Writing Wednesday: About the Author

A couple of months ago I read this book called Younger that I got for free from Amazon.  The premise is that a 57-year-old marketing person for a cosmetics company is laid off and volunteers to be a guinea pig for a new skin care product that makes her look 25.  An important distinction is that unlike my many ridiculous books like say Chance of a Lifetime, where a 50-year-old guy becomes an 18-year-old girl, she's only young-looking on the outside and only for a limited time.

Anyway, I get to the end of the book and then the About the Author screen comes up and wouldn't you know that the author just so happens to be a fifty-something-year-old woman who worked as a marketing person for a cosmetics company?  And gee, the picture of her looks very similar to how the character is described.

This isn't the first time I've seen that.  Like when I read The Time Traveler's Wife and gee, the author has red hair like the main character and is into some paper shaping or whatever like the main character.  What a coincidence!

Michael Offutt wrote a post and said that he writes to escape reality, which is why his characters are not like him.    To that I said, "Yeah, can you imagine if all my characters were fat, bald, unemployed accountants?"  Ugh.  No one would want to read them then.  I mean, even fewer.

I suppose the common thread of the two books I mentioned is that they were both by first-time authors.  If you've never written a book before then it's pretty easy to turn your story into wish-fulfillment instead of trying to imagine a different character.

Not that my characters are completely different from me.  A lot of my characters like Frost Devereaux or Emma Earl are pretty socially awkward.  They're just not as fat or bald and have more interesting jobs.

Anyway, when I see that an author is using herself as the main character I do tend to groan.  Not only does it seem lazy, it seems really narcissistic too.  How self-centered do you have to be to make yourself the center of this whole little fantasy?  Self-centered enough to be marketing cosmetics.

I say try harder, authors!  Or at the very least give your heroine a different color hair.  Throw us off the scent that much.

Writing Wednesday: Making Peace With It or How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Write the Ending

A couple of months ago I was writing my Chances Are spinoff Another Chance and I kept running into a problem with the ending.  I had sketched out one ending in my notes.  Then I changed my notes.  Then as I got up to that point in the actual writing I started an ending but didn't like it.

At that point I do what I often do:  I took a drive to clear my head and think the problem through.  Really it all boiled down to thinking, What exactly was the problem?  In the end I realized the problem was that I knew pretty much what I should do but I kept not wanting to do it.

The story revolves around a con man who gets turned into a woman thanks to a drug he was trying to steal.  He's then employed and trained by a covert government agency to steal a very special research project.  Since the main character is a con artist I really didn't think I should have a big actiony ending with a shootout and explosions and such.  The reason then I kept having problems with the ending is I kept trying to think of scenarios where he (she) wouldn't have to really fight the bad guys, usually involving some double-crosses.  But at the end I wanted him (her) to be badly wounded to set up something for the future.

Eventually I just thought to myself, why the hell not do the big actiony ending?  In a way it makes sense since it finally gives him (her) a chance to use a lot of the soldier-type skills the government instructed him (her) on.  Plus it gave me a way to badly injure him (her) to set up something for the sequel.  And who doesn't love a good gunfight and explosion?

So I just sat down and wrote it that way and it pretty much worked out.  Whether readers will like it or not is a whole other thing.  Anyway, the point is sometimes you just have to embrace something you're skeptical about; it might just turn out to work out better than you thought.

Writing Wednesday: Cool Kids Don't Always Cash In

Happy Canada Day!  Today should be when Alex Cavanaugh and his minions whine on their blogs about their securities.  Which makes it appropriate to post this today.  During the Andrew Leon Debacle(TM), people on his blog would comment about me, "I'd never buy one of his books because he's a meanie!"  To which at one point I said, "You didn't buy my books before this, you aren't buying them now, and you won't buy them in the future."  Which is true so far as I know.  The people reading his blog weren't my target audience, so it's not like they were buying my books before they thought I was a meanie.

