Sunday, September 29, 2013

Post mortem: Banned Books Week 2013.

From the organizers, as tweaked by Kriss Morton.

Yesterday was the final day of this year's Banned Books Week. In my usual timely manner, I'm late to the party. My justification for talking about it now is that, like most observances of this sort, we should be vigilant about the suppression of books, and the ideas in them, all year long.

And not only because I fully expect the Pipe Woman Chronicles will make the list one of these days, if I ever get famous enough.

Look at any list of banned books, in any given year, and you'll find entries from the sublime to the ridiculous.Take the 2012 list. I mean, okay, Fifty Shades of S&M makes sense. Right? But Toni Morrison's Beloved won a Pulitzer, for gods' sake, and Morrison herself won the Nobel for literature in 1992. And what's the deal with Captain Underpants, anyway? [A pause while I go googling...] Hmm, okay, I get it now. It's subversive -- the kids disobey authority. Never mind that our nation was founded by a bunch of guys who disobeyed authority.

But I digress.

Tor.com ran a series of blog posts about banned books this week, and one of them talked about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. Like many sci-fi and fantasy novels that tackle religion, Pullman sets his series in what amounts to an alternate universe. The "evil overlords" are represented by Mrs. Coulter, but it's clear that what Pullman is really jabbing at is organized religion -- a point that was not lost on the Catholic League when "The Golden Compass," the movie version of the first book, was released in 2007. The group mounted a protest against the books, saying they were "written to promote atheism and denigrate Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism."

Pullman more or less copped to the charge in an interview with the Guardian after he won a major British literary prize, the Whitbread, in 2002. In it, he said:
The original impulses of the great religious geniuses -- with whom I include Jesus -- were, as often as not, something that all of us would benefit from studying and living by. The churches and priesthoods would benefit more than most, but they dare not.... [I]n my view, belief in God seems to be a very good excuse, on the part of those who claim to believe, for doing many wicked things that they wouldn't feel justified in doing without such a belief.
(That's not far too afield from where the Pipe Woman Chronicles end up. Alas, my series lacks Pullman's subtlety. But I digress again.)

The fight against book banning, and in favor of free speech, has been going on pretty much forever, and no one expects it to end any time soon. Whenever an author -- whether it be Dav Pilkey (who wrote the Captain Underpants books) or Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) or Philip Pullman or Toni Morrison -- tweaks the nose of someone in authority, authority is going to try to silence that author. That's why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is the first amendment: to protect those who dare to speak truth to power.

***
Thanks to those of you who took advantage of the free days this week and downloaded the first two Land, Sea, Sky stories. Please stick around -- there's more to come. The third story, "Prophecy," will go live next month, and the first draft of Crosswind is officially in the can.  I've got a Pinterest board set up already, too, for the gods and goddesses in the new series. Why, yes, September has been a busy month...

***
These moments of unbanned blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Tweet test: the results.

Last week, you may remember, I rambled on for a while about how my Twitter feed was filling up with "buy my book" tweets and retweets, and suggested maybe we should all quit doing it, inasmuch as it alienates followers and doesn't sell books.

After reading some of the comments to that post, I decided to try a little test. Last Wednesday, I released the second of three Land, Sea, Sky short stories, Change of Plans. So on Thursday, I programmed HootSuite to promote the book by sending out one tweet an hour, from midnight to midnight -- 24 tweets in all.

Here's a screen shot of what my Twitter profile looked like that day. I'll spare you the repetition of all 24 tweets. (This isn't the most egregious use of Twitter I've ever heard of; I read about one self-pubbed author who programmed tweets to go out every 15 minutes.)

Granted that it's not the most cogently-written tweet ever, and #PipeWomanChronicles and #LandSeaSky aren't exactly trending hashtags (although not for lack on trying on my part, at least in the case of the Pipe Woman Chronicles). And it's a short story, which tends not to sell as well. And I offered it for 99 cents, not for free. But if Twitter were a viable advertising platform, you'd think I'd get some action out of my tweet blitz, wouldn't you?

