Michael Montoure's Blog, page 23
March 21, 2011
Saying No to Ninety-Nine
I'm getting Slices ready to put up on the Kindle store — fixing the typos I'd missed, re-writing the introduction, putting together a new cover because I'm not happy enough with the old one — and something I've been thinking about while I've been doing this is, how much will I want to charge for it?
A huge number of indie writers have been pricing their Kindle books at 99 cents. That seems — well, kind of ridiculously low to me, and to a lot of other people. But I've heard some good arguments for it, and I'd been seriously considering it, especially after reading J.A. Konrath's interview with John Locke, who set out to "become the world's greatest 99-cent author," and recently ended up at the top of Amazon's Top 100 — the first indie writer to do so.
But on the other hand, here's the perspective of Zoe Winters, an indie who started out at the 99-cent price point but soon abandoned it:
"I noticed that 99 cents drew some unappealing customers [....] A strange but true rule of business is that the customers paying the least amount for a product or service always complain the most and try to squeeze more out of you. I really don't want to participate in the Walmartizing of literature or cater to that audience.
"Then there was the fact that I wanted to cultivate a loyal following and most people who expect ebooks to be 99 cents aren't that loyal. They're shopping by price as their main deciding factor. I just don't want those readers [....] I think the readers I attract now are truly interested in MY work, and not just a bargain. I feel like the readers I'm attracting are the types of readers who are going to be passionate about the work and tell other people. I also think that people don't expect it to 'probably suck anyway' if it's $4.95. That negative assumption with 99 cents devalues the work because human beings are psychologically wired to get the experience they expect with many things. Fiction is one of those things [....] At the higher price point, people just expect it to be good. And I work hard to deliver on that expectation."
She definitely has a point. I guess I just kind of inherently think my book is, well, worth more than a dollar. I suppose I'd like my readers to think so, too.
March 18, 2011
Don Quixote versus the Pirates
I've seen so many arguments about book piracy — both for it and against it. In the end, I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it just flat out doesn't matter whether you think book piracy is wrong or right, the point is, it exists, and no amount of yelling about it on the Internet is going to make it go away. Or, as Paul Raven puts it:
That is what you're up against. That is someone upon whom you're attempting to use rational persuasion and logic in order to convince them that they shouldn't copy your books and give them away for free.
Technological measures will only be seen by these people as an intellectual challenge.
Reasoned arguments will wither under the blowlamp of their own spurious logical framework.
You cannot defeat these people. Every attempt to do so will be seen as a validation of their efforts, not a discouragement.
Yes, this is the Robin Hood Complex in action. So stop playing Sheriff of Nottingham and focus on winning over the people who really matter: the people who might have bought your book if it were available to them conveniently at a price they consider reasonable.
Seriously, people, give it up; you're tilting at windmills. No, it's worse than that: you're tilting at windmill tilters.
— This is why trying to prevent book piracy is utterly futile (Futurismic)
(This is a subject I've been doing a hell of a lot of thinking about, and you're going to be hearing about it from me for quite a while to come. Just so you're warned.)
March 17, 2011
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Huh. I think I need a copy of this book.
"[A] collection of 22 modern essays about depression by writers (several well known) who know their subject intimately. Some face depression as a sudden interruption of a previously gratifying life; others have never known life without it [....] The writers' descriptions of "dwelling in depression's dark wood" (William Styron) are disturbing and haunting, laden with vivid imagery. "My heart pumped dread," writes Lesley Dormen. David Karp describes his depression as sometimes a "grief knot" in his throat, sometimes chest pain like a heart attack, sometimes "an awful heaviness" in his eyes and head. From her teenage years, Darcey Steinke would wrap herself in an old comforter and lie in a fetal position on top of her shoes in the closet (her brother called this her "poodle bed"). Nancy Mairs describes being institutionalized: "Lock [a woman] into a drab and dirty space with dozens of other wayward souls, make sure that she is never alone, feed her oatmeal and bananas until her bowels are starched solid, drug her to the eyeballs so that she can scarcely read or speak, and threaten to shoot bolts of electricity through her brain." If you want to know depression from the inside, from thoroughly gifted writers, you'll find it here.
— Amazon.com: Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
I've lived with depression for over half my life now. (I hadn't done that little bit of math until just this moment, and it kind of shakes me up a little.) I'm not doing too badly these days. For starters, I'm taking medication for it, which helps more than I can even begin to explain; and secondly, throwing myself into creative projects (like this blog, and Causality) also helps tremendously.
