Christopher D. Schmitz's Blog, page 10

Author Feature: Glen Kenner

[image error]Kenner is the author of THE FIRST – an action thriller with a bit of magical realism (soft sci-fi) and horror. It’s the first of a planned ongoing series of 3 novels, and by the looks of it, might appeal to fans of the Unbreakable, Split, and Glass movies.

Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

I’ve been writing short stories for 30 years, since getting my degree in English – Creative Writing and have dozens of stories published in print and online, including in Japan, where I lived for 3 years.

Tell us about your stories:

I was educated to write contemporary literature, like my favorite authors Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Shirley Jackson. But I also love reading no-nonsense thriller writings like Lee Child. So my writing is a mix of all of that, with a bit of magical realism and horror just to keep it fun. A reader recently described my first novel, THE FIRST, as a mix of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Deadpool with the imagination of Kurt Vonnegut and the insight of Camus. I don’t know about all of that, but it sounds impressive.

What kind of success have you had?

I won a few writing contests in college and published in a few print journals that got me some university press recognition but I joined the corporate world and my creative juices ran dry. I’m back now writing full time and readers seem to really enjoy my first novel. My next book will probably be out by May and interest seems high.

What books/authors are your greatest influence?

I read very widely and mostly read non-fiction science and history. As I’ve grown older, I keep going back to some of the same fiction books that I fell in love with the first time I read them: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, the short stories of Shirley Jackson, the Rabbit novels by John Updike and many of his short stories, Shogun by James Clavell, the stories of Robert E Howard (Conan the Barbarian), Tolkien, and Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and John Carter novels. And, lastly, the gritty westerns of Elmore Leonard. I first read all of these somewhere between 20 – 40 years ago. I believe it’s important to support new writers but readers and writers both are best served by being exposed to the greats of previous generations.

Give us an insight into a time you wrote a scene with feeling.

The ending of my first novel has, for me, a sense of awe and true romantic love that I didn’t exactly intend and didn’t even see coming. It just happened organically and so I left it as it poured out. The book is in no way a romance but I suppose that love really does find a way..

Check out this book by out FEATURED AUTHOR.

[image error]

Questions about Pen Names

[image error]

I’ve fielded a few questions about Pen Names recently. There are a few different reasons authors might want one and so I’ve tried to address their concerns. I do not write under a pseudonym, so I am far from an expert so don’t consider me as golden or legal advice… just some guy who has friends who are willing to share what they’ve done.

Following are several reasons you might use a Pen Name and some details about how best to proceed based on your needs…

There is another author with the same name already.

This is a pretty common reason to utilize a pen name. I am not entirely certain that it is necessary, but understand why one might want to avoid confusion. It could be frustrating to keep saying, “No. The other John Doe.” I could especially see this if the author wrote something in a far removed genre  or one that clashed with yours. If you write religious devotionals but someone with your same name writes M/M erotica you might want to create some separation. It may be advisable to put your real name “writing as XYZ” on the copyright page of your book.

If you write with a pen name it becomes important to file an actual copyright certification. It may be important to note that it may be unwise or even disallowed to use pen names for nonfiction—especially when credentials are important.

I write multiple genres and would like to keep my two personas separate.

There are many authors who do this as well. Some do it because they don’t want cross-over on their audiences (see the above example) and others for the sake of not confusing an audience. Some, perhaps, to compartmentalize who they are as writers and operate in a different head-space as they produce their works. To each their own. It is effective. It does require additional work since you are now building and maintaining two audiences, author profiles, newsletters, etc. but the reasoning is valid. It is important to understand that you might limit your backlist or potential sales early on in your writing career, so know why you are doing it first and then stick to your guns.

I write sensitive material and need to keep myself as anonymous as possible.

This is a difficult situation to be in and I can only really recommend that you seek legal advice. The more hedges of protection you want to shield your name behind equates to more hassle, and more money. There are ways to hide who you are behind DBAs, by registering a company with contact info for a person living in a foreign country which will not comply with outside requests and/or court orders, and also never have the author’s real name appear anywhere. Still, there is someone else involved and so it cannot be truly anonymous… someone will know.