Do you want to know how many copies of Change of Plans I sold on Thursday? Exactly one. And that sale may be attributable to my posting the link on the Thrifty Thursday feature at Indies Unlimited the same day, forgetting momentarily that I was doing the Twitter test. (In my defense, I hadn't had any coffee yet.)

I also should have checked whether I lost any followers because of my wall-to-wall Twitnoise. Alas, I forgot to note my pre- and post-test follower numbers -- and anyway, that, too, might have been skewed by a Twitter follow-fest we did at IU last week. (No, I'm not doing another tweet barrage to find out for sure.) I do have one anecdotal report, however: one of my daughter Kat's friends, who also follows me, asked Kat what was going on. Upon learning that it was a test, she told Kat that if it hadn't been, she would have unfollowed me.

If you need more evidence, this rant came to my attention today.  In it, a gentleman opines about how self-published authors are "destroying literature" (the maroon's words, not mine) by publishing unvetted dreck and -- wait for it -- clogging up social media with "buy my book" posts and tweets. (Apparently there's a #buymybook hashtag. I don't know why that surprised me.)

I hear you: "So if I can't use social media for advertising my book, what's it good for?" My friends, you can find the answer in the word "social". Don't just shout at people; aim to start a conversation. It's not hard! Here's what you do:
  1. Set up your Twitter profile properly. K.S. Brooks posted a tutorial last year at IU about how to get both your website's or blog's URL and your Amazon Author Page URL into your profile. Read her post here. Then go to your Twitter profile and fix it. Do it now, while you're thinking about it. Go ahead -- I'll wait.
  2. Back already? See, that didn't take long. Now make a quick list of things in your book that you could tweet about. The Pipe Woman Chronicles were rife with stuff I could work into tweets: the locales (Denver, the Pine Ridge Reservation), the people (Native Americans), the events, and the gods. A secondary theme of Fissured is hydraulic fracturing, so I sometimes post about that. Last week, I shared a link to a re-imagining of many of the Yoruba gods and goddesses, because Oya sends a human representative to the Big Mediation in Annealed. Your book is a standard romance? Then tweet about romance. Your book's a thriller? Tweet about real-life events that inspired you or that remind you of your plot.
  3. In addition to that, I'll tweet links to writing-related blog posts that I've found interesting. And occasionally, I'll post* random stuff that made me laugh.
So how does this sell books? If a follower thinks you're sufficiently interesting and/or entertaining, they will check out your profile to learn more about you. And I don't know about you, but I almost always click through to a person's profile before I follow them on Twitter. And -- hey presto! -- now your profile sports a link to your Amazon Author Page, so people can go there and look at your work. And precisely because you haven't been hitting them over the head with "buy my book" links, they're more likely to buy one of your books -- and tell their friends and followers what a great writer you are, on top of being entertaining, and maybe then those people will buy one of your books. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You don't think it works that way? Tell it to Hugh Howey. Wool got to be a bestseller by word of mouth. You've got nothing to lose by giving it a try.

*Dirty little secret: I have my Facebook fan page linked to my Twitter feed, so anything I post on my fan page goes automatically to Twitter.

***
In other news: The first draft of Crosswind should be done tomorrow -- huzzah! That means the book is on track for a late November release.

Thanks very much to those who've purchased Change of Plans! And please watch your spam filter e-mail inbox (I have no illusions here!) this week for an extremely belated newsletter.

Happy Mabon, everyone.

***
This is a test of the hearth/myth blog by Lynne Cantwell. This is ONLY a test. Do not adjust your set.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Reducing Twitnoise: A modest proposal.

StartBloggingOnline.com | Creative Commons
I hope I don't get myself drummed out of the indie author corps for this post.

I dislike Twitter. There, I said it. And yet, it ought to be a natural for me, because broadcast news requires short sentences of 10 or 20 words, in subject-verb-object order. I'm used to conveying ideas in quick bites that are easily understood by a distracted listener.

