How many books a year is too many?

Is the whole dust-up a load of sheep?
You decide.

Because I only blog here once a week, sometimes I miss the opportunity to talk about an issue when it's hot. By the time I get around to talking about it on Sunday night, everybody has already weighed in and moved on, and it feels like talking about it here will just rip off the scab.

Sometimes -- but not often -- it keeps me from talking about the issue at all. This week, as usual, it won't.

So here's the thing: Last Sunday, indie author Lorraine Devon Wilke wrote an article for the Huffington Post in which she basically told indie authors to slow down. Her post breaks with the advice-mongers who have been telling indies for the past few years that the way to success on the indie train is to write a lot of books and shove 'em out there. How many is a lot? She quotes one source who quotes some indies as saying they write and publish four books a year. Lorraine said in her post that four might well be too many for some folks -- that that sort of publishing schedule doesn't leave a lot of time for letting the prose ripen, working diligently with an editor to make the book the very best it can be, finding a cover artist, mapping out and executing an effective marketing strategy, and all the rest of the stuff that goes into making a book. 

I'm convinced she meant well. I believe she believed she was letting writers off the hook -- that people were feeling pressured to keep to some grueling, arbitrary publishing schedule and were freaking out and releasing their books before their time. She wanted those authors to know it's okay to write and publish more slowly.

But y'know, it's teh intarwebz. If people can get offended, they will. Some folks felt the tone of the article was condescending -- that perhaps Lorraine didn't believe anyone could turn out quality prose so quickly, and that maybe even she believed that the only sort of books worth writing were those slow, meandering, literary novels with exquisite words strung together in exquisite ways but with no actual plot to speak of.

I am pretty sure she didn't intend to say any of that, but that's what a number of folks got out of it. Chuck Wendig, who has had a fair amount of success with his own books lately, weighed in on Tuesday, suggesting the best course of action was this: You do you. In other words, write as many books as you're comfortable with, and take however long or short a time makes you comfortable doing it. My fellow minion at Indies Unlimited, Shawn Inmon, said much the same thing in a post on Thursday. I'm sure other bloggers piled on, as well, but those are the ones I saw.

By the time Shawn's post ran, Lorraine had gotten the message and then some. She posted a follow-up on her own blog Tuesday, saying that even when she tried to clarify her post at HuffPo, people got mad all over again. Like I said, it's teh intarwebz.

So what's my take? As I said above, I think Lorraine meant well. And all of the posts I read -- even Lorraine's -- came to same conclusion: Your publishing schedule is nobody's business but yours. You should publish as many books per year as you feel capable of producing without the product suffering in some major way. That doesn't mean your work has to be worthy of winning a National Book Award. But if you write slowly, own it. If you write fast, own it. If you write genre, own it. You do you, as Chuck says, and don't let the people with well-meaning advice tell you any differently. Indie Author Land is a big, big place, and there's room enough here for all of us.

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I'm still on track for my usual and customary three books per year, by the way. I have a little more work to do on the first draft of a companion guide to the Pipe Woman Chronicles books. It will feature some extra info about each of the gods and goddesses in the ten books of the series. I expect to make it a stand-alone book, and I'll probably also include it in the Pipe Woman Legacy set, which will be out sometime in November.

I had meant to make the companion guide a leisurely summer project, and write a new novel this fall. But when I blinked, it was mid-September. Ah, well. I won't have a big novel launch for the holidays, so maybe I'll do NaNoWriMo in November and have something fresh to start off the new year. I'll keep you posted.

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These moments of sheepish blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

How much would you pay for a verified page?

An odd thing happened to me this week. All of a sudden, out of the blue, I started getting a ton of likes on my Facebook page.

I'm not the sort of writer (yet!) whose fans are racing to sign up for my Facebook page. Oh, I get a few new fans every now and then -- and I love each and every one of you! Have I mentioned that recently?

Anyway, the point is that my page typically doesn't attract likes in droves. The only time I get a lot of action is when I participate in a like-fest, either at Indies Unlimited (where we run them pretty regularly) or some other group where participants agree to like each other's pages. When that happens, I can tell where the likes are coming from, because I recognize the names.

But this week, I got a whole bunch of new likes -- all from India and Pakistan, as near as I could tell, and none of them were names I recognized. I wondered what was going on. I know I haven't sold enough books there to account for that much attention.

Then I started getting messages from people I'd never heard of: "Hey i am ur fan...plz help me...I Want To Be A Editor on yr Page...I will xchange for thousands of likes!!!" Stuff like that.

At that point, it all came clear. These people weren't fans at all. They'd likely never heard of me. What they wanted was my verified page.

See, Facebook doesn't give that little blue checkmark out to everybody -- only to people with pages whose identities they have verified. And even then, you have to be an American. And even then, not everybody gets one. (Frankly, I have no idea why they gave me one. I suspect they looked at my LinkedIn profile and saw I'd worked at CNN and Mutual/NBC Radio News once upon a time.)

So my guess is that some folks on the other side of the world have hit on a brilliant (to them) idea: Contact the admins of verified pages and pester them for access to the back end. Everybody wants likes, right? So offer hundreds of fake likes in exchange for that access. No, thousands! A million!

One guy claimed he was trying to set up a verified page for Kristen Stewart -- who, as an American and an honest-to-goodness celebrity, wouldn't need to hire some guy in Pakistan to do it for her. Another guy asked me to apply for a verified page for him. I tried to explain why that wouldn't work -- Facebook would need to verify his identity, not mine, and I'm not going to submit a fake ID with a US address on his behalf. I think that's when he offered me the million likes.

