection in a mirror.  This does a better job but still leaves you longing if you've read the comics, which I'd recommend.

This whole thing gave me an idea for a more epic Logan movie that I'll share (and no one will read) on Friday.

In Memoriam...Blogger Edition

Today's Memorial Day so it seems like a good time to honor those who used to read this blog.  Those blogger buddies can be broken into a few categories.

Special Mention, Dead IRL
Yzerbear19, aka Melissa Dilloway

My sister was not a regular blog reader but she did comment from time-to-time

Now the less depressing entries.

Because Life, You Know?
Rusty Webb
Jay Noel
David Walston
Neil Vogler
Stephen Hayes
Lisa Potts

I know Rusty and David have been busy and Jay has been sick, so not really into blogging anymore.  I still see Rusty around Goodreads, where he usually has epic reviews.  Neil I still follow on Twitter.  He has an album out that's a good listen.  I still read Stephen Hayes (aka the Chubby Chatterbox)'s blog and sometimes he emails me.  Lisa was someone I knew from writers.net and followed my original writing blog for a while but then I guess she got busy.

Those Who Pissed Me Off:
Andrew Leon
Briane Pagel

I don't need to explain that, do I?

Those I Pissed Off:
Michael Offutt
Tony Laplume
Laura Diamond

I'm still in contact with Offutt but Laplume has mostly dropped off the grid.  I don't know what his deal is other than I didn't like his one book like 4 years ago.  Talk about holding a grudge.  Laura was a sometimes reader of my first blog until I pissed her off about some other friend using the same cover image as another of my Facebook "friends."

With the exception of Andrew Leon, if anyone else on this list wants to read my blog again, they're more than welcome to.  It is kind of sad on the Internet how we just lose touch with people.  I suppose to some extent that happens in real life too.  That's just life, both "real" and online.

Passengers: An Ode to Male Privilege & Stockholm Syndrome [Spoilers]

I've talked before about how sometimes it's just one little thing that can ruin a movie or book.  Whether it's whitewashing a part, some bad special effects, or a plot twist that doesn't make sense, all you need is one thing to go bad and it causes a cascade effect.  Which is an apt description because in Passengers, one meteor getting through the ship's shielding eventually starts to cause the entire ship to fail.

While the meteor is what ruined the ship, something else ruined the movie for me.  After that meteor hits, Chris Pratt's hibernation pod is activated.  For a year he tries various things to go back to sleep, but nothing works.  Then he sees Jennifer Lawrence sleeping in her pod and becomes infatuated with her.  She's a writer and he reads some of her work and starts to think about waking her up too.

Where this whole movie goes off the rails is when he actually does this.  Because now what's supposed to be a love story of two people stranded on a ship in the middle of space becomes what's essentially a rape as he decides to doom her along with him.  It's male privilege in action as he thinks, "What I want is more important than anything else."  And when Laurence Fishburne is woke up he tries to excuse this by saying, "A drowning man always tries to take someone with him."  In other words, "Hey, it's OK he ruined your life, he was desperate."  And obviously his needs were more important than your need to not die in space.

At first when they meet, Jennifer Lawrence doesn't know she was woke up intentionally.  So as she falls for him, it's still creepy, but less so for her.  But then after she finds out and falls for him again, that's where it gets creepy again.  It's like Stockholm Syndrome with the kidnapping victim falling in love with her captor.  Or a woman falling in love with her rapist.  He cursed her to die on the ship with him and she decides to make a life with him because they worked together to save the ship?  Really?  I'm supposed to buy that and cheer for it?  REALLY?

Naturally the previews were smart enough to leave that angle out, letting you think--like J-Law in the beginning--they were both just randomly woke up by the ship.  Whoever cut the previews probably knew people weren't going to want to watch a movie where a guy intentionally wakes up a woman just so he'll have some company, cursing her to die of old age in space along with him.

Why was it even necessary?  Why couldn't the two pods have gone haywire?  Since you had a third go haywire later, why couldn't Chris Pratt's have opened and then later J-Law's?  That would have sidestepped this whole creepy, disgusting element.

