John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 23

Armed for Change

Change is one of those frightening things we all struggle with. Creatures of habit, we humans like things to stay more or less the same. Even if we don’t like the way things are, we prefer the comfort of knowing and understanding to the prospect of having to adapt to something new.

There’s this tiny bump on my arm. It’s just above the elbow. It’s so small you couldn’t even call it pea-sized.

I thought it was an ingrown hair or other gross skin thing.

But it didn’t go away. And I can’t fix it. And it’s hard.

My doctor wants to remove it, because it goes beneath the surface of the skin. It’s so small, he doesn’t want to take a sample, because there isn’t enough to get. It’s probably nothing. But, you know, we should excise it just in case.

I should really be worried about cancer. Lumps aren’t supposed to appear on your skin. But the prospect of cancer isn’t what’s worrying me.

The doctor wants to carve a hunk off my arm.

He assures me this will have no impact on my range of motion. The thing is so small it shouldn’t be any kind of big deal.

But I’m left-handed, and it’s on my left arm.

What if does change things? What if my arm is just a little tighter? What if, by losing maybe an inch of skin, I’m not the same person anymore?

I mean, I might not be able to pitch like Tom Seaver or pass like Joe Montana anymore. Forget that I never could  pitch or pass like those guys, what if this extremely minor surgery prevents me from ever being able to learn?

I’m not so much afraid of the pain. They’ll give me a local anesthesia and some post-op painkillers. I’ve been injured numerous times in my life, and I’m a black belt. However much it’s going to hurt doesn’t scare me.

But the doctor is planning to carve a hunk off my arm. He’s going to take the me I’ve known for 45 years and change it. What if I’m not the same?

By the time you read this, the bump on my arm will be gone. I’ll be home and going on with my day, probably like nothing really happened. All of this is likely to be very insignificant.

But I might be different, even only a little bit. I might be changed.

That scares me.

Win a Signed Copy of BEAUTY & THE BEAST: A MODERN FAIRY TALE

I’m running a promotion on my Facebook page right now, where you can win a free, signed copy of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale.

I’m interested in knowing what your favorite version of “Beauty & the Beast” is. Do you like the Disney film? How about the Linda Hamilton TV show from the 1980′s? The new TV show with Kristin Kreuk? Some other version? It doesn’t matter if it’s TV, movie, book, or play. Just let me know your favorite.

Click this link to go to my Facebook page and leave a comment in the thread telling me your favorite version of “Beauty & the Beast.” Next Friday, I’ll choose a random winner and send the lucky person a signed copy of the trade paperback edition of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale!

Want to get the Kindle version and start reading it right now? Get it here from Amazon.com!

Don’t forget to like my Facebook page for updates and insights!

Do KDP Select Free Events Still Work?

One of the things about being an indie author is the constant need to review, analyze, and alter your strategy in the face of a changing market. Since the introduction of Amazon’s KDP Select program, multiple changes have been made. Amazon keeps tweaking it, trying to make it work best for its true customer — the book buyer. To be sure, they’re interested in it working for authors too, but that’s the secondary concern. Authors are not their real customers.

This past summer Amazon made several adjustments to how free events work. Authors started reporting fewer downloads and, more importantly, smaller post-free sales bumps. That’s been concerning on two fronts. The main reason to do a free event is to boost a book’s visibility in the Kindle store. The more sales you have, the more Amazon features your book. The reason is pretty simple. Amazon wants to sell readers books. So if a book has sold a lot of copies, chances are good it can sell another copy to the reader who meets the profile of the people who have previously bought it.

In the past, free downloads helped kick a book up the charts, so that more readers could discover it. When the book went off free, it generated a lot of actual sales. That was good for Amazon and for authors.

But the metrics have changed. Amazon’s algorithms have been adjusted. And, while I hesitate to say the changes are bad for authors, they are forcing us to learn how to play the game all over again.

There are fewer downloads per free event, which lowers discoverability. There are fewer sales — so it’s been reported — after the event, which lowers profitability. That raises two important questions:

Is there a new way to maximize the results of a KDP Select free event? In other words, can it still be used to give a book’s sales a shot in the arm?
Is it still worth it to enroll a book in KDP Select? After all, you have to sell the eBook version exclusively through Amazon if you’re enrolled. The principal benefit had been using those free events to kick up your paid sales. If that doesn’t work anymore, is it still beneficial to enroll in Select?

With all that in mind, I ran a five-day free event for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” I had two major goals for this event. First,  I wanted to boost my overall sales. While I’d done well earlier this year, things had really fallen off in the summer. I was looking to kick-start my numbers.