Moreover, a reasonably-sized slice of my broadcasting career was devoted to writing "bumpers" -- one-line promos about the next story or stories that are designed to pique your interest so that you stick around through the commercials.

So I should be gravitating to Twitter. But I hate it. Why? Because I feel like every time I'm there, somewhere around 87% of my tweet stream consists of people trying to sell me something. Oh, it's not all blatant "buy my book" tweets; often it's people retweeting other people's "buy my book" tweets.  To make matters worse (for me), there are a number of apps that will not only filter out the dreck from your own feed, but will allow you to schedule your "buy my book" tweets, as well as "buy this other guy's book" tweets, as often as you want, all day long, for weeks into the future.

If you, too, are an indie author, you probably already know this. And you've probably been petitioned, cajoled, and/or coerced into either sending your own advertising tweets or retweeting somebody else's. Right?

Here's what bothers me. See, I'm not a public relations professional: I'm not paid specifically to sell other people's stuff for them. Mind you, P.R. is an honorable profession -- it's just not what I get paid to do. I'm an author. And as an author, I believe (maybe wrongly!) that I have a reputation to uphold. I want readers and other indies to associate my name with a certain level of quality. And so if I'm recommending that someone click on a link I've posted on Facebook or tweeted on Twitter, I want them to know that I've vetted the material at the link, and I think it will be worth my followers' time to check out.

So when somebody hands me a list of tweets from people I met five minutes ago and says, "Here, tweet these, and then we'll all tweet one for you," I resist. I haven't read any books by any of these people; I don't know whether I can recommend them or not.

I had someone tell me this week, "It's just a retweet. People will know you haven't read the book."  Really? I'm sending out a tweet under my name, with my picture on it, and people won't think it's a personal recommendation?

Do we have any figures on whether "buy my/his/her book" tweets actually sell books? Any proof that this tactic does anything other than annoy people with Twitnoise (a word I just coined -- do you like it?)? If so, please let me know and I will reconsider my prejudice against the practice.

But if it annoys people *and* it doesn't sell any books, why do we keep doing it?

***
Speaking of self-promotion (and yes, I get the irony): Coming out this week will be the second of the "Land, Sea, Sky" prologue stories. In "Where Were You When?" last month, I introduced you to Tess Showalter, who's on the verge of becoming a journalist ("Gee, Murgatroyd, I wonder where Lynne got that idea from?"); this month, in "Change of Plans," our main character is Darrell Warren, a nice guy whose life is about to do a 180-degree turn courtesy of a certain rabbit-eared god. I hope you'll check out both of them on Amazon.

Also, I'm making good progress on Crosswind, the first LSS novel. The first draft passed 40,000 words early this morning -- whoo hoo! I'm hoping to finish it by this time next weekend, but that's probably too optimistic. We'll see, though.

***
This moment of cranky Twitter blogginess is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Ghosts in the machine, and other stuff.

Alert readers of my Facebook page will know that work has begun on the first draft of Crosswind, Book One of Land, Sea, Sky. I'm now up to almost 25,000 words, after a good 5,000-word day yesterday. The first LSS short story -- "Where Were You When?" -- came out a couple of weeks ago.  I'm thinking I'll release the second one, which is called "Change of Plans," right around the fall equinox; the third, "Prophecy," will be out in mid- to late October.

Anyway, progress has been made on the new book -- which made for an interesting morning today, when I booted up the computer and noticed my usual background was gone. Then I noticed a bunch of my desktop icons were gone. And then I tried to open my e-mail program and found all my e-mails were gone. And all my bookmarks were gone from Firefox, too. Aieee.... I spent some time doing damage control instead of writing, and then I shut the computer down and went to book club. When I got back tonight, I restarted the beast -- and everything's back where was last night: icons, e-mails, bookmarks, all fixed.

I have absolutely no idea what happened. One of life's little mysteries, I guess.  The good news is that I didn't lose any of my data files -- which means I still have all 25,000-ish words of Crosswind. Whew.

