Mary Sisson's Blog, page 63

Uf

Still moving--I'm doing it one carload at a time, so it's taking forever. I'm semi-settled into the new place, though--still lots of piles o' crap around (it's actually rather discouraging to realize that I have so much crap, since as a rule I try to live uncluttered), but I can sleep at the new place and I have Internet and tomorrow I am supposed to get an actual stove.

I've been doing so much hoisting, plus the new place has stairs, that I've been pretty much exhausted all the time (yes, overexercise is real). But hopefully soon I can strike a balance between moving and the rest of life--just spend an hour or to a day on moving-type stuff, and then spend time on other things. Of course, I still have to get the old house ready to sell--UGH. I will be very happy to get rid of THAT commute....

From the Annals of Marketing Neglect

So, Alicia had a good question:

I'm curious - when you have a moment - how did your books do while you had no time to promote and pay attention to them? I hope well.

Or did you find time for at least keeping track of that?

Now, it seems she thinks that I haven't been paying any attention to my books for the past couple of months as I fixed up the new house. But the truth of the matter is that I haven't done ANY marketing since my brother passed away late last April--in a crisis, I've found that it's best to simplify one's life as much as possible and focus only on the things that are truly essential. As a result, aside from the stuff that cropped up because of something I did a couple of years back, there has been no marketing of my books for almost a year--no Facebook ads, nothing.

How have sales been? Remarkably steady!

With one important caveat: Whenever something changes with Amazon, the level of my sales changes--but then remains steady. Sales are lower since Amazon switched from have a Science Fiction: Series bestseller list to having a Science Fiction: First Contact list--but they have been quite consistent at that lower level.

Compensating somewhat for that lower level is the fact that the book is now on the Science Fiction: First Contact list at Amazon UK.

Wait! This means I am now an INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR!!! Oh, that's hilarious.

The reason it's hilarious is that I'm still not selling tons of books--not nearly enough to make a living off it or anything. If I needed to do that--well, for starters I would actually write more, but also I would push to get on a bigger bestseller list, like getting back on the general Science Fiction list. Back in those days I was making about $500 a month off of sales of Trust--obviously still not enough to live off, either, but if I had more titles out....

It's getting, it's getting, it's getting kinda hectic

Moving in! It's happening! It's kind of a complicated process because the new place still lacks some key things (like a stove and curtains) but hopefully it will be done fairly soon!

In the meantime, here's a couple of article I thought were interesting but didn't have time to actually write posts about:

This one is about the music market in Japan. Japan has been notable because it's resisted digitization, but guess what's happening right now? Oh, yeah, digitization is happening with a vengeance and all the Japanese labels are being caught out because they thought that Japan was the one market that would never, ever change, so why should they prepare?

I also have to point out something that has always annoyed me with reporting about the Japanese music market: People always report the revenues. So they say (or rather, they used to say), Oh, the Japanese music market is so much better than the U.S. music market because evil, awful digitization hasn't happened there so their revenues are still high!

Anyone see the problem there? Revenues are not profits. If I sell something for $10 that costs me $8 to produce and ship, I have revenues of $10 but profits of only $2. What's so nice about digitization (be it music or books) is that you can sell something for $5 or $3 that costs you next to nothing to make. So yeah, your revenues go down, but who cares?

That one is about dodgy on-line reviews. Businesses are starting to sue people who post negative fake reviews for defamation--something to keep in mind if you're ever tempted to trash someone via sock-puppet.

 

Look at that!

It's been mentioned that the way Amazon is designed gets you to focus on them at the expense of other retailers, and I'm going to expand that observation to note that the same is true of Amazon's international operations--I can't look up my Amazon UK numbers, so I just don't give them much thought.

Until I was entering their payment into my checking software and realized that it was fully 50% of what Amazon US is paying me.

It turns out that, at the moment, Trang is in the top 10 of Amazon UK's free first contact books!