Second, I was releasing my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale,the first week of October. I put an ad for the book in the back of “Sleeping Beauty” and then set the free run to occur the week after the release. I was hoping to raise the visibility of the new book by giving away an older but similar book free.

I confined my advertising to only a few venues. BookGoodies.com and Bargain eBook Hunter have both garnered good results for me, and their rates are reasonable. I experimented with FreeBooksy.com. I’d not tried them before, because their rates are considerably higher. I got good recommendations on them, so I decided the money was worth it.

The first day of the event was fantastic. I gave away over 1500 copies of “Sleeping Beauty” on the first day alone. That was far and away the best first day I’ve ever had. The book hit #1 in two different categories, and peaked at #170 overall in the free store.

The results fell off sharply after that. The next day, I only had about 200 downloads. Over the next three days, I got another 200 or so.

By the time it was all said and done, I got 1967 downloads in the U.S. Foreign markets were pretty insignificant. That’s the second best I’ve ever done on a free event. So, at least for me, I didn’t find that the new system had significantly reduced my downloads, although I used a new advertiser for the first time, and I think it definitely gave me some rocket fuel.

However, there were two other significant things of note about this event. First, the rapid decline of my numbers after only one day. So far as I could tell, as soon as Free Booksy moved on to another client, my numbers tanked. So it seems the right advertising is still (if not more) critical to running a successful event.

Second, I experienced the lack of post-event bounce other authors reported. I’ve sold five copies of “Sleeping Beauty” since offering it free. In the past, if one were to count on a 2-3% bump (which is fairly conservative), I should have netted at least 39 U.S. sales. Five sales is a .025% bump. That’s a significant difference.

Other authors I’ve spoken with report they saw a very slow climb in their total sales but that they did see increases in their backlist sales. I was hoping for this result — it’s one of the reasons I ran the promotion.

To an extent, I’ve seen it. I’ve sold six copies of Beauty & Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale since the promotion and gotten one borrow through Amazon Prime. I sold a copy of “Passion Play”, which had been totally moribund, and one copy of State of Grace. I’ve also seen a significant increase in the downloads of my perma-free short story, “The Darkline Protocol.”

It may be too early to gauge this, since it hasn’t quite been a week, and other authors have reported their gains took  time to realize. But, at the moment, it does not appear that a successful free event leads to a solid sales bump.

And if that’s the case, I need to be able to answer the two questions the new system raises. Is there a way to make free events work, and is it worth it to enroll in KDP Select anymore?

I don’t know the answer to either at the moment. Both bear further investigation.

Amazon KDP Upload Issues Appear Solved

My nightmare is over.

Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale is up in both print and eBook format without any hitches or glitches.

Just yesterday, I was writing about how I still hadn’t gotten a solution from Amazon.com, although the corrected Kindle version had at last uploaded. It was  “in review” — a status I hadn’t seen before.

Last night, I got an email from Amazon that the book was live in the Kindle store. I confirmed it.

So. All the blank lines that my work-around solution had stripped out are back in. The acknowledgements are now updated to include Katie Darden, who helped me get that work-around solution up and at least make it possible to sell during the two weeks KDP’s interface was having technical problems.

Speaking of KDP, I have not received a follow-up email from their tech staff saying the issue has been resolved, so I can’t say for certain that it has. But whatever was preventing me from uploading a Word version of my book to their site seems to have cleared. Hopefully, that’s the end of whatever was wrong.

So Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale is now not only on sale but formatted the way I want it to look. Go buy it. You can get it for your Kindle for only $2.99 or in print for just $7.99. I think you’ll like it.

I know I like it a lot better now that everything is working correctly.

Issues Uploading to KDP Continue

You may recall last week I was struggling to get a clean copy of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale uploaded to Amazon.com. I kept getting an error message that read simply, “We could not process your file. Please try again.”

You may also recall I contacted Kindle Direct Publishing’s tech support and got largely informationless responses and vague assurances that they were looking into it.

Saturday, I received the following response from KDP tech support, following up from their last response a week before:

“Hello John,

I wanted to let you know that I’m still researching the uploading issue. It’s taking longer than usual to resolve this, and I’m very sorry about the delay. I’ll be in touch with you again with an update as soon as possible.

Thanks for your continued patience.”

So after a week, they couldn’t tell me anything. I replied, asking if they could tell me anything at all about what was going on. Twenty-four hours later (KDP’s usual response time), I received the following message form a different tech:

“Hello John,

Hope this email finds you well.

We’re currently experiencing an uploading issue where the book titles are not being uploaded correctly. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Uploaded data may be unavailable until the issue is resolved.

We will be in touch with you again with an update as soon as possible.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, and appreciate your patience and understanding.