Everything can be traced and people can be persuaded. JK Rowling had a pen name for other projects. It was her lawyers who leaked it and spoiled her anonymity. If you really need your work to be public but anonymity is a must, consider staying anonymous and forfeiting your copyrights. You really have to weigh your pros and cons in this scenario and make your own gut call.

You can pick up a phone, dial 866-216-1072 and ask Amazon up for contact information of any seller located in USA (its different numbers outside USA), stating ‘initiating litigation’ as the reason for your call. Amazon has a policy stating you that they will release your information here which is visible here https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html

“Protection of Amazon.com and Others: We release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law; enforce or apply our Conditions of Use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Amazon.com, our users, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction. Obviously, however, this does not include selling, renting, sharing, or otherwise disclosing personally identifiable information from customers for commercial purposes in violation of the commitments set forth in this Privacy Notice. ”

I want to throw out a caveat regarding pen names that there may arise disputes from time to time regarding authorship. Not only might hackers steal your work and try to pass off your book as their own (it happens) but also unscrupulous competing authors have been known to use copyright infringement claims to shut down other authors to temporarily block competing titles so they can steal the lion’s share of the market.

Since you will have the original file on your computer, you have proof. It shows the sign-in user as the file creator along with a date; this is traceable. This is the ultimate mark of evidence, but it’s not something easily verified to turn over one of the above mentioned disputes. Authors with a pen name may have to prove their identity (there are many ways to do this,) but if you’ve read my account of dealing with amazon after being plagiarized by Russian hackers then you know it is more of a hassle than it ought to be. Ultimately you are protected, but if you have to go so far as verifying the source document and identity to prove copyright ownership then you’ve likely already had to get lawyers involved. That means there were several months in lost sales, legal fees, and the bad mark by things like algorithm ranks, associates accounts, etc. that could be put in jeopardy. A Pen Name potentially muddies the water as you try to straighten everything out.

Helen Sedwick says over at
You may register the copyright of your work under your pseudonym, your real name, or both. There are downsides to registering the copyright under a pseudonym only. First, it may be difficult to prove ownership of the work at a later date. Second, the life of the copyright will be shorter: 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from its creation, instead of 70 years after your death.

I recommend that authors register their pseudonymous works under both their real names and pen names. This creates a permanent record of ownership, and few readers are going to research copyright records and find out the author’s real name.

There is no way to “claim” a pen name as exclusively yours. You may go through the process of filing an FBN Statement, but that gives you the right to use that name, not the right to stop others from using the same name (unless they happen to be doing business in the same county as you). If you become very famous under your pen name, then you might have other options. If that happens, you should engage a lawyer to help you.

State of Writing

[image error]

I’m still plugging away at a few projects. I have a little more than 1/2 of the final third of the Tales of Esfah done (a fantasy side-project I’m working on) plus I’ve been working on some blogs and workshop presentation stuff. I do have a mini-workshop I am teaching in rural MN this coming weekend (right before a wedding… my family has 3 weddings to attend this month, and a few more throughout the year. crazy busy) plus, my nonprofit has a huge fundraising banquet this  coming weekend. It’s not often that I find myself with nothing to do.

This week I would love to complete the Tales of Esfah series plus begin work on the powerpoint displays for my marketing workshop. I would also like to complete at least two more articles for my SF/F devotional that I’m collaborating on with other authors.

RSS push to Facebook Workaround Found

[image error]

I posted back in March about how to automate your writing blog and maximize your platform’s reach. It’s pretty simple: find tools that push your blog posts to those locations automatically so that you don’t need to spend time copying links every time you publish a new post. Unfortunately, FaceBook  shut down a lot of those tools making it harder to reach your audience on some of the most interactive sites.

I’ve finally found a work-around. I use hootsuite to push blog’s RSS feed to facebook!

First, get a free account at hootsuite and link your facebook account for your author profile.

Second, add your RSS feed (https://help.hootsuite.com/hc/en-us/articles/204585700-Add-pause-or-delete-an-RSS-feed) and direct it to post the RSS feed t you Facebook page.