Not surprisingly the writer, director, and I think all of the producers are guys.  I mean, if there had been a woman involved you think she probably would have pointed out that maybe a woman isn't going to fall in love with a guy who cursed her to die in space.  Obviously the guys involved didn't see a problem with it.  And really, why would they?  That's just par for the course in Hollywood.  We like to say Hollywood is liberal and while many of its stars are, most movies not intended for awards consideration are fairly conservative.  In this case the movie could have been written by Mike Pence or the "Freedom Caucus" as the moral of the story is:  Hey, women, just let the man decide everything for you and it'll work out in the end.  I'm not a pussy hat-wearing feminist and even I think it's pretty disgusting.

Anti-Sequelitis

Considering I wrote 7 sequels (and 2 prequels) to the Scarlet Knight series, 2 sequels (and a spinoff) to the Chances Are series, and 2 sequels (and a collection of short stories and a spinoff) for the Girl Power series it's kind of weird that I've only written four direct sequels since 2014.  Those are both for Eric Filler series Gender Swap Challenge and Gender Swap Detective.  Otherwise the "sequels" are unrelated stories.

Once or twice someone has asked if there's a sequel for a particular story and no there isn't.  The thing about those gender swap stories is there's usually no point for a sequel.  Because unless you change the main character into a man again (like in Last Chance) you can't really do a gender swap again.  So for those sequels I did write it's the character changing into different kinds of women.  Like in the Gender Swap Challenge it was the main character changing from a stoner guy to a bimbo, then into a sultan's plaything, and then a virgin schoolgirl.  Or in the Gender Swap Detective stories first the hard-boiled detective turns into a beautiful woman, then an exotic dancer, and then a little girl.  So really that makes those ones kind of hard to write direct sequels for them.

I've toyed with ideas for sequels for Another Chance but weirdly the problem in part are the covers.  I use a pair of silhouettes for each cover and I really like them, especially the ones Al Sirois made up for the revised versions of the Chances Are series.  So to make a sequel I have to have two different silhouettes; it can't just be a sexy woman and another sexy woman.  So looking around it seems like I can do exotic dancer, pregnant woman, little girl, or go back to a male one.  It kind of limits the options.

And storywise there's usually no reason to do a sequel for most of the gender swap stories.  The character usually lives happily ever after or ends up unhappily ever after, but either way it's over one way or another.  So in my mind there's not any unfinished business left behind.

Someone said about the novella From Warrior King to Peasant Girl:  it ended when it was just getting started.  And I'm like, "What the fuck you talking about?"  I mean the King Arthur-ish character had become a little girl, grown up again, discovered she had witch powers, overthrew the bad guy, and retaken her kingdom.  What the hell else was there to do?  I guess unite the whole kingdom but who cares about that?  I mean she has witch powers and a magic sword so it's not like that's going to be too hard.  I really don't know how you could say it was just getting starting, but people are annoying.

I have a couple of ideas for gender swap series.  First was the superhero-themed one Secret Origins and I have some vague ideas for a sequel.  Then there's the Transformers-themed one Only Human where I'm thinking of having bad guys adopt human forms in a sequel.  I also have an idea called Gender Swap Therapy where a shrink would be a recurring character who uses gender swapping/age regression to cure his/her patients.  And another inspired by Quantum Leap would have a scientist "leap" back in time as various female characters.  But those are just in the drawing board stage.

As for non-gender swap stories I just really haven't come up with any solid ideas.  Mostly because no one buys the first book hardly so there doesn't seem to be any reason to waste time with a second or third one.  With the Scarlet Knight, Chances Are, and Girl Power series I had ideas for sequels as I was writing the first one but Justice for All (The Outcast #1--and only?) or Army of the Damned (Sky Ghost #1--and only?) I didn't really think of anything solid at the time and I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about them.  Someone said about Justice for All (The Outcast #1--and only?) that "You can't leave it like that" and I disagree.  I have absolutely no idea why I can't leave it like that.  The main character is alive and going back to school in the town where her boyfriend lives.  The Kingpin-ish bad guy is still out there, but so what?  It's not like it ended on a cliffhanger.

Lately, maybe because I watched a couple of Mad Max movies I was thinking of something similar to do for a Sky Ghost sequel.  The idea would be the good guys are starting to run low on gas and so ace pilot Hunter Hawking is out looking for some when he stumbles across an oil tanker that's run aground but still has plenty of oil on board just waiting to be plucked.  So they'd have to clear the ship of zombies and get the oil off it (or maybe get the ship working) and then try to get it back to their home in Salt Lake City while some other groups try to steal the oil from them.  Maybe I'll do that or maybe not.  Since it has zombies I just don't want to be like The Walking Dead and just have it be they find a group of survivors who are good/evil and then mayhem ensues.