Anyway, it got me to realize that in many cases being a popular blogger doesn't make you a popular author.  I'm not naming names, but there are several authors I follow who get dozens of comments on their blog entries and have way more followers than me and yet their books hardly sell at all.  Whereas my alter ego who has no blog, no Twitter, no Facebook, no social media presence at all, has sold lots of books.

In an entry a while back I think I mentioned how I don't really care about doing blog tours, cover reveals, etc for my books anymore.  It's the same thing where I never really saw any benefit from doing those and books where I haven't done that have actually performed better.  Which really book blogging in general is probably pretty useless unless you're someone who's famous already.

The point isn't to say that you should be a dick to everyone, but I'm just saying that it's probably not going to matter that much.  In my unscientific opinion there's no correlation between being a popular blogger and being a popular author.  So if you're worried you're not blogging enough, just relax.

Someone once asked me if you're not going to go around to hundreds of blogs to make inane comments to make "friends" then why blog at all?  I don't know.  At this point I suppose I just figure I should have some kind of online presence.  And what the hell, it gives me a soapbox to rant from on occasion.  As with many things I'm just going to try to not take it too seriously.

Recently I read this Reader Magnets book Cindy Borgne pointed me to and basically in it the guy says that social media (including blogs) is pretty much useless.  He uses Wordpress for his site but pretty much just to get Email addresses for his mailing list.  That's where (supposedly) the money is made.  With that in mind I decided to start a Wordpress site for my alter-ego, so now you can go to www.ericfiller.com and find...pretty much nothing yet.  According to this book it's important to have some books for free, which I have to wait a few days until some of my Transformed books come off KDP Select so I can put them on Draft2Digital.  By the end of the month I should have the first six off KDP Select.  (That would be Transformed Into a Little Girl, Schoolgirl, Whore, Geek Girl, Dominatrix, and Goth Girl.  The others don't expire on KDP until late August or early September.)  They don't get that many downloads from Amazon anymore, so it's not much of a gamble to offer a couple for free.  But anyway, it helps substantiate what I'm saying, that it's not all that important how popular your blog is when it comes to selling books.

BTW, today should be the last day to get Where You Belong for free.  Amazon has price-matched Chance of a Lifetime for free now, so if you never downloaded that, it's free again! 

Writing Wednesday: Hubris or When $3 Million Isn't Enough

Years ago I used to read Bill Simmons's columns on ESPN's website.  It was mostly something to do when not doing work at work.  Eventually I stopped.  For one reason because he's such a homer.  I mean come on not everything in the sports universe revolves around the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots.  The other reason though was it's like when you listen to an indie band and then all the sudden they make it big and everyone is listening to them and it's really not special anymore.  Once the dude got his mug all over TV as part of ESPN's NBA pregame show (ironic with how he used to lambast the lameness of pregame shows) and guesting on Pardon the Interruption and essentially closed down ESPN.com's Page 2 to replace it with his pretentiously named "Grantland" (which still sounds like a website dedicated to obtaining Federal grants) he got too big and I just stopped caring.

Anyway, I heard a month ago that Simmons's contract wasn't being renewed by ESPN.  Which seemed stupid from both sides.  Then I read this article from some of the competition and my jaw just hit the floor.  Mostly from the part that said he wanted to double his salary from $3 million to $6 million.

It's like, WTF is that?  $3 million isn't enough to bitch about Boston sports and make references to 80s movies?  Christ, man, you know how many people go and pay to sit in sports bars or "man caves" to do that exact fucking thing?  You or I would have to work like 60 years to make $3 million just once and that's not good enough for this guy for one year?  It's absurd!

All I could think is that either this is a ploy because he really doesn't want to work at ESPN and so had his agent pitch a ridiculous offer they would never accept, or it's just pure hubris.  The kind of hubris that ironically sports writers (and fans) are always chiding athletes about.  The kind where an athlete says, "I'm better than that guy so I should get more money!"  And damn the consequences!  I know a while back I pointed out a stupid article on Yahoo! sports that was lauding Peyton Manning for "only" wanting as much as rival quarterback Tom Brady, which was $18 million.  That heroic sacrifice still put a huge dent in the team's budget that could have been used to field a better team--one that might not have been crushed by the Seahawks in the Super Bowl--and wouldn't have needed to increase ticket prices.  But hey, what a hero for "only" wanting $18 million to spite some other guy!