I hope this helps. Thanks for using Amazon KDP.”

So they are experiencing a problem with uploads. Okay. I knew that. And I’m pleased to hear their engineers are working on solving it.

But the response doesn’t really help. It just tells me what I already knew.

Ever the optimist, I decided to try to upload the book again before writing this blog. For the first time, it successfully converted my MS Word file to Kindle content! I fired up the previewer. Everything looked good!

Not wanting to jinx anything, I clicked on “Save & Publish” as quickly as I could get my mouse lined up. Woo-hoo!

However . . .

Your bookshelf usually gives you a message like “publishing.” But this time it was different. The status of the book is “In Review.” When I clicked on the “What’s this?” link, I got the following message:

“Your book is currently under review by the Kindle Operations team as we are trying to improve the Kindle customer experience. The Kindle Store requires approximately 12 hours for English and 48 hours for other languages to make your content available for purchase. This will not affect any titles you are currently selling in the store, but uploading updates to existing titles will take longer to process.”

Needless to say, that’s never happened before.

I was a little concerned, so I tried clicking on the book to make sure it was still on sale in the Kindle store. But the title was completely greyed out. I couldn’t do anything with it. I checked the checkbox to try to work with it to “See title in Kindle Store.” Same thing. No options were available.

So I opened a new browser window and called up Amazon’s main page. I searched for Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale, and it did come up. I clicked on it, and it appears to still be for sale. So, as far as I can see, Amazon did not take it off sale while they review the update, which is good.

Last week, I updated “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” twice for the giveaway I was running. Neither time did this “In Review” result occur. So I can’t tell if this is a new policy by Amazon that went into effect this week, or if it just has to do with the ongoing upload issue that Beauty & the Beast is caught up in.

At any rate, I’ll update this space as the situation develops. If you’re publishing with KDP right now, I’d be interested to hear if you have had any sort of similar experiences. Leave a comment below.

And finally I will reiterate a couple of things I’ve written before on this subject. First, KDP’s customer service and tech support people are extremely polite. No one has been able to satisfactorily help me, but they have all been very friendly, very nice, and regretful of not being able to solve the problem on the spot. Amazon deserves kudos for its customer/vendor interactions.

Second, KDP needs a more responsive way to work with its tech support. A tech hotline or chat service would improve the help they can offer when something goes wrong. Waiting a day, a week, or more to get an answer isn’t fast enough, especially when you are launching a new title and you have promos built around it to boost sales. Here’s hoping they get whatever this issue is resolved soon and they improve their interface with authors.

The Real Villain in “Beauty and the Beast”

This week, I’ve been blogging about the principal characters in my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale. On Wednesday, I looked at the Beauty character, Rory Bellin. Thursday, I examined the Beast, Caleb Johnson. Today, I’ll look at the true villain of the story, Mr. Nickleby.

The Real Villain

In the Disney version of Beauty & the Beast, the story’s real villain is handsome hunter Gaston. Conceited and arrogant, he bullies the rest of the town and believes he should have anything he wants. He is the opposite of the Beast — beautiful on the outside, hideous within.

When I sat down to modernize the tale, I wanted to take a similar approach in that I wanted there to be a third figure who is the true villain of the story. Given that I set my version at a modern high school, the selection of a fiend seemed pretty obvious to me — a teacher.

Adults, particularly school authority figures, have a unique opportunity to influence young people. Thus, in a story about temptation and obsession, an important teacher is the ideal figure to push the novella’s two teenaged protagonists towards the things that can undo them.

Rory is the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. So I made Mr. Nickleby the paper’s faculty advisor. That puts him in a position to be extremely influential over Rory, and, because Caleb becomes obsessed with dating her, Nickleby is perfectly placed to manipulate him too.

“So when are you going to ask Miss Bellin out on a date,” Mr. Nickleby asked when everyone else had gone.

Caleb looked as dumbfounded as when he’d been called on a few minutes ago. How had he known?

“Oh, please,” Mr. Nickleby said as though he had read Caleb’s mind. “It’s ridiculously obvious. You weren’t paying attention to my lecture this morning because you were staring at the back of her head. Just like you’ve been doing every morning for the past two weeks.”

“You saw—”

“Of course I saw,” he said. “You’d have to be blind not to see.”

Caleb thought about that. How is it that everyone else could see, but Rory couldn’t?

“She doesn’t see,” he said.

“Because she’s blind,” Mr. Nickleby said.

“What?”

“She’s blind to your interest,” he said, softening his tone. “She can’t see what everyone else can, because she is busy obsessing on other things.”

Caleb nodded. Holly was right. Rory only cared about the newspaper and college.