In less personal news, the Apple price-fixing case is over -- at least until Apple files an appeal. This past week, US District Judge Denise Cote handed down Apple's sentence: the company cannot enter into so-called "most favored nation" agreements with any publishers; and it is prohibited from sharing a publisher's information with a competitor, including information about promotions and pricing. The court will set up a compliance monitor to make sure Apple is toeing the line. Interestingly enough, the decision applies only to e-books; Apple's strategies in relation to music and apps were not affected. Judge Cote said she didn't want to stifle innovation in those markets.

Thanks to this whole mess, you probably received an e-mail this week from your favorite e-book retailer, outlining the terms of your refund(s) due from the publishers who were charged with price-fixing along with Apple, but which settled rather than go to trial. According to the e-mails I received, it looks like Amazon and Nook will credit your refund to your account, while Sony will send out checks. I haven't bought any e-books from Kobo, so I didn't get an e-mail from them. If you did, please leave a note in the comments; I'm interested to know what all the affected retailers are doing. I also didn't receive an e-mail from iBooks, but maybe they're waiting for the trial to conclude before they begin setting up any refund machinery.

Speaking of Amazon, it has recently instituted a program called MatchBook. If you've ever bought a hard-copy book from Amazon since it was founded in 1995, you can now buy the ebook version for no more than $2.99. Sounds like a great deal if you're interested in digitizing your whole library, right? The problem is that very few trad publishers are taking part -- according to Digital Book World, only HarperCollins has signed up thus far. Amazon's publishing imprints are playing, of course. And so is Kindle Direct Publishing, which is the platform indies use to get their books onto Amazon, so I've enrolled SwanSong and the Pipe Woman Chronicles in MatchBook. I expect I'll do the same for the LSS novels.

The vast majority of my sales are e-books, so I don't expect to see huge financial rewards from the MatchBook program. But hey, if you bought a paperback of any of my novels and you're thinking of getting a Kindle, it's nice to know that the e-books won't cost you a fortune.

***
This moment of calm-after-the-panic blogginess is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

One-book wonders.

image copyright most likely held by the 20th Century Fox
from Wikipedia
In the music business, to continue the theme of last week's post (and to attempt a clever segue), a term became popular in the '60s to describe bands that had just one good song in them. They were known as "one-hit wonders." If you've ever seen the movie "That Thing You Do!" with Tom Hanks, you'll get the significance of this term. Hanks played a music promoter in the wake of the British invasion in the 1960s. His job was to find garage bands with a marketable sound, and give them a record contract.

The Oneders -- whose name Hanks's character changed to the Wonders because nobody could figure out how to pronounce the original -- were signed on the strength of their song "That Thing You Do!" They toured the state fair circuit, playing to screaming fans, with Hanks's character orchestrating their every move.  But when it came time to record another song, the band fell apart -- and the promoter went on to find the next potential big thing.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, perhaps inadvertently, tapped into this idea in a blog post this week. She was attempting to explain the difference she saw between writers who want to make a living at fiction writing, and those whose aim is mainly to tick "get published" off their bucket list. That's probably more flippant a description than those writers deserve, which is likely why Rusch had so much trouble coming up with a term for them.  "Hobbyist writer" doesn't cover it, any more than "amateur" would; after all, these writers do sometimes make money from their novels.  And many of them are perfectly adequate writers who pay attention to their craft. Sometimes they have ideas for two books, or even more than two books. But one thing delineates them from the career writer: they are focused on the goal of having their book accepted by a traditional publisher. They want to see their work on a bookstore shelf. They want to be able to hold their book in their own two hands and see their name on the cover. They want to be published

Rusch dubs these folks "one-book writers."

Sometimes, she says, a one-book writer believes it's impossible to make a living at writing. Sometimes it's that the writer has other interests he or she would rather pursue. In any case, she says, the vast majority of the writers she has met over the course of her career have met this definition.