Now here’s the sticky wicket: Remember that Facebook’s API developers made changes to prohibit this exact sort of pushing back in August 1, 2018 because of the Russian Collusion scandal (which wasn’t really what it’s been said it is… but hey, it’s a way to make we FB users lives a bit murkier [which will likely result in a new product the FB will force us to buy in the future.]) Anyways, hootsuite, like the other services, cannot bypass this (here is there statement). BUT, if your FB author profile is set as a business profile (which it should be to take advantage of advanced features in FB ads.)

I inquired with Hootsuite to confirm:

Thank you for reaching out! I can confirm the change you mention only affected Facebook Personal Profiles and not Facebook Pages. You can still publish RSS feeds to your Facebook page.

Free Books

This month I was part of several huge giveaway programs… here is one final one to end the month (it’s more of a Dark Fantasy collection). Go check it out by clicking here. Browse over to it. You might find something you like!

[image error]

State of Writing

[image error]

I’ve been hard at work on some new stuff. I agreed to write a few short stories for a blog that I read and I have the second installment completed as of Friday. I’ll get it revised and edited this week while working on the final installment (it will be released as a novella at the end.)

Also, I’ve been cracking away at a marketing workshop I was asked to put together for Indies. I may compile these pieces into a short book as part of the Indie Authors Bible series, but we’ll see.

My big goals are to complete this short story series and then dive back into the other two books I am writing (my CYOA and the next Dekker’s Dozen).

Review: Always Gray in WInter

[image error]

As a SF/F author I go to lots of comicbook conventions with my books and meet new an interesting folks. I also blog and keep in touch with my readers and I am always somewhat fascinated with the furry community (and being from the Midwest, I’ve never seen a higher per capita number of furries at con than Fargo, ND). That’s how I was introduced to Always Gray in Winter by Mark J Engels.

The book is technically SF/military SF and for a few good reasons. As an avid fan of World of Darkness in my teen years (Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade, etc.) I appreciate shapeshifter fiction, and I had always loved that universe’s bastet (werecats,) of which Pawlina Katczynski is one (and the word play in the naming is ingenious.)

Engels does a great job of world building, both in establishing his furpunk universe and also in keeping grounded in reality with established places and locations across the world. It has an authentic feel—both in terms of the characters’ personas (humanity isn’t quite the right word in this context,) the setting, and the danger/intrigue.

This is a solid book and I got a distinct Tom Clancy with werecats vibe.

If there’s something I would find issue with it is the formatting. It’s an 85,000 word novel packed into 175 pages (meaning the text is DENSE and font is smaller than industry standard;) this is often done to reduce production costs. The small publisher of my first novel did this (back when I was young) and I didn’t initially see a huge problem with it. Now that my eyes are older it did tire me a bit to read it–luckily there is an ebook option so you can set your own size. I recommend that format.

I did get a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. You can get a copy of this book (or check it out via Amazon’s Look Inside feature) by clicking this link.

State of Writing

[image error]

Things seem fairly quiet on my blog these last couple weeks. Between my busy work schedule and a few other side projects I haven’t had an abundance of free time to research and write on a few relevant topics… but I’ll be back soon. I have a few short items in the works, some short fiction I’m working on and my CYOA story is about half-done as well. I hope to have it ready by the summer.

On a sidenote, I have a bunch of promo stuff coming up soon and a newsletter about to drop. stay tuned!

Free Books

I’m part of another huge giveaway program this week with many Urban Fantasy books being given away. Go check it out by clicking here. You might find something you like!

[image error]

State of Writing

[image error]

I spent all of this last week pretty much under the weather (and speaking of weather, I’m living in a blizzard warning area… right after I put my snowblower away for the year. go figure.)

Despite that, I managed to get a few words on pages. I’m about 10% deep on a choose your own adventure style book I thought I’d throw together. It’s a little harder than I’d expected, but I think my available writing time is more a factor than anything else. I’m splitting time with researching a new workshop module I plan to begin teaching soon (I also revamped and taught one this last weekend and wrote another new piece for an artists retreat coming up next month.)

My plan is to have this CYOA piece (it’s another humor story: Lord of the Fries, about a fast food worker set in a fantasy kingdom where a lowly frycook tries to impress a coworker at MimicDonalds by sneaking into the neighboring rival: Kentucky Fried Tengu,) done by the end of April and then I’ll be back onto Austicon’s Lockbox and full speed ahead on my SciFi.