“I don’t know what to do about that,” he confessed.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Mr. Nickleby said.

“What?”

Caleb looked at him for the first time. He wore his usual outfit – a black dress shirt and slacks with a red tie. Caleb thought it was cool he wore school colors, but it was strange he wore the same thing every day, and the tie looked weird against the shirt. Longish, black hair fell on either side of his head, framing his face in a strange sort of darkness. His brown eyes were penetrating. They seemed to be looking into the depths of Caleb’s soul. It made him nervous.

“You can’t stop her from obsessing on the things that matter to her,” Mr. Nickleby said.

“So it’s hopeless.”

Mr. Nickleby laughed gently. Caleb looked at him in surprise. He was used to his friends laughing at his romantic misadventures, but it made him angry to hear from a teacher.

But Mr. Nickleby didn’t appear to be mocking him. He smiled sympathetically. Then he looked wolfishly at Caleb.

“Nothing is ever hopeless, Caleb,” he said. “You just have to know the right solution to the problem.”

Nickleby knows just how to get to Caleb. He manipulates him expertly, setting him up for his eventual fall from grace.

That in itself is what makes him a villainous character. Students are supposed to be able to trust their teachers. But Mr. Nickleby deceives them and tempts them to disaster.

Heart’s Desire

Writers take their influence from all sorts of places, and I admit to being influenced by ABC’s Once Upon A Time. In particular, Robert Carlyle’s Rumpelstiltskin colored my shaping of Mr. Nickleby. My villain isn’t as over-the-top as Carlyle’s portrayal of the sinister deal-maker,  but the idea of a manipulative magic man who can offer a person their heart’s desire definitely appealed to me.

When he first tempts Rory, Mr. Nickleby knows just how to get to her. He sympathizes with her anger of football star Mike and his girlfriend Holly getting elected homecoming king and queen instead of people who have non-sports achievements. Then, when he’s broken down her defenses, he offers her a chance to do something about what she considers an injustice.

Rory chewed her lower lip. She felt completely depressed.

“I wish there was some way to do that,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Nickleby said.

Suddenly, he looked different. He looked . . . hopeful.

“I said, ‘I wish there was some way to do that.’”

He pushed off the doorframe and took a step forward. The wolfish grin was back on his face.

“Maybe there is,” he said.

She cocked her head. What was he up to?

“What do you mean,” she asked.

He withdrew his left hand from his pocket, turned it over, and opened it. There was a silver ring in his hand.

“Maybe this could help,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

“A ring?” she said. Was he serious?

“Not just any ring, Rory,” he said. “A ring of three wishes.”

“What!”

This could not be happening. The new teacher at the school, the advisor to The Budget could not be offering her a ring and claiming it was magical. What kind of fantasy story had she just fallen into?

“Oh, I know,” he said. He walked towards her slowly, his hand extended. “It sounds ludicrous. It sounds insane. But what if it’s real?”

There was a wild light in his eyes. His black hair fell across his face, and, this time, he made no effort to sweep it aside.

“What if it really is a ring of three wishes?” he continued. “What if you could use it to get whatever you desired?”

He’s playing on Rory’s deepest desires here. He knows what she wants. He’s been watching her — something he confesses to a few paragraphs later to help seal the deal. He knows she wants to change the social structure at Lawrence High so it favors her. He also knows he can manipulate her into making poor choices, so that she doesn’t really get what she wants. Like Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon a Time, his deals are designed to sound really good but are actually set up to favor him.

Throughout our lives, we wish for things to be different or better. We wish we could be better than we imagine we are. High school intensifies these feelings. Everything seems so very important in our teenage years. That makes it an ideal time for temptation.

Mr. Nickleby plays on that. He is a tempter, and he has magic to make one’s dreams come true. That makes him the perfect villain for a fairy tale set in a high school.

And he is the most dangerous kind of fiend. He makes people think they can have anything they want, and that the consequences will be minimal. He makes people believe he is their friend, when he is nothing more than a con artist.

Rory and Caleb make their own choices in my novella. They suffer the consequences of things they choose to do. But they are manipulated into believing they are doing something better than they are. They are tricked into thinking the consequences won’t be bad.

That makes Mr. Nickleby a sinister villain. He’s supposed to be their friend, but he’s the worst enemy they have.

Click here to purchase Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale from Amazon.com.

Changing Roles: My Take on the Beast in “Beauty & the Beast”

Yesterday, I began a three-part series on the principle characters in my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale, by looking at Rory Bellin, the story’s Beauty. Today, I’ll examine her Beast, Caleb Johnson.