Long ago someone suggested I write a sequel to Where You Belong and I'm like, "I have no idea what that would be about."  I mean I was using the cradle-to-not-quite-grave John Irving formula, so what would there be to do in a sequel?  If it were going to cover another 35 years it'd be going until like 2044 so then it'd be science fiction instead of literary fiction.  I guess that's why Irving doesn't write sequels. And more to the point I don't think I'm ready to write about Frost Devereaux in his 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s because I haven't lived that yet.  Maybe in another 30 years...

But I don't know.  Maybe if someone has a sequel idea for another story they can send it to me.

Grumpy Blue Dogs

I’ve gotten into arguments with plenty of right-wingers on Facebook, etc., but sometimes I piss off the other side too, especially when it comes to Hillary Clinton. In the last couple of months I had someone on Twitter and someone on Facebook block me because I wasn’t really with her.

The first time was when some lady on Twitter complained about Bernie Sanders’s ideas. And my response was: At least he has ideas. What great ideas did HRC have—except those she pilfered from Bernie? And this lady was like: she has ideas! Tons of ideas! Like what? Go to her website and find out, I don’t have to tell you! Which to me seems pretty funny. I mean, if you can’t name one idea she had then that’s kind of a problem. And then she blocks me, still without providing one idea HRC originated.

And then a month or so someone on Facebook posted a link to an article about HRC coming out of the New York woods to make a big speech and I made a snide remark about her Wall Street speeches. And then it was on! You’re the reason HRC lost! (I voted for her in the general election.) So on and so forth. Then finally: We’re not friends! Go away! And then finally blocking me.

The disturbing part of this second encounter was the attitude of if you’re a progressive who wasn’t on Team HRC, you should just shut up and vote for whoever The Party tells you to vote for. Which it’s like, that’s Republican thinking. Democrats aren’t supposed to be authoritarian; we’re supposed to be inclusive.

As long as you have this core of “moderate” corporate Democrats with an attitude of shut up and do whatever we tell you, it’s going to be hard to bring the farther left Bernie faithful into the mix. Those people don’t want to be told “This is fine” or “let’s just try to inch forward a little;” they want real change. And so do disgruntled “independent” voters in states like Michigan; they wanted real change so badly they voted for a lying, pussy-grabbing “billionaire” who made a bunch of crazy promises he had no intention of going through with. While it would be nice if these people woke up and realized that the Republican Party cares only about making rich people richer (see their “health care” bill that was just an excuse for a big tax to the rich), you can’t realistically expect people to stop believing what they want to hear. Had the corporate Democrats actually listened to Bernie supporters instead of just trying to suppress them or make half-assed attempts to placate them, HRC might be in the White House right now.

It wasn’t a good sign when they pushed through another corporate Democrat as DNC chair and then demanded everyone working for the DNC tender a resignation. It’s just more authoritarian bullshit. Cleaning house like that is something dictators do.

I’m still not sure if the corporate Democrats have really learned their lesson. They seem to think the problem was not campaigning hard enough. The real problem is you tried to water down Bernie’s platform and make the face of it someone few people trusted to actually try to enact that platform. So in 2020 if you try to run another corporate Democrat (like, say Cory Booker who has ties to Big Pharma) and think you can just demand the allegiance of Bernie supporters, it’s going to be hard to unseat…whoever will be president by then.

Last month there was a third one, though it wasn't exactly because of Hillary.  After US ships bombed a Syrian airbase, this one corporate Democrat was whining about progressives who weren't rolling over to heap praise on Trump.  "You guys are like the Tea Party after the bin Laden raid!"  It's like, hold on man, the Tea Party were just a bunch of racists; progressives complaining the Syria attack was a smokescreen could point to that the FBI was investigating Trump's Russia ties.  So it's not just some tinfoil hat conspiracy.  He tried to big stuff me by saying he works in Washington, so he knows way more than peons like me.  If people like him are in charge, it's no wonder Democrats lost.  His response was, Well Hillary said we should bomb Syria too, so checkmate!  Which really didn't make a lot of sense.  Just because Hillary thought the same thing doesn't have any affect on the Trump administration's thinking.  Also, Hillary thought Iraq was a good idea, so not exactly the best judgment.  Then of course he blocked me. 
 