As entertaining as all of this is -- and it is -- it's also kind of...hmm. Worse than surprising, but not quite all the way to horrifying. Let's call it "causes concern." Because if someone asks you to break the rules to get into the back end of your page, it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not going to play nice with it once they have access. Here's what an editor can do on a Facebook page:

Can edit the Page, send messages and publish as the Page, create ads, see which admin created a post or comment, and view insights.

In other words, if I'd let that guy in, he could have changed stuff on my page, spammed it with his crap, created spammy ads and had Facebook charge me for them, and on and on. And who would Facebook come after? Not Editor Boy, that's for sure.

So far, "Go away or I'll report you to Facebook" has been working pretty well as a deterrent. I hope I don't have to get to the point of blocking whole countries from liking my page. Some day I might have actual fans there.

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These moments of bloggy concern have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Are editors negative people?

I saw an intriguing topic in a LinkedIn group a couple of weeks back. The title was something like, "Editors spend all their time finding other people's errors. Does that make them negative people?"

Gee, I hope not. Because Kat, Suzu, and I are officially hanging out our shingles (at long last!) as honest-to-goodness editor-type people. We kicked around a bunch of names, and concepts for names, and finally I just said, "Let's call it hearth/myth since it's kind of a brand already." So that's what we're calling it: hearth/myth editorial services. Or Hearth/Myth Editorial Services, if you want us to go all title case on you. Here's the logo (drumroll, please):

There's a tab up top that will take you to our bios. And there's contact info there, too, in case you're intrigued enough to want more information.

But getting back to this idea that editors might be negative people: I don't think that's true at all. And I know several authors who also do editing work, and they're actually very pleasant people. Detail-oriented, for sure. Funny, occasionally. Interested in helping others make their work look as good as it can, definitely. That's certainly what we're aiming for.

Now news editors might be a different story. Those folks are usually working under a tight deadline, so they're not going to suffer fools gladly. Still, I wouldn't call them negative -- just busy. Harried. And again, generally nice folks once the deadline is past.

I saw the link to that discussion in an email, and saved it because I didn't have time to read the thread right then. Now I wish I had moved faster, because the whole thing seems to have disappeared. I'd be interested to hear what you all think: Do negative people gravitate to editorial work? Or do editors become angry, cranky people because of the work they do? Or...? 

I promise we'll take any horror stories as object lessons.

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I've still got some free copies of The Maidens' War to give away. Let me know if you're interested. Thanks!

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These moments of bloggy editorializing have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell

Our West Virginia vacation, and hey! Another contest!

Most of us, I suspect, have a place or two in the world that we revisit over and over again. Either its natural beauty speaks to us, or we associate it with good times, or both.

Alert readers of hearth/myth know Colorado is one of those places for me. Another one is Pipestem Resort State Park in southern West Virginia. I even set my first book, The Maidens' War, there. And that's where my daughter Kat and I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago.

The first time I went to Pipestem, I was in my twenties and working in the news department of WKEE-FM in Huntington, WV ("KEE 100 FM -- it's a monster!"). The West Virginia Associated Press Broadcasters Association held its annual meeting at Pipestem for a couple of years running. Every time we went, my co-workers and I would talk about how beautiful it was, and how we wanted to go back in the summertime when everything was open -- including the lodge at the bottom of the Bluestone River Gorge, the one where the only way in or out is by riding the 3,600-foot-long aerial tram. It's a steep trip -- you gain about 1,100 feet in elevation from bottom to top.

Try hauling a suitcase across that.

To be fair, there's a trail, too. But you wouldn't want to haul your luggage down the trail. It's five-and-a-quarter miles long, downhill all the way, and you have to ford the river at the end of it to get to the lodge. Better to pack light and take your stuff down on the tram.

Anyway, some years later, when Kat and Amy were small, I remembered Pipestem. It's only about a four-hour drive from DC and the rates were extremely reasonable. Plus back then, the park threw in some nice perks for lodge guests: free admission to the pools, free tennis, and free mini-golf. Not to mention the free tram rides for guests staying at the lodge down in the gorge. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but free is my favorite price. Plus at the time, I was pretty much broke. So we stayed at the lodge, ate lunches out of a cooler and dinners at the snack bar, did all the free stuff, and had a great time.

I've lost track of how many times we've been back since then. Once, we got a cottage and brought Suzu along. Another time, I dropped the kids off at college and went by myself; I hiked every day, including the five-mile downhill run with the walk across the river at the end, and drafted the outline for The Maidens' War.

The tram stop at Mountain Creek Lodge.

This most recent trip wasn't anything that momentous -- which, after the year I've had so far, was perfect. Kat went with me -- Amy had to work -- and all we did was read books, sit on our balcony, and ride the tram up to get lunch at the other lodge. Very restful.

You're waiting for the contest part, aren't you? Okay. It's easy. I'm not even going to do an annoying Rafflecopter this time.

The Maidens' War gets no love at all. It's my first book, published by a small press, and nobody ever reads it. The poor thing has only one review on Amazon. So I'm offering a free Kindle copy to the first five people who ask for one.

Also, I picked up two fun Pipestem souvenirs while we were there earlier this month. If you post a review of the book at Amazon, send me a message (email or Facebook or here on the blog -- wherever) and I will send you one of them. But you have to be one of the first two people to post a review.

Got it? Okay. In sum:

• Free Kindle copy of The Maidens' War to the first 5 people who ask.
• Pipestem tchotchke for the first 2 people who post a review at Amazon.

While you're deciding whether to play, here's a video of one of our tram rides this year. Flora, fauna, a view of part of that five-mile downhill trail, and massive rattly noises as our tram car goes over the support towers. Enjoy! And good luck!

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These moments of bloggy vacation memories have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.