Turning the Curse Around

In the original story and most of its adaptations, the Beast is a formerly handsome prince, who was cursed to become a monster, because he offended a witch. Believing beauty only to be skin deep, the prince refuses shelter to an ugly hag, so she curses him to be monstrous until he can learn to love more than beauty.

Like the original fairy tale, I wanted to play with the question of “Who is Beauty, and who is the Beast?” But for my modern take, I chose to reverse the transformation. Rather than having my Beast start shallow and gain depth, I had Caleb lose it.

When we first meet Caleb Johnson, he is pathetic. He’s the third-string running back on the Lawrence High football team. He never plays. He can’t get a girl, because he’s really unfortunate looking.  His problems are summed up succinctly in an early scene set in the football team’s locker room after practice:

“I don’t know, Evan,” Caleb said with a sigh. “Mike’s a jerk, but it’s hard to argue with the evidence. GQ hasn’t called to shoot this mug, and I’ve been unattached pretty much since we got to LHS. The girls aren’t interested.”

“You just haven’t found the right girl yet,” Evan countered.

“Cuz he’s looking here instead of the zoo!” Mike shouted from around the corner of the lockers.

A couple of people laughed. Mike howled like a wolf.

Caleb is the hideous beast, locked away in a tower (in this case a social one), whom no one could think to love.

However, his appearance does not match his personality. He’s clever, he’s amiable, and he’s fun to be around. He’s the very picture of the nice guy.  Later in that same scene, Caleb and Evan discuss the possibility of finding Caleb a girlfriend.

“As much as I appreciate this,” Caleb said, “there would have to be someone available I wouldn’t scare away.”

Evan frowned. He always crinkled his forehead when he was thinking.

“What about that girl who edits the paper?” he said. “Nobody’s datin’ her.”

“Who? Rory Bellin?” Caleb said.

“Yeah! That’s her! That girl is hot!”

“She’s also really smart,” Caleb said, expressing doubt. “I wouldn’t even know what to say to her.”

“What?” Evan said, looking floored. “Dude, you always know what to say. You are the funniest guy I know.”

“Funny-looking,” Caleb countered.

“Dude, stop talkin’ like Mike,” Evan scolded. “If you run yourself down, ain’t nobody gonna want you. And you’ve got a lot goin’ for you.”

Caleb is glib. He always has a quick comeback or a funny turn of phrase. Evan recognizes it and tries to build his confidence, but Caleb, too unsuccessful at dating and too often picked on for his looks has trouble believing in himself. At the start of the book, he may be beastly in appearance, but he’s also an Everyman we’re rooting for — a departure from the traditional story.

Transformation through Obsession

As the novella progresses, though, Caleb changes. He becomes obsessed with dating Rory, so he makes a deal with the sinister Mr. Nickleby (more on him tomorrow)  to help him say the right things to seduce her.

He doesn’t realize it at first, but this is the start of a slippery slope of behavior for him. Caleb knows there is something wrong when Mr. Nickleby offers to help him. He knows a teacher shouldn’t be helping a student woo a girl. He also can sense a predatory instinct in Mr. Nickleby.

Caleb looked at him for the first time. He wore his usual outfit – a black dress shirt and slacks with a red tie. Caleb thought it was cool he wore school colors, but it was strange he wore the same thing every day, and the tie looked weird against the shirt. Longish, black hair fell on either side of his head, framing his face in a strange sort of darkness. His brown eyes were penetrating. They seemed to be looking into the depths of Caleb’s soul. It made him nervous.

But despite his misgivings, Caleb goes forward. He accepts Mr. Nickleby’s help even though he knows it comes with a high price. He’s decided he wants Rory badly enough he’ll do anything to win her.

At this point, Caleb begins his transformation into a true beast. He allows his obsession to drive him.

Trading Roles

As the novella moves towards its climax, Caleb and Rory exchange their respective roles in the fairy tale. Rory begins as the Beauty, but her obsession makes her unapproachable. Caleb is a Beast on the outside but a Beauty within.

But Rory becomes more victim than antagonist, and Caleb ceases to be sympathetic to the reader. In a twist of horrific irony, it is Rory who pushes him over the edge into a pit of beastliness. Using a magical ring, she wishes for Caleb to win a football game and become the new starter. Her spell is far from altruistic — she is hoping to punish Mike and his girlfriend Holly. But she was trying to do something nice for Caleb in the process.

Unfortunately for Rory, it completely backfires. Mike and Holly suffer no consequences, and Caleb becomes everything Rory despises. He is unmasked as a true beast later that night when he attempts to force her to have sex with him. She thwarts his unwelcome advances, but, from that point forward, their two roles in the story have completely reversed. Caleb becomes hugely popular, and his nice personality is subsumed under his obsessive quest to be the new hero of Lawrence High. Rory becomes an outcast. She loses her boyfriend, she loses her best friend, and she loses her dignity. Her beauty — both inner and outer — is locked away. No one can see it past the glow of Caleb’s popularity.