By contrast, she says, career writers view the business of writing very differently:
The career writer is in this for the long haul. She has dozens if not hundreds of books in her. She wants to make a living—a good living—from writing those books. Her goals are twofold: to have books in print, yes, but more than that. This writer wants to spend her life telling stories and/or sharing information.
She’s not in it for accolades or wealth, although those are nice side benefits. She’s not in it to get tenure or to show her literary bona fides. She needs to make the rent and do so while pursuing a non-traditional career. That takes planning and foresight, and an ability to roll with the punches.
- See more at: http://kriswrites.com/2013/08/28/the-business-rusch-a-career-versus-publication/#sthash.Jfa6OXla.dpuf
The career writer is in this for the long haul. She has dozens if not hundreds of books in her. She wants to make a living -- a good living -- from writing those books. Her goals are twofold: to have books in print, yes, but more than that. This writer wants to spend her life telling stories and/or sharing information.

She's not in it for accolades or wealth, although those are nice side benefits. She's not in it to get tenure or to show her literary bona fides. She needs to make the rent and do so while pursuing a non-traditional career. That takes planning and foresight, and an ability to roll with the punches.
I realized, while reading this description, that I've been straddling the fence for quite a while. I've said here before that I'm on a seven-year plan, and that I hope to make enough money from my writing to retire before that seven years is up.  Now I realize that at some point in this journey, if I'm serious about making a living from my writing, I'm going to have to give up the day job. I'm not there financially -- yet. But it's time for me to start planning for that day.

Another observation Rusch makes is that most of the writing advice you find on the web is aimed at the one-book writer. It's either for people starting out in the writing business, or for people who are seeking that elusive contract. They want to tick "published author" off their bucket list. And they want to do it "legitimately," in the time-honored manner, with a "real" contract from a "real publisher."

These people, Rusch implies, will never be happy as indies.  Because they've been led to believe (often by other one-book writers!) that it's impossible to make a living as a writer, they don't expect to. So the idea of learning to publish and market their own work doesn't make any sense to them, even if they could make a living at it. The concept of living off their writing income seems crass or vulgar. If their work doesn't sell, it simply means the public doesn't understand them -- not that either: a) their work stinks, to put it bluntly, or b) they don't know how to find their readers and market their work to them, and they won't bother to learn.

I know it's possible to make a living from one's writing; I did it for 20 years. But I confess that I've been buying into the idea that one can't make a living from writing fiction unless you're extremely lucky, the way J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are lucky. But you know what? Maybe all it takes to make a living at writing fiction is to have a lot of books for sale, and to market the hell out of them.

So I'm spending this Labor Day weekend making a dent in the word count for Crosswind, the first "Land, Sea, Sky" book, and I'm going to be packaging some of my other work in different ways for the upcoming holidays. It's nearing the end of Year One of the Grand Seven-Year Plan, and I'm going to start putting stuff out there and seeing what sells.

***
These moments of bloggy determination are brought to you, as a public service, by .
The career writer is in this for the long haul. She has dozens if not hundreds of books in her. She wants to make a living—a good living—from writing those books. Her goals are twofold: to have books in print, yes, but more than that. This writer wants to spend her life telling stories and/or sharing information.
She’s not in it for accolades or wealth, although those are nice side benefits. She’s not in it to get tenure or to show her literary bona fides. She needs to make the rent and do so while pursuing a non-traditional career. That takes planning and foresight, and an ability to roll with the punches.
- See more at: http://kriswrites.com/2013/08/28/the-business-rusch-a-career-versus-publication/#sthash.Jfa6OXla.dpuf
The career writer is in this for the long haul. She has dozens if not hundreds of books in her. She wants to make a living—a good living—from writing those books. Her goals are twofold: to have books in print, yes, but more than that. This writer wants to spend her life telling stories and/or sharing information.
She’s not in it for accolades or wealth, although those are nice side benefits. She’s not in it to get tenure or to show her literary bona fides. She needs to make the rent and do so while pursuing a non-traditional career. That takes planning and foresight, and an ability to roll with the punches.
- See more at: http://kriswrites.com/2013/08/28/the-business-rusch-a-career-versus-publication/#sthash.Jfa6OXla.dpuf