The worst part about it, as far as it affects my writing, is the time it steals away. Days and weeks and months lost to a feeling of tremendous weight, of not feeling like I have enough energy to do anything, or to want to do anything, even just sit and write. Maybe especially just sit and write.
On the other hand, it's given me a lot to write about. There are so many dark moments I've been through that have found their way into stories, one way or another.
I'd definitely be interested in finding out what other writers have to say about it.
March 16, 2011
You Say You Want a Revolution
"Oh, the internet is saying so many things about me," says Amanda Hocking. And it's not hard to see why. She's never been published, and she's selling her own books through Amazon's Kindle store. Like, a lot of them. Like, over a hundred thousand a month, at this point. So, yeah. People are paying attention.
I think this is great. She seems very level-headed, down-to-earth, and really super nice, judging by her blog and her Huffington Post interview. It'd be hard not to be happy for her.
The backlash has, of course, already started. This is the Internet, after all. I'm seeing a ton of blog posts with titles like "The Very Rich Indie Writer," "Is Amanda Hocking the New Christopher Paolini?" and the pretty much self-explanatory "Amanda Hocking Is The Exception, Not The Rule."
You can just hear the haughty sniff of condescension in that last title, can't you? Okay, sure, it says — there may be one writer out there who's doing quite well at this whole indie writing lark, but don't you go getting any ideas.
I remember what how the tune used to go on this one. They used to say the same kinds of things about J. A. Konrath — sure, he's been wildly successful with self-published e-books, but he already had a successful career in traditional publishing and an established fan-base, so you couldn't do it. Now, Hocking comes out of nowhere, and knocks that argument right out of the park, and people are still saying the same kind of thing. Even Hocking herself makes roughly the same point:
"Everybody seems really excited about what I'm doing and how I've been so successful, and from what I've been able to understand, it's because a lot of people think that they can replicate my success and what I've done. And while I do think I will not be the only one to do this – others will be as successful as I've been, some even more so – I don't think it will happen that often."
The majority of these posts are, I'm sure, quite well-intentioned. No one wants people to rush into indie publishing with an unrealistic set of expectations. But some other comments I've seen seem way more like sour grapes to me.
The thing is, this is how it's always been. There are always people out there telling you the odds are impossible, the amount of work is inconceivable, you're just not going to make it.
But she's not the only one who is making it. Robin Sullivan writes,
"I agree with [the] assessment that Amanda is an Outlier – but there are a number of success stories now in self-publishing even beyond her. John Locke has 7 books in the Amazon Top 100 including #1 Saving Rachel. D.B. Henson's Deed to Death was self published and was picked up by one of the biggest agents in the world, Noah Lukeman – her book went to auction for an undisclosed some and will be releaed in July – Keep a watch on this one. H.P. Mallory got a six-figure two book deal after self-publishing her books. Michael J. Sullivan (my husband) got a 3-book six-figure deal from Orbit after doing a Paolini (my small press Ridan published his works). Victorine Lieskie has been on the top 100 for over 10 weeks. Nancy Cartwright has been on the top 100 for more than 100 days. J.A. Konrath has been posting guest blogs from many self-published authors and his own novel, The List has broke the top 20."
Right now, if you look at the top 100 best-selling Kindle books on Amazon, about 40% of them are self-published. I'm sorry, but that's a huge deal, a game-changer. This is not a few freak anamolies here and there. This is just the first few cracks in the dam.
I think all the nay-sayers are coming to the wrong conclusion about the growing buzz of excitement around Hocking's success, and what it means for other indie writers. I know I'm not looking at her track record and thinking I could make millions (although that would be nice) — instead, I'm coming to the same conclusion as Kevin O. McLaughlin:
"For every one person who sells a 400k ebooks a month, there will be a few selling a hundred thousand or so, dozens who sell tens of thousands (and there are), and hundreds who sell a few thousand a month. Now, my odds, your odds, the odds of any one person becoming an overnight breakout superstar are pretty slim. But the odds of making it into those hundreds of successful writers selling in the thousands a month? That race isn't about odds and chance so much as it is about elbow grease and hitting the keyboard [....E]ven a couple hundred sales a month would equate to some nice extra income. Even that would be a 'success', to some degree."