I'm sure if you could travel back in time to 2000 when Bill Simmons was just starting out and said, "Hey, you think you could live on $3 million a year?" he would say, "Fuck yeah!"  But that's the problem once you start to make the big time.  All the sudden it's not enough to make a measly $3 million; you have to make sure you're getting the "respect" you deserve by having a bigger paycheck than anyone else.

Even for those of us still down in the muck this can hold true.  I used to be happy if I made $10 a month in writing sales.  I'd be ecstatic if I made $30 a month!  Now if I make less than $1000 I'm pissed off.  A lot of that has to do with needing the money to live on, but once you get a taste of bigger money you don't want to go back.  That's how money changes us.  After a while you really do start to think of it as a barometer of success, of self-worth when really you should just be happy to have a goddamned roof over your head and food in your belly and stuff.  It's the old Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where once you've got the basics covered you want more and more.

It's like if you ever watched that "Cribs" show on MTV.  I could watch about 5 minutes of that before I felt sick by the sheer avarice on display.  I mean come on that was the whole fucking point of the show:  celebrities showing off just how they can waste all the money the little people have given them.  It's hard when they're showing off their shoe closet the size of my whole apartment in a house they only use for 2 months a year not to think, "Jeez, you know how many starving people you could feed for all this?"  As awesome as it is that Jay Leno has one of every sports car ever built, there are millions of people going hungry or without a roof over their heads; the value of just one of those cars could sustain a guy like me for a couple of years!  That's where there's a disconnect between the people who perform and the people who pay for them to do so.  Yet like so many things, while we might be aware of it, we don't seem to have the stomach to try to do anything about it, which is why we complain about Wall Street and corrupt politicians and then elect more millionaires to Congress.

(Of course if I suddenly hit it big would I live like a Buddhist monk?  Fuck no.  I'd buy three different mansions so I never have to endure any bad weather and a whole fleet of cars, planes, and helicopters to get me there.  Plus my own private security force to keep the riff-raff away.)

Anyway, Simmons should take a good long look in the mirror--a gold-plated mirror in his 45-bedroom mansion with his rocket car outside.  I'm sure some desperate site will give him the millions he wants, though leaving ESPN hasn't worked out so great for a lot of people.  In a few years he might have to go crawling back like Keith Olbermann or Michelle Beadle with hat in hand to work for a paltry $2 million a year.

Oh we should all have such problems, right?

Writing Wednesday: On Authorial Bondage or The High Cost of Success

Last week on his blog, Michael Offutt talked about how money makes slaves of us all.  In a similar fashion, most of us self-published authors are slaves to Amazon.  Most of the time you don't see the chains but then sometimes Amazon decides to remind you.

About a year ago Amazon started their Kindle Unlimited service, which is sort of a Netflix for books.  You pay your $9.99 a month and you can get all the KDP Select books you want.  Some authors have complained about it, but others like me have really profited from that program.  Usually 40-60% of what I make is thanks to Kindle Unlimited borrows.  For example, in May I sold 863 books between actual sales and Unlimited borrows.  350 of those (40%) were actual sales while 513 (60%) were Unlimited borrows.

How you get paid is Amazon puts so much money in the fund for the month and then divvies it up based on how many total borrows there are for all books.  It's usually less than you'd get from an actual sale but my philosophy (especially now) is money is money.

I got some distressing news on Monday that starting next month Amazon is going to completely revise their formula to screw people like me who have profited by writing shorter books.  The new formula is instead of the number of borrows will be the number of pages read.  Which is great if you're Tolstoy or Thomas Pynchon writing 1000-page books.  But considering most of my gender swap books are 50 pages or less (which is high compared to the average) I'm going to get the royal screw thanks to this change.