Rory sat sullenly in the girls’ locker room. She’d managed to sneak away from her class, so she wouldn’t have to sit with the cheering, screaming mob of football fanatics at the school, but she was every bit as lonely in here by herself as she would have been in that crowd of strangers. Worse, while sneaking into the locker room had gotten her away from everyone, she could still hear the pep rally. For all practical purposes, she was attending, even though she was cutting.

She missed Cameron. The two hadn’t spoken since Friday night. Rory had barely even seen her. For someone who was allegedly her best friend, Cameron had managed to make herself pretty invisible this week.

So now it is Rory who is locked away in the tower of isolation and Caleb who is out free, able to impact the world of Lawrence High School. Beauty becomes the Beast and vice versa.

Tomorrow I’ll look at the man who makes all this happen, Mr. Nickleby. The strange and sinister English teacher, who brings magic to Lawrence High and ruin to its students.

Click here to buy Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale from Amazon.com.

Pretty and Prickly — My Take on Beauty in “Beauty & the Beast”

Last week, I released my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale. Over the next three days, I’ll blog about its three principle characters — Rory Bellin, Caleb Johnson, and the mysterious Mr. Nickleby. I’ll start with my Beauty, Rory.

A Beautiful Princess

For some reason, a fairy tale often begins with a beautiful princess. Our young heroine is virtuous, lovely, and deserving of every good thing in life. She is often royalty, but regardless of her heritage, she is an outstanding, upstanding example of what is best in people.

I wanted to play with this idea some. To be sure, Rory meets some of these qualifications. She is a strong young woman. She’s smart, talented, and hardworking — the kind of high school student guidance counselors rave about and college admissions directors hope will send them an application.

Because I was adapting “Beauty & the Beast”, I also made her gorgeous. Everyone in the novella acknowledges Rory’s loveliness — her best friend Cameron (who herself is plain) notes Rory is much better looking than homecoming queen Holly, all the boys in the story believe she is one of the most beautiful girls at Lawrence High, and even Holly herself admits Rory is prettier than she. She says to Rory:

You’re really pretty. Much prettier than me. You’ve got incredible cheekbones and amazing eyes. I’d kill to have lips as plump as yours. Mine are so thin. And you dress well, even though you don’t have a lot of money. If you wore a little more makeup and took some more time with your hair, you could be stunning.

More than Meets the Eye

One of the essential questions of “Beauty & the Beast”, particularly the Disney version, is “Who is Beauty, and who is the Beast?” Asking that question and returning to it multiple times was important to me when I approached adapting the story to the 21st Century.

Thus, Rory nominally fulfills the Beauty role in my novella, but she’s not the perfect image of young womanhood many fairy tale heroines are. She may be pretty, but Rory’s never had a date, never really been interested in one, because she is obsessed with school.

She is the daughter of a single mom. Her mother became pregnant by her boyfriend her last year of high school. After graduation, Rory’s father left them to play football at Oklahoma. Rory never sees him. Her mother just gets a support check every month.

Rory is angry. She’s worked very hard to get where she is — editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, president of three clubs, and a straight-A student. She plans to attend Yale so she can escape Lawrence and her mother’s sad existence.

She also feels she is deserving of more than she is getting. Despite all Rory’s accomplishments, it is Holly who is popular and Holly who is elected homecoming queen. This frustrates Rory to no end, because Holly’s sole claim to fame is dating Mike Kelso, the captain of the football team. We see her frustration early in the novella:

She stared at Holly laughing and giggling with her friends and tried to understand what they saw in her. Why couldn’t anyone see that Holly’s popularity was completely unearned and not worth the time and attention everyone gave her?

She understood Mike being worshipped, even though he didn’t really deserve it either. He won football games for LHS. It was a mediocre but comprehensible accomplishment.

All Holly did was date him. She dressed trendily and cheered for him at the games. She clung to his arm between classes and laughed at his insipid jokes. She probably didn’t even think they were funny. How did that make her homecoming queen? How did that make her worth anyone’s attention?

This obsession with personal success and anger at Holly’s unearned popularity gives Rory a prickly personality. When she’s talking with Cameron, she spends all her time complaining about Holly. When her mother is trying to talk to Rory about her own experiences at Lawrence High, Rory completely invalidates them. And while Caleb Johnson — the novella’s nominal Beast — is sitting behind her in class daydreaming about her, she barely knows he exists.