This pleases me very much, because in my opinion, British media tends to be very well-written. Of course there are many great American writers, but I've seen British trashy celebrity gossip crafted with a care that you would just never see here for that kind of story. I think we are much more of the mentality that there's high literature and then there's the everyday stuff that just needs to be simple and clear (really simple and really clear--we make zero assumptions about the literacy of our audience), while the British take more of the attitude that everything should be written as well as possible regardless of purpose. I really noticed that when I was collecting reviews for Serenity--American reviewers almost never noted that the movie was well-written, because that would be regarded as kind of off-putting ("this movie is hard, and you will not understand it"), while British reviewers almost always threw in a paragraph about how marvelous (and enjoyable!) the use of language was.

Did I put in for that?

I got an e-mail the other day telling me that Trang was being featured on Free eBooks Daily--I have no idea at this point if I submitted the book long ago or if there was some other selection criteria. (Looking at the site, I think I must have submitted it--wow, I have no memory of that.)

Anyway, of course I thanked the person, but I had no idea if it would have any impact--that sort of thing doesn't always, and that site lists a whooole lot of books.

At this point, though, I can say its definitely had an impact, which is nice, because God knows I'm not doing jack for the book nowadays. (But the house is painted! Now I can start moving stuff in!) It didn't cost anything, so if you're thinking about submitting a book to that site, it's probably worth doing. Just, you know, don't expect it to go up right away....

How to make a romance excruciating

The house is keeping me busy, so I decided it would be nice to unwind by watching more of the Hong sisters' output, starting with their very first show--you know, made back before they had the pull to make a non-generic drama.

Remind me not to do that again.

The show is called Delightful Girl Choon Hyang, and in theory it's supposed to be a retelling of a folktale, except that it's not. The interesting and very funny bits actually are, but they are few and far between--and they are incredibly frustrating, because you can see the Hong sisters' wit and humor come out to play for a tiny bit, but then all the good stuff is shoved back into its cage and we're just stuck with the annoying generic romance.

It's annoying because its the kind of romance that gins up drama by having the characters be crazy and dumb, which I dislike in any story but I think is more of an issue in that genre because it's so character-driven. If the ENTIRE FOCUS of the story is a relationship between two people, shouldn't that relationship and those people actually be worth something?

I mean, the vast majority of people have some level of relationship skills. But that's not helpful to a romance writer who needs to pad out a book or script! So the characters act like a pair of hypersensitive 14-year-olds with attachment disorders!

Let's see if you are a real-life adult or a badly! written! romance! character! with a quiz!

You really, really like someone! In fact, you're in love! Do you:

1. Show affection for the person and ask them out.

2. Treat the person like dirt and repeatedly inform them that you don't even like them--don't worry about them taking it seriously, they can read your mind!

A significant other--or even just a friend--suddenly is in a very bad mood for no apparent reason. Do you:

1. Ask them what's wrong, and offer to help if possible.

2. Assume the worst! They hate you, and if the two of you are dating or married, they're cheating!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. A problem crops up in some other area of your life. Do you:

1. Discuss it with your partner.

2. LIE! LIE!! LIE!!!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. Their psycho stalker ex, who you know full well would do or say absolutely anything to sabotage the relationship, tells you something negative about your partner. Do you:

1. Laugh in their face, then go home and have a good laugh about it with your partner.

2. Believe them completely!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. A horrible, abusive relative of theirs tells you it would be better for your partner if you went away, leaving them isolated with said abuser. Do you.

1. Laugh in their face, then go home and have a good laugh about it with your partner.

2. Do exactly what they tell you to!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. The two of you are extremely close, and you communicate very well/have a wonderful sex life. Someone who is not nearly as close to your partner as you are suggests that you radically alter your communication/sexual style. Do you:

1. Nod politely, then go home and have a good laugh about it with your partner.

2. Accept the advice and follow it slavishly, without (and this is key) discussing it with your partner first!

You are in a serious relationship with someone you love very much. Some random person tells you that your partner has done something very wrong, and unless you do exactly what they say, they will reveal this misdeed to the authorities. Do you:

1. Discuss the matter with your partner and figure out what to do together.

2. Submit to blackmail alone, because teamwork is for suckers!

Angsty post

So, the house is chugging along--I'm glad I've been focusing on it, because it actually does make things happen a lot quicker if the homeowner has already made decisions about stuff, or is willing to run off to the REALLY big Home Depot to pick up that thing that the nearby merely-large Home Depot doesn't carry.