If you aren't clear on the concept basically each page read is like giving you 1 share of the fund.  Someone reads my 50 page book I get 50 shares.  Whereas if someone reads a 500 page book that author gets 500 shares.  So if someone reads My Wife Changed Me Into a Pinup Girl I get 43 shares.  If someone reads Where You Belong I get 520 shares.  Or to put it another way I'd have to sell 13 of the former to equal what I'd get from one of the latter.  But which book do you suppose gets a lot more borrows?  Hurm.

Now the other caveat that's important to note is it's the number of pages READ.  This is something that should really disturb privacy advocates because it's saying that Amazon will be actively monitoring your Kindle/app so they can calculate how many pages of each book you're reading.  You don't suppose they'd ever do anything else with that information, do you?

The system right now seems fairly easy to keep track of but this new system will be impossible for authors to keep track since we don't have Amazon's NSA-type technology to eavesdrop on the millions of Kindles/phones out there.  But you can take Amazon's word for it, right?  Sure because I should definitely trust the company spying on all of its users.

Of course what I'm really annoyed about is this new system is going to cost me money.  A LOT of money I'm sure.  Because again I have to sell over a dozen smaller books to equal one larger one.  Unfortunately I need money, so this has the potential to screw me over big time.  I'm sure some smarmy person would say, "Well just write longer books."  And my response would be:

I mean really do you have any idea how many books I've written this year?  Crimeny.  But hey just make them longer!  Or I suppose I can start putting 3-4 stories together.  Or maybe I'll start putting in a lot of blank pages.  Like a blank page for every scene break!  Or like Brian Griffin's Wish It, Want It, Do It I'll leave a third of the book blank for people to write their hopes and dreams.

The only other option is to take my books out of KDP Select and start selling them through other outlets.  What's the chance I'll generate the same cash flow on Draft2Digital or Smashwords?  Not a lot I'd bet.

I guess you can say this is more fair to people who write longer books and that's certainly how Amazon was couching it.  I mean why should I get the same amount for a 43 page book as a 520 page one, right?  That doesn't seem logical, does it?  But let's be honest this isn't about "fairness" for Amazon.  What they want to do is divide the pie into smaller pieces.  I mean think of it this way:  right now they might divide the $10 million in the fund by say 10 million books sold.  So that's $1 per share.  But by using pages you split that $10 million let's say 100 million ways so you're getting a penny per share.  People like me will probably end up with a lot fewer shares and thus less money.  Which maybe that's what Amazon wants.  Maybe they want to drive people like me with my short books or people like Andrew Leon with serials out of business.  I'm not sure what that really gains them, but I don't buy the notion that a huge corporation is doing this to be "fair."  And CVS stopped selling cigarettes because they really care about your health.

It's a stern reminder of the chains binding authors to Amazon and how they can take advantage of that.  As I wrote about in a blog entry a while back, Amazon isn't your friend; they're your frenemy.  They want you to be successful--but not too successful.  Though I could remind Amazon that no one said they had to keep adding money to the fund every month.  If they didn't want to pay authors much money they could have just kept the fund at $5 million or so.

Anyway, I guess I really need to find a job.  Even burger flipping for minimum wage is more lucrative than trying to sell books, especially once July comes.

Writing Wednesday: Arguing With Yourself

On writers.net there's this one guy who has frequently gotten into arguments with me.  It was a lot more frequent when they still had an "anything goes" forum and we'd argue about politics, abortion, evolution, and all that other stuff.  He's like super-religious, so it's no surprise that that comes through on his website.

He seriously has a whole page dedicated to "The Bible & God" where he basically takes old arguments on writers.net and posts them.  What's funny to me is that each argument ends the same way, with him declaring "victory" by saying, "I never heard from [so-and-so] again."  As if the fact someone stops arguing with you means that you're right and won the argument.  All it means is the other person got sick of pointless fighting and quit.  That doesn't make you right; it makes you stubborn.  Even I can get sick of arguing with someone after a while.  I wouldn't say they won or they're right.  Actually I'd say such a person is just too damned stupid to know he's wrong.