The moral is that corporate Democrats can't stand being challenged by those who don't share their wishy-washy views.  So when they can't shout you down or roll over you, they just ignore you, which is ultimately self-defeating.  HRC’s slogan was “Stronger Together” and that’s true; we just need all progressives to actually put that into practice.

This Rolling Stone article on the book Shattered, an analysis of HRC's failed campaign, backs up some of what I've been thinking.  Because she had no ideas or vision, her campaign was completely stymied on coming up with a reason why she was running. In addition, she and Bill had gone through to pick out "disloyal" Democrats and in some cases even try to make sure they were voted out. That's not exactly "Stronger Together" is it?  More like "My Way or the Highway."  And that's unfortunately the attitude of too many corporate Democrats yet.  Instead of listening to progressives, they hope to just ram their watered-down Republican agenda down people's throats.  As long as they stay out of touch, it's going to be a long road back to the top.

Stuff I Watched Again

More Stuff I Watched...

Coming Through the Rye:  In 1969 a Jewish kid at a prep school decides to do a play of Catcher in the Rye.  His teacher asks if he has the permission of JD Salinger, so the kid decides to go track Salinger down.  During a trip to New York he finds an old magazine article saying Salinger lives in a town in New Hampshire so he goes there with the help of a girl.  Along the way he and the girl make out and have sex.  And then Salinger (Chris Cooper in fake eyebrows) turns him down because Salinger is kind of a jerk if you didn't already know.  It's a good fairly light indie drama that reminds me of a story I wrote about 13 years ago where a would-be author tracks his literary hero down and the moral of the story was:  never meet your heroes.  That's good advice but the kid got a girl out of it so it wasn't all bad, right? (3.5/5)

U-Turn:  A small-time gambler (Sean Penn) breaks down in a small Arizona town called Superior.  He then gets robbed, beat up, and embroiled in a scheme between a husband and wife who want to pay him to kill the other.  It's directed by Oliver Stone but feels more like a film student's homage to David Lynch.  It squanders a lot of acting talent including Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Voigt, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Clare Danes, and Jennifer Lopez. (2/5)

The Angriest Man in Brooklyn:  The late Robin Williams is a man with a brain aneurysm.  His harried doctor (Mila Kunis) tells him he has 90 minutes to live and so he goes running around Brooklyn trying to make amends to his son, wife (Melissa Leo), and brother (Peter Dinklage) while the doctor tries to find him.  What I didn't understand is if the doctor has a cell phone and she has Robin Williams's cell number, couldn't she just text him?  Anyway, it was a good mix of drama and comedy, though the bit with James Earl Jones as a stammering electronics salesman was pretty lame; I remember Night Court did something similar back in the 80s where they were in a big hurry and of course there's some guy who stutters and stammers and talks really slow.  Just saying. (3.5/5) (Depressing Speculation:  Some of Williams's last film credits are this, World's Greatest Dad, and The Final Cut, which all feature death rather heavily.  Could this have helped push him to suicide?)

Predestination:  In time travel stories they often mention the paradox of someone going back and inadvertently being his own grandfather; they even spoofed it on Futurama like 14 years ago.  This movie tops that by having a time traveler be her own mother AND father!  Oh and she/he is also her/his own mentor and enemy too!  It involves a lot of machinations including sex change surgery and plastic surgery, but basically everyone is the same character.  Up until the big reveals it was a fairly interesting drama about a lonely orphaned girl who gets knocked up and during the cesarean, doctors find out she also has boy parts and so start transitioning her into a man.  It probably would have been better off without all the creepy time travel stuff. (2.5/5)

Casino Jack:  I watched this back in 2012 but I watched it again recently on CBC.  In what could be seen as an audition for House of Cards, Kevin Spacey is "superlobbyist" Jack Abramoff who made a name lobbying for Native American casinos.  When he gets embroiled in trying to buy a shady floating casino, it ends up toppling his whole house of cards.  It's kind of sad how cheaply Congressmen and senators can be bought; I mean they do Abramoff favors for rounds of golf and theater tickets.  No wonder we're so fucked.  Something I pointed out on Facebook was at one point Abramoff goes to Paramount to pitch a movie about Moses and the exodus starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott; ironically two years after this movie came out, Ridley Scott made Exodus: Gods and Kings, but with Christian Bale, not Russell Crowe.  Still, pretty close!  At the end of the movie Abramoff sends a letter to Bill Clinton to say he'll use his knowledge of Republicans to help the Democrats...I guess they should have taken him up on it. (3/5)