He's damn right it would. See, I've spent my entire life gradually, reluctantly coming to accept the fact that even if I managed to get published, the odds that I would be able to make even a modest living as a professional writer are vanishingly small. But now everything seems possible again, and I feel energized and alive and crackling with that possibility.
Time to get to work.
March 15, 2011
An Early Christmas
You've probably seen this by now, but just in case you haven't, here's a prediction that Amazon will be giving away the Kindle before the year is out:
In October 2009 John Walkenbach noticed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate, lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date at which the Kindle would be free: November 2011.
Since then I've mentioned this forecast to all kinds of folks. In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, "Oh, you noticed that!" And then smiled again.
— The Technium: Free Kindle This November
It goes into speculation about the business model at work here, and how they might pull this off.
Do I think it'll happen? Maybe. It's an interesting idea, at any rate, and something I kind of suspected might happen eventually back when they rolled out the first Kindles. Am I sorry I just bought one, instead of waiting to see if they really do start giving them away? Naaah. I'm way too impatient to wait that long.
March 14, 2011
Autographing e-books?
Honestly, this is one of those ideas that I genuinely can't decide if it's brilliant or stupid or both:
"Basically, what you do is pull up a copy of your book as the author, and it inserts a blank page behind the cover and you sign whatever you're going to personalize for somebody," Waters said.
Waters can sign from his iPad, and that message will show up on the eReader within a couple of minutes on a newly created page.
"What we've also been able to figure out is how to do this remotely," Waters said. "So an author could be sitting in his home or a facility like this and doing a book signing in Cleveland."
— Local inventors create way to autograph eBooks.
I just dunno. Is this something that people really want? Personally, I definitely wouldn't want a remotely-signed autograph — for me, an autograph is a memento of getting to meet an author I like, that little moment of connection. Not really seeing the point of a virtual signature from someone miles or states away. Still, it's cool and all, I guess.
March 11, 2011
Where I Write
Oh my gosh I freaking love this. Just like it sounds — gorgeous photos of writers in their home environment:
I spend a lot of time thinking about people's environments — the places they build around themselves, the things they choose to live with. Is there a connection, I started to wonder if there was a connection between the places that writers work and their work itself.
Why not find out?
Looks like there's plans to turn this into a book, and I hope that happens. Really inspiring. Although, weirdly enough, I don't really have any particular space set up in my home for writing — I've actually found I write best where there are people around, so I tend to work in coffee shops. And occasionally, even nightclubs. But still! Most of these pictures make me want to step inside them and claim a corner of a desk for my own.
March 10, 2011
"Control"
(Here's a little bit of flash-fiction for you, an 878-word story written for Chuck Wendig's "Irregular Creatures" challenge. Enjoy.)
It was dreaming, he supposed. Eyes darting back and forth under closed eyelids. The set of the eyes, the mouth, the shape of the face — all of it was a close match for his own face, the skin just a shade lighter than his own. From there, all resemblance fell away.
The torso was about half-sized, and asymmetrical. Two small legs, fused together, ended in perfect, tiny feet. The left arm was jointed in too many places, and the right not at all. Neither one ended in anything that could even charitably be called hands. He'd had trouble figuring out where to put the I.V.
Subject Zero had been his perfect twin. Subject Fourteen he could hardly stand to look at, but he made himself keep his detachment. They'd all been made by the same process — his own stem-cells introduced to self-replicating quantum foam, his memories impressed on the newly-formed brain by neural resonance. Each new iteration drifted farther and farther away from the baseline, as he introduced new variables, new deviations.
He'd done this hundreds of times. Joanna hadn't understood. She understood the idea of it well enough — take a subject that has some illness, or some congenital defect that you're trying to eliminate, and copy it. Change the copy, study the differences, try to find the key to eliminate the problem. She followed the science. She just didn't agree with it, no matter how many times he'd tried to tell her that the ethics committees had ruled that vat-grown sims were not technically alive.
Their disagreements had been mild, almost academic, so long as he'd been doing this procedure with mice, with lab rats. She started arguing with him more when he'd moved on to dogs and primates, and it all finally degenerated into screaming arguments when the human trials started.
He'd been convinced he was right, that she'd come around eventually. He was completely unprepared the night he'd come home to find her gone, to find she'd moved all her belongings out without a word to him. He had stood there staring at the disarray, not understanding it at first, thinking they'd been robbed, calling out her name again and again until it stopped even sounding like a word to him.