There's another page where he shows his skills as an editor by again pasting stuff from writers.net that he critiqued.  The thing is, he didn't ask permission of the authors before he did this.  I think that's kind of unethical, but when I pointed this out the site moderator shrugged and said, "Meh."  I personally would not want someone taking something I had submitted to be critiqued and posting it to their personal website.  I mean sure I posted it to a website, but that doesn't mean I want it out there for just any schmuck anywhere to read.  It seems like a violation to me, but if the site moderator isn't going to do anything, and no one else is complaining, what can you do?

Monday he put a sample of mine in there.  Of course without permission, though I suppose he did notify me in advance, so that's something. I guess I could say no, but I'm not sure that would have mattered.

The writing questions thing I think is largely the same.  Really he cribbed most of the content for his site from another website.  It's like his "greatest hits" from those message boards.  Which I did that once upon a time in the 90s.  I copied a bunch of old posts from my flame wars on a Transformers newsgroup (one of those old pre-World Wide Web newsgroups) and put them on a web page.  Mostly I just wanted to preserve my brilliant thoughts, though I have no idea where they went and I'm sure that old page has been taken down by AOL or Geocities or wherever the hell it was.  I'd go find my greatest hits on writers.net but I don't really remember the stuff I say.  Someone once referenced something I'd said that I guess was really funny and I was like, "Did I say that?"

Of course if you want to hear my volumes of wisdom you can always go read my old blogs.  In the meantime, what do you think about harvesting message board posts for your author website?  Yay or nay?  You'd better answer in the comments or otherwise I win.

Writing Wednesday: The Decline of P.T. Dilloway or How I Got Into Erotica

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Writing Wednesday: Imitiaton Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery or Ain't Life a Bitch?

As a long-time reviewer of crap on Amazon and Vine Voice(tm) and Amazon Prime member and stuff like that, I get offered free shit sometimes.  Like once a month Amazon picks out 4 of their upcoming books to offer for free on Kindle and I can download two.  I've done that a few times and the books usually suck.

Anyway, one of April's selections was called Boundary Crossed, which sounded like generic urban fantasy crap I have no interest in.  I was curious if it was about vampires or witches or angels or mermaids or what (vampires) and the first part of the description is this:

"The third time I died was early on a Monday morning, a week after Labor Day." As opening sentences go, that one is nothing less than awesome. I was hooked.

And I thought, hey that first line seems really familiar.  I've read something like that before.  I racked my brain for a couple of minutes and then went to check out a book on Amazon.  And yup, here's the opening line:

"Last night I died for the third time this week..."

That book is of course Oculus by Michael Offutt.  It was published in 2011, 4 years earlier!  I'm not saying it's plagiarism or anything, but it is a big coincidence.  And really Editor Person of the other book, I have to say Mr. Offutt's sentence is better.  It's a lot less bulky.  I mean the other sentence is a passive sentence whereas the one in Oculus is far more direct and active.  But hey, I guess that editor is blown away by passive sentences.

Anyway, did you ever see that movie Sliding Doors where Gwyneth Paltrow is racing to catch a subway train or something and they show two different outcomes, one where she makes it and one where she doesn't?  I think it's the version where she makes the train that turns out happy.  Or maybe not.  That's kind of how the writing world can work.  I mean, have you ever written something and then two weeks later you see a book or movie that's pretty much the same thing?  Like in 1995 I wrote a book called First Contact and the next year Star Trek:  First Contact comes out!

The point being two writers have two different books with similar opening sentences.  One book gets published by Amazon with all the marketing hoopla.  The other...not so much.  It's certainly not that the one book is bad and the other is good.  It's just that sometimes Fate is bullshit and you aren't at the right place at the right time.

The worst part is knowing there isn't shit you can do about it--except maybe throw more vampires in your book.

Writing Wednesday: Disproportionate Responses

There's that old saying that the punishment should fit the crime.  In books, TV, movies, etc that's not always the case, is it?  Think of that famous Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith where he survives a nuclear blast in a bank vault because he went down there to read so no one would give him shit about it.  Now the last man on Earth (or his neck of the woods) he finds a bunch of books and gleefully says, "There's time now!  All the books I want!"  And then his glasses fall off and the lenses break.  D'OH!  I always feel bad because really what did the poor guy do to be tortured like that?  He just wanted to read some goddamned books.