So is she Beauty or the Beast?

Complex Motivations

The real theme of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale is the danger of obsession, Both Rory and Caleb get themselves into deep trouble by pursuing their obsessions blindly.

But the story is no fun, indeed it has no impact if we can’t sympathize with its protagonists. Rory is a complicated young woman. She doesn’t intend to be nasty. In fact, she doesn’t deliberately insult or hurt anyone directly. The damage she causes occurs entirely because she doesn’t understand the consequences of her obsession or even that she is obsessed.

It isn’t until Mr. Nickleby — the novella’s true villain — explains her own thinking to her that it occurs to her she may have been wrong. She accuses him of making events go as they have, but he denies it, saying to her:

You made your own choices, Rory Bellin. I gave you a ring of three wishes. I told you the first wish was free. I never told you what to wish for. You made that choice on your own. You could have wished to be accepted with a full-ride scholarship to Yale. You could have wished for The Budget to win a national competition under your editorship, so you could write your own ticket. Hell, you could have wished to win the lottery, so you wouldn’t have to worry what college is going to cost.

But you didn’t. You were so obsessed with Holly and Mike being popular when they had no right to be, you wanted to see some sort of petty justice done. You wanted to see your boyfriend get the glory, so you could stand in front of everyone and tell them how right you were.

You did this, Rory. You did all of this so you could have your revenge.

It isn’t until this point in the story that she recognizes she’s been a fool, that, despite being Beauty, she may have behaved beastly.

For a modern fairy tale, I think that’s an important characteristic. Fairy tales are fables — stories meant to instruct — and I’ve got several lessons woven through my version of “Beauty & the Beast.” But for them to ring true in a contemporary setting, I don’t think you can have completely virtuous heroes and utterly dastardly villains. Modern characters need to be as complex as modern problems.

So my Beauty is partly a beast. Tomorrow, I’ll examine the Beast — Caleb — and see whether he’s a monster or just misunderstood.

To purchase Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale from Amazon.com, click here.

“Sleeping Beauty” Outperforming FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA

In honor of the release of my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale, I’m giving away my short story, “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale”, free on Amazon.com this week! If you haven’t had a chance to read it, now is an opportunity to do so at no cost. “Sleeping Beauty” was an Indie Book of the Day pick, and it’s garnered a number of very nice reviews.

Yesterday was pretty exciting. I got nearly 1200 free downloads, pushing “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” to the top of two categories in the Amazon Free Store and getting it all the way up to #177 overall.

But even more exciting than that for me was where it landed in relation to some of the other books available. In the Science Fiction & Fantasy>Fantasy>Fairy Tales category, it was at number one for awhile yesterday before slipping back to number two. But look at the Top Five in the category:

Number five is Dracula. Dracula! Number four is my all-time favorite novel, Frankenstein! Number one is Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know, and, given that I was number one in this category for awhile yesterday, I was “outselling” it too.

Obviously, it doesn’t really mean anything. Shelley and Stoker are going to be doing better than me long after “Sleeping Beauty” goes back into the paid store, and being able to give away more books than those two greats doesn’t say anything significant about my literary prowess.

But wow. I’m in a Top Five that includes Frankenstein and Dracula. I could not be more flattered.

You can help keep me there for a little longer. Head out over to Amazon.com and grab a copy of “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” Tell your friends too. After all, it’s free.

Need more convincing? Here’s the book blurb and cover.

He wanted to save her. He got it all wrong.

Carl is the only one left. All Beth’s friends were sad when she fell into a coma two years ago at the age of fourteen. But life moved on, and so did they. Except Carl. He still comes to see her. He still visits two to three times a week, talking to her and hoping she will wake.

Her mother, Marie, is insane. She stares constantly through a thick haze of cigarette smoke at Carl whenever he visits Beth, watching him, evaluating, plotting.

Marie knows the truth. She knows why Beth is in that coma. She knows it was Rex, Beth’s father, who did it. She knows he hired a witch to cast a spell on her Pretty Princess until she is old enough to marry, until his hand-picked protégé wakes her with True Love’s First Kiss.

But if whomever Rex chooses can break the curse, then so can Carl. He’s loved Beth since he first met her in Sixth Grade. Marie knows. She has a plan. And maybe she’s not as crazy as everyone thinks.

First, though, she’ll have to convince Carl to believe in magic. Then she’ll have to encourage him to defy Rex. That won’t be easy. Rex hates Carl. He put Beth into that coma to keep Carl away from her. And Rex has a wicked temper.

Marie is determined, though. She’s going to get her Sleeping Beauty back. And Carl is going to help . . . whether he likes it or not.