He lifted his glasses. He screwed his eyes tight shut and rubbed them with his other hand, trying to dismiss the memory, ignore the headache. He took another sip of his coffee and looked back at the monitors, stole another glance at the sim through the one-way glass. It was moving fitfully, half-awake now, struggling faintly against the straps holding it to the bed.
Yawning, he double-checked that all the data was being saved directly to his own encrypted folder and not in the central stores. He wasn't going to be able to keep this up much longer. The more sleepless nights he spent in the lab, the more careless he was going to get, and he was going to get caught.
He had to do this himself. No one else could find out. No one else was going to understand what was killing him.
Pulse and respiration were up. It was nearly awake. He turned out the lights in the main lab, switched the monitors to infrared, ultraviolet. He turned on the voice simulator, cracked his knuckles, and started typing.
"Sweetheart?" the voice simulator said for him. "Are you awake?"
He closed his eyes again. He'd spent weeks coding and tuning that voice, until it was perfect.
The sim tried to sit up. Its eyes were open now, and he wondered distantly if they were the same color as his own. He would find out in the autopsy.
"Joanna?" the sim said. The voice was hoarse and untried, but recognizably his own. "Joanna, is that you? Where are you? What's going on?"
"You're in the hospital," he typed, and the voice spoke the words aloud. "There was an accident. You're going to be all right."
"You — " The sim stopped, coughing. "You came to see me? Really?"
"Of course I did. You — " He stopped typing, just for a second, but the hesitation probably sounded natural. "You still mean so much to me."
"Thank you," the sim said, its voice breaking. "Oh, God, Joanna. Thank you for coming. I've missed you so much."
He looked at all the monitors. Voice stress analysis, galvanic response of the skin. All the signs were there.
"Shhh," he typed, the voice said. "Just try to get some sleep."
He pushed the button that flushed morphine into the sim's system. When he was sure that it was asleep, he'd inject the air embolus that would stop its treasonous heart.
He threw his glasses down on the desk and rubbed his eyes again. He sighed and thumbed the switch on the recorder.
"Terminating Subject Fourteen. The defect has not been corrected." It was already past midnight, but he turned his attention immediately to his notes for Subject Fifteen.
This time. It would work this time. He would find the center of it, the cause of it, and burn it out of himself. This wouldn't be like the previous trials. This time, he told himself, the subject wouldn't still be in love with Joanna.
Short but sweet
Ha! I suppose I should have seen this coming, but somehow I didn't. Dark Markets links to a new market that's looking for short horror stories. Like, really, really short. Like, 140 characters — short enough to fit into a tweet:
We pay $1.20 per submission entry—which equates to a minimum payment of approximately 5¢/word (considering a "word" to be 6 characters). While we technically pay professional rates for fiction we DO NOT qualify as a SFWA professional market as our payment is below their $50 minimum payment threshold.
March 9, 2011
Take my advice
I've certainly been reading a lot about writing and publishing lately — look for links to share with all of you out there, natch — and I've certainly noticed that a lot of it, as Richard Dansky points out, is a little, well, contradictory:
"In order to become a successful writer, you need to blog and tweet relentlessly. Or maybe you need to not be distracted by social media, and focus exclusively on your writing. You need to give your stuff away online in podcast and PDF format to spread word so people will pick up the hardcopy or ebook. You also need to not give your work away for free or do things "for the exposure", because that's not professional. The way to write is to write endlessly on your own to hone your craft. The way to write is to go the workshop route.
[...] The best thing you can do with this tsunami of writing advice is to look at it, to understand what it's actually suggesting you do, and then look at yourself. Figure out what you've got the time and the inclination and the bandwidth to do."
– Useful Writing Advice, 'Cause You Need More of It.
I think that's an eminently reasonable suggestion. People who think they've found the One True Way to do anything, even writing — maybe especially writing — tend to give me the heebie-jeebies anyway. (Yes, heebie-jeebies. That's a technical term. You know how Eskimos are supposed to have dozens of words for different kinds of snow? Well, it's like that with horror writers and different kinds of fear. Now you know.)
Anyway, yeah — if you read some piece of writing advice, and you can just feel yourself light up inside as the idea reverberates around your brain, if you find yourself thinking, yes, this makes sense, this is what I want to do — take it to heart. If it doesn't, don't worry about it.