A bad review for my book My Wife Changed Me Into a Pinup Girl was titled, "he loved her, so she tortured him."  A succinct, albeit inaccurate way to describe the plot.  I described the plot in my P A to Z Challenge post.  The gist is that an old woman gets a couple of magic crystals and uses them to turn her husband into a 60s pinup girl he had been ogling in an antiques shop.

Now is being turned into a sexy young woman really a proportionate response for him checking out a hot chick on an old magazine cover?  I don't think anyone would say that it is.  Then again is going from a 70-something-year-old guy to that girl on the cover really such a punishment?  We should all be "tortured" like that.

Admittedly after that the wife lets her newfound power go to her head a bit and does a few other things to the husband to act out some naughty bedroom fantasies.  You could think of it as releasing 30 years of pent-up sexual frustration.  Still, probably not a proportionate response.

I can think of two other recent responses.  In another bad review, someone complained about my book Transformed Into a Pregnant Girl that the nasty woman who turned her boyfriend into a pregnant girl didn't show him any mercy.  To which my response would be, well he did kinda strangle her to death.  So, you know, you die and make a deal with the devil to come back to life, you might not be in the most forgiving mood either.

A more recent example would be Transformed for Mother's Day.  Every year Joe's wife gets super-duper pissed-off on Mother's Day because she can't have any babies.  So this year Joe decides he's going to sneak out for a little fishing before she can wake up.  That's when she reveals that she's a witch and decides to make Joe into her cute daughter Jo to have the perfect Mother's Day.

Does ditching your wife on Mother's Day really deserve being turned into a young girl and forced to do things like make her breakfast in bed and pictures out of macaroni and glitter?  Yeah, probably not.

But then if characters were all sane and rational, where would you get any drama?  If Burgess Meredith can just sit around reading books, then where's the message about Man's folly in destroying himself with nuclear weapons?

Sometimes you just have to go nuclear.

Writing Wednesday: The Art & The Artist

At the end of March I got into a feud with a couple of (former) associates because one had given a third associate a bad review.  I don't like naming names, but you can find out all about it here.  Anyway, it was pretty pointless because you can't convince a jerk he's a jerk.  I mean people have been trying to convince me for 20 years and it still hasn't worked.

At one point the party in question said basically, "I only gave her book a bad review; it's not like I said anything bad about her."  Which I always think is a lame dodge.  This idea that the art and artist are somehow not one and the same strikes me as a copout so someone can justify being an asshole.  Again, I've probably done it myself a few times.

It's kind of sad when another writer says this, because he should know better.  If you've written a book then you know how long it takes--just ask Game of Thrones fans about that--and how much effort it requires.  It's not something you just toss off and forget about, not even when you've written as many books as I have.

All right, so it takes a lot of work to make a book.  And after all that work, who wants some jerk to come along and say, "That sucks?"  Especially when it's a jerk you know and whom you've been collaborating with for over a year.  Can you imagine if da Vinci finished the Mona Lisa and then some buddy of his walked by and said, "Boy that really sucks.  Why isn't she smiling more?"

But hey, don't take it personal because I'm just saying your work sucks, not you.  Like in The Godfather, it's nothing personal, just business.  Uh-huh, sure.  Where I come from, you're supposed to take pride in your work.  Even when your work is something fairly ridiculous like this:

I still took the time and effort to pull that story out of my brain and put it down on the screen and then send it out into the world.  Even if it's not my name on the cover, it's still my work.  Even if it's a ridiculous story, I still take writing it seriously.  So when someone says something bad about it, I get pissed off like they said something bad about me.  My books are a part of me; they're part of who I am.

But maybe you're a cold-blooded Vulcan or android or something and don't have emotions.  You can disagree in the comments, but be warned; I take blog writing seriously too.