Can True Love’s First Kiss really break the curse, or are darkness, insanity, and self-doubt too strong?

Set in modern times, “Sleeping Beauty” is a creepy re-imagining of the original fairy tale. Much like ABC’s Once Upon A Time, it offers a fresh look at an old story.

It explores what happens when parents go too far to protect their children. All parents struggle deciding when to hold on tightly to their children and when to let go. Rex and Marie get it all wrong. A cautionary tale, “Sleeping Beauty” reminds us there is a fine line between love and obsession, between care and cruelty.

Click here to download “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” for free through October 11, 2013.

Amazon KDP’s Tech Support Unhelpful

I’ve never been this frustrated with Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing. In fact, I’ve never been frustrated with KDP at all.

But I am now. As you know if you read this blog regularly, I am having trouble with the Kindle edition of my new novella, Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale. I struggled mightily to get it to upload. No matter what format I sent it in (and KDP accepts several), I kept getting the following message:

Note the error message in red: “We couldn’t process your file. Please try again.”

It’s maddening on a couple of levels. KDP fails to mention what was wrong. It seems to indicate it might work next time — “Please try again.”

This has been happening over and over for a week now on every file type with one exception — .mobi. That’s the file format for Kindle. So the issue appears to be that Amazon is having trouble converting from a Word, HTML, or text file to Kindle format.

I’ve checked my coding. I’ve done everything just as I’ve done for the other five books I’ve published with KDP that all went up without a hitch. My file size isn’t too large. I’m using a file format KDP claims is compatible. My cover image is within their regulations. I even started with a fresh file, taking the base manuscript and completely recoding it from scratch.

But “We couldn’t process your file. Please try again.” Ad infinitum.

Naturally, after doing everything I could to eliminate the problem on my end, I contacted tech support, especially after I heard other authors were having the same problem.

Here’s the thing, though. You can only contact tech support via email. There is no chat service. There is no phone number you can call. If you call KDP’s customer service (which I did), they just tell you have to email tech support about tech problems.

And tech support gets back to you in around 24 hours. That’s right. You send them an email saying you’re having trouble getting your files to upload, and they reply tomorrow.

And what do they write? The first response read,

“I’m sorry about the inconvenience you had when trying to upload your book’s content. We were experiencing an ongoing issue with this matter but I can confirm that the problem has now been corrected.”

They could confirm it was fixed. But it wasn’t. So I emailed them back saying so. I got the following response.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I apologize for your experience with uploading your book. I’d like to get this issue resolved for you as soon as possible, will it be possible for you to send us a screen shot of the actual message you’re getting during the process? This will be effective for our technical support to troubleshoot it without any delay.

while you’re doing that may I also suggest, if possible, for you to use another machine so that we can eliminate all source of potential problems?

Thanks for your patience while we work on a solution.”

Prior to their suggesting I use another machine, I had done just that. I tried uploading from three different computers at three different locations. The only thing that worked was using Mobipocket Creator to convert the files to .mobi. But that changed the formatting so that the book didn’t look as sharp. Blank lines were stripped out, making the book harder to read.

After I messed around for a couple days trying to fix it myself through the work-around I’d discovered, I gave up and emailed them again, this time attaching the screenshot they’d requested. I got the following reply:

“I’m very sorry for any frustration this issue has caused.

We’ll need a little time to look into the content uploading issue.

We’ll contact you with more information by the end of the day on “Saturday, October 12.”

Thanks for your patience.”

I got that reply 24 hours after I queried them on Friday. So it will take them a week to update me on the problem.

This isn’t technical support. KDP does a lot of things well (and their techs and customer service people are extremely polite — something Amazon should be commended for). But asking me to wait one to seven days while you look into a technical problem is not “support.”

Moreover, each time I received a reply it came from someone different. So, despite my corresponding with KDP three times and my replying to their messages, not starting a new one, I heard from a different tech each time. There does not appear to be a ticket started on my issue. None was referenced in any of the correspondence. So I’ve no guarantee anything is being done about my problem, nor can I expect there is a history that whomever does look into this can look up.

KDP’s customer service is wonderful, and the opportunity Amazon.com provides for indie publishers like me is terrific. But if something goes wrong on a tech issue, they are not equipped to handle it well. They need a tech support phone line. They need a chat service. And they need to respond faster than 24 hours later.

I’ll keep posting in this space about the ongoing saga with KDP’s tech service. I’m hoping to upload a new version of Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale as soon as possible, so I can clean up the formatting issues the work-around caused and add a thank you to Katie Darden for helping me get the book published in the first place.

Whatever’s wrong with Amazon’s platform needs immediate attention. So does KDP’s tech support.