Silicon Cowboys:  This not-hard-hitting documentary chronicles the startup of Compaq in the early 80s.  Basically 3 Texas Instruments employees quit their jobs to create a "portable" computer that was like a suitcase and weighed 28 pounds.  Yet people went crazy for it and soon Compaq had IBM on their heels.  IBM made their own "portable" that ironically was less compatible with PC software than Compaq's.  Later IBM tried to clear the "clone" field with IBM PC2 that didn't have any backward compatibility--big mistake as businesses weren't keen on buying an entirely new set of computers.  By the early 90s Compaq began to decline thanks to lower-priced competition like neighboring Dell.  The last of the company's founders then was forced out.  In 2002 Compaq was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard.  But they had a great 8 year run or so.  It was interesting though like I said not really hard-hitting journalism.  If you want a dramatized version, AMC's "Halt & Catch Fire" is inspired by this story.  A couple of modern Silicon Valley things Compaq helped popularize:  the "fun" workplace and big showy rollouts for new products. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I owned a Compaq in the late 90s.  I absolutely hated it.  Worst computer I ever owned.  The two Compaq laptops I bought weren't good either.  The second one had a design flaw with the screen that ended up making it useless except for parts.  So...good riddance to them.)

American Experience:  War of the Worlds:  The Trump campaign popularized "fake news" but one of the best instances of fake news was the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.  The play was hastily written to sound like an actual news broadcast.  Even though there was an introduction, many people missed that to listen to a ventriloquist act (which seems lame since it's radio) and then joined in later to think New Jersey was being invaded by Martians.  A panic ensued in many places.  Welles took his sweet time to tell people it was a hoax even after it was known people were panicking, because Welles was kind of a dick if you didn't know.  Later he apologized publicly but privately wasn't sorry since this really put him on the map.  In a little bit of Welles fakery, the documentary stages interviews that are based on what some people actually said.  Not hard-hitting either but a good reminder that #fakenews has been around for a long time. (3/5)

Art and Craft:  This documentary is about a scrawny old guy named Mark Landry who forges art as a hobby.  A weird legal loophole apparently is that if you donate forged art to a museum it's not a crime.  I guess because you're not profiting off of it the FBI doesn't give a shit.  But to museum curators it's pretty annoying.  One named Matt who first worked in Oklahoma City and then Cincinnati kind of made it his life's work to track the forger's activity and warn museums, though in the process he lost his job and as kind of an FU the Cincinnati museum put on a show of the forger's work.  Apparently the forger is still at it, using several fake names and even dressing as a priest.  Kind of weird that they don't have text on the screen at the end to tell you what happened to the people.  It was a pretty interesting story.  Next time you go to an art museum you might want to look a little closer at the pictures.  (3/5)

Cool as Ice:  This woeful Vanilla Ice vehicle was corny enough before the Rifftrax treatment.  The plot makes little sense.  After an overly long musical number, Vanilla and his 3 black friends get on motorcycles and go...somewhere for...reasons.  I wasn't sure if the people in the town where they stop to get a bike fixed were freaked out more by the motorcycles and 90s clothes or just that three black people to them probably equate to a gang.  Anyway, after spooking a horse and causing it to buck its female rider, ladies man Vanilla Ice doesn't apologize and gets punched by the girl, who he then stalks and steals her planner and "saves" her from a douchey boyfriend before she takes him to a construction site for an extremely lame romantic montage.  Meanwhile the girl is featured on a TV news segment for...reasons and her father (Family Ties's Michael Gross) is spotted by a couple of bad dudes who recognize him as a cop who ratted them out.  So they go there and kidnap the guy's young son while he's playing Tecmo Super Bowl (because it wasn't 90s enough already) and only Vanilla Ice can save the day!  It was as godawful as you'd expect.  It took the movie/music industry a full ten years to make something almost as bad with From Justin to Kelly.  8 Mile and Purple Rain look like Citizen Kane compared to this. (1/5)

Frankenstein Island:  This early 80s movie doesn't really make a lot of sense.  4 hot air balloonists crash on an island that's populated by hot chicks in leopard print bikinis, salty sailors who can't stop chuckling, a crazy guy quoting Poe, van Helsing's daughter(?), and her ancient husband (?).  And Frankenstein's monster is chained underwater.  And a bunch of stuff happens.  Not even Rifftrax can make this turkey watchable. (1/5)

ROTOR:  I saw the original version of this on late night TV and it was pretty awful.  The Rifftrax version makes it more fun.  This is a cheesy combination of The Terminator and Robocop but far, far worse than either.  Basically a police robot goes around killing people because its standards are too high.  And only a cop/rancher/scientist and his burly skunk-haired lesbian friend can stop him!  With lassos, a Jeep Cherokee, and its car horn.  Epic!  My favorite part is still when they spent five minutes of the  movie checking into a hotel so the skunk-haired lesbian can change into a tank top.  I mean they totally couldn't just go to a rest stop or gas station to do that, right?  Nah, why do that when you can pay $100 for a hotel room you'll occupy for three minutes? That's the kind of thought (or lack thereof) that went into this movie. (1/5)

One Punch Man:  They had a dubbed version on Cartoon Network, but on Netflix it's in Japanese with subtitles.  As with a lot of anime, it's kind of weird, but there's a neat concept:  a superhero is so powerful that he can beat any enemy with one punch.  While you might think that's awesome, for him it makes life kind of boring.  I suppose that's why they had to invent Kryptonite for Superman, right? (3/5)

The Last Samurai:  I fell asleep so I didn't really know why Japanese soldiers were fighting samurai.  What I can tell you is guys with swords on horses are no match for Gatling guns.  Just saying. (Inc)

Amazon's Jackbooted Thugs Are At It Again

I've had Amazon pull one of my books a few times before.  The frustrating part of it is that they have no definition of "offensive content" that actually provides any guidance.  Their whole policy is one sentence:  What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect. .  WTF?  There is no court of law where that definition would hold up because it's far too broad to have any meaning at all.  What it really boils down to is:  it's our site so we can do what we want.

The second annoying thing is once someone (or something) flags a book for offensive content, no one has any idea why.  I've emailed and emailed and emailed them and never gotten a reasonable response.  Really I think it'd make a good Michael Moore-type documentary to have me go to their help center in India and try to track down and confront whoever flagged my book.  (And I say India because every email has the name of someone with an Indian-sounding name, so I assume that's where it's coming from.)

The latest beef began a month or so ago when they alerted me to some "book" called When You Were Young that had the same text as MY book When You Were Young.  I looked it up and it was 7 pages long with a different author name and different cover, but the first chapter of my book.  Only it was published 2 years later.  It had a sales ranking so someone bought it for some reason.  Or maybe they borrowed it.  Either way it seemed pretty dumb.  So naturally I tell Amazon this person is plagiarizing my book.  For once they agree with me and pulled the thing.

That should be it, right?  Well a couple of days later they come back demanding I prove I own the copyright to my book.  As proof they wanted a letter from the publisher, something official saying I'd filed a copyright with the government or whatever, or an email from the owner.  It's like, 1. I published the book with your platform so technically you're the publisher, 2. I don't bother wasting time and money filing copyrights, and 3. I wrote it so why would I email myself?  They sent me an email saying that was fine...and then blocked the book two days later.  So I have to send them an email asking why they blocked it if they had approved it?  Then they unblocked it.

Now that should be everything, right?  Well no, a few days later I had submitted a paperback for Transformations:  The Gender Swap Collection, which was an omnibus of a bunch of my books.  Instead of approving the paperback they say they can't publish it because of something about mentioning it's a box set or whatnot.  Before I could get around to attempting to fix that they blocked it for "offensive content" and for good measure blocked the ebook too.  And yet they didn't block any of the individual stories included in the collection.

Then a few days later I get the ultimate kick to the balls when they declared I'd had three books blocked already so now they were going to suspend my account until I took a loyalty oath--or promised I wouldn't do whatever it is I did again.  Since I haven't the slightest idea what I did it's kind of a hard promise to keep.

You might say, well just write clean books.  Except one of the ones they blocked, Transformed for Mother's Day Too, was a clean book.  It wasn't classified as erotica so it shouldn't matter it had kids in it.  There was no sex, no violence, and very little bad language.  One of the people who reviewed it originally said it was wholesome enough to let her grandkid read.  So if that gets blocked, what the hell is safe to publish?

Of course this would be a lot easier if they just said what the hell was wrong, but see above.  There's no way to know why they flagged a book.  It's like if a cop pulls you over, doesn't say why, gives you a ticket that doesn't have a reason on it, and then says if you do it again he'll put you in jail.  You'd be like, What the hell did I do?  If you don't know what you did, it's impossible to avoid doing it again, but Amazon chooses to hide behind vagueness and boilerplate than provide anyone with actual reasoning.  And now that they're threatening to shut down my account, the shit is getting real.

It would be nice if I could just go to Smashwords or Draft2Digital or something, but they don't distribute to Amazon.  Amazon has walled themselves off from any other site and if your book isn't on Amazon you might as well be trying to sell it out of the trunk of your car.  And in all honesty Smashwords and Draft2Digital aren't really much better about that stuff, though I think they've provided slightly more specific responses.

It really leaves me between a rock and a hard place.

The Gravy Train Derails

For a while last year book sales were really humming. For about two months I never had one of those days where I only sell two or three books. I was selling at least ten every single day. Granted that’s not in Stephen King or JK Rowling territory, but I always figure 10 books per day at 30 days for about $2.00 in royalties would make about $600 in sales royalties and then usually about that much from Kindle Unlimited, which is a decent second income.

But towards the end of last year sales started taking a dive. Those streaks of 10 or more books sold became a lot shorter. Instead of plateaus you have more of a mountain range going up and down. January bounced back a little but then February wasn’t great. I could have written that off as being a short month, but then March was even worse.  April was slightly better in part because one day I think someone bought like 30-35 books.  I sold 41 that day and most were single purchases so I tend to think someone bought a bunch.  That was just an aberration though.

Part of it might be I worked on a couple of longer projects so I wasn’t putting out a book every couple of weeks. The rest of it I’m not really sure about. It could be a number of things. Sales for indie authors in general are flatlining. There are too many authors in the gender swap niche anymore, many with what I’d consider inferior products.  Or like that one ring I caught on to who were just posting the same crappy book under seven or eight different names.  Shit like that, helps to drive business away.

Despite my newsletter getting more followers I’ve never really gotten much of a real following. Most of my books either get no reviews or just one crank giving it 1 star because it didn’t end Happily Ever After or whatever. I tried offering books in advance for reviewers, but only one person took me up on it and then disappeared after a couple of months.

It’s hard to isolate which of these variables might be the biggest drag. It could be all of them. It could be something else entirely. Who knows?

Sometimes I think I need to find a new niche. I just stumbled into this one, so I’m not sure how I’d find a new one. Some people make money with “normal” books like mysteries, thrillers, and romances but then far more people don’t. It’s all kind of a crapshoot.

Of course the tailspin might stop on it’s own. Or not. Who knows?

"Reviews" like this don't really help to motivate me either:

This story was divided up into three separate parts that in my opinion each could have stood alone as a separate story on their own. Instead the author tried to shorten them all into one book, leaving out a lot of description of what was happening. Very little on the actual changes that happened with each individual. Clothing and mental changes were very bare in my opinion. The first person's story was one I would have enjoyed much more, but the whole thing was very lacking in plot structure and was very lacking in information that would have made it a better read for me. Second one was again very lacking in detail and description and too short to make much of a story. The third story was the best and was better done in my opinion. If the author had put more into the first two parts, this book would have been much better in my opinion.

The "reviewer" doesn't seem to understand that my time is not infinite for these things.  I had about a week to put the story together before Black Friday, and that's leaving a day or so for Amazon to review and post it.  So I couldn't exactly stretch each part into a novel as this asshole wants.  And the idea that I "tried to shorten them all into one book" is just nonsense.  I started out with the first story where a guy gets turned into a girl but I gave him a girlfriend so he'd have a reason to be at the mall on Black Friday so it's like, "What happens to the girlfriend?"  So I thought I'd write her a story too.  And then I had an idea for a couple and I did that.  It was all organic; I didn't try to "shorten them all into one book" at all.  It's annoying when people who don't even know your real name think they know more about my motives and techniques than I do.