But I'm still having the writing itch. I've been taking it out on the other blog--including writing posts and then deleting them without publishing them, which I think is like a Grade A symptom of Frustrated Writerdom. ("I have nothing to say! But I shall write it down anyway!")

I'm really of two minds about blogging there--and I was already of two minds about blogging here. I know there are writers who think that it is important to just write anything, so much so that they will count blog posts toward their daily word count. Maybe it's because I spent a few years having to switch between working on Trang and Trust, and writing for a living, but I feel like you have to decide, Do I want to be a novelist, or do I want to be a blogger? I had to do this before with the freelance writing--did I want to be a novelist (and spend time writing novels), or did I want to be a journalist (and spend time networking and pitching stories)?

A blog can really reel you in, so that you begin to focus on building readership and networking with other blogs that you like, which can be a major time-suck and distraction. The other issue is that it's simply easier to do blog posts, so writing them can be a form of procrastination--Look! I wrote 1,000 words today! Everything's fine!--just like the way to-do lists can be abused.

Part of me feels like I should just delete the other blog--prune off that writerly outlet so that output is forced into the novel. (Can you tell that I garden?) Part of me wonders if the writing-is-like-exercise people have a point. I think I'm going keep both blogs, but make an effort to channel the writing into the novel--at least it's a good sign that I want to write, and that even though the house takes a lot of time and focus, I've been able to write, even if it's just for that random blog.

Wow, that got bad quick

(So, yeah, HOUSE has eaten all my time, plus I've been really sick. But at this point, the hazard-abatement stuff is pretty much done, plus I found a general contractor to deal with the flooring/painting/renovating stuff, so there's less of a burden on me to schlep out there every day at the crack of dawn to meet various workers. And I'm starting to feel better, although still tired. So I may get writing again fairly soon.)

I've mentioned that I like the show Sherlock. My sister really likes it, so she recorded the third season when it aired, and I've been watching it at her house.

And man, was it bad! Like, yelling-at-the-television bad.

It's always painful to watch a show go downhill, but the speed and efficiency with which Sherlock has taken the plunge has only been matched by a few shows (the first season of Enterprise springs, ever-unbidden, to mind).

The main problem as I see it is that Sherlock used to be a mystery show with engaging characters and the occasional vague conspiracy. Now it's a soap opera featuring vague conspiracies and a bunch of whiny dysfunctional characters who yammer on about their feelings and, every now and again, make reference to those mysteries they used to solve back when they did that sort of thing.

Mystery is a very logical genre. And unfortunately it felt like, in deciding to abandon the rigor of mystery, the Sherlock writers decided to abandon all other forms of rigor as well. Sometimes this lost rigor was logical (Why would North Korea want to blow up Parliament? Why would an evil genius reveal to his opponents the only way to stop his evil plans?), but one of the things that really stuck out to me was a bit of lost production rigor: The show stopped showing Sherlock's thought process.

That was one of the more-original and better-done things in the first two seasons of Sherlock. Sherlock would come across a crime scene and examine it. As he was doing so, little words (or sometimes images) would appear ("damp" maybe, or "clean clean clean dirty"). It usually wasn't enough for you to easily put the pieces together, but when Sherlock later did, you could see how he got where he was.

It was a neat trick, and it tied the television series to the original stories quite well, since Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was always noticing these tiny details and making deductions from them. It also was something that clearly took a lot of work on the part of the writers, the production crew, and the actors--so of course it had to go!

In the third season, the visual element is divorced from Sherlock's thought process: He looks at stuff and words and images appear, but it's like a music video--looks cool, doesn't mean much. Then Sherlock just kind of magically knows things--unless it's more convenient for him to remain completely clueless, even in situations where he is paying close attention. The degeneration of the Sherlock character from puzzle-solver to convenience-clairvoyant reminds me quite a bit of what P.G. Wodehouse did to Jeeves.

In addition, what the third season made me realize was that I found the character of Sherlock engaging specifically because his thought process was entertaining. He was doing good and delighting me to boot, so I cared about the fact that he was a recovering addict and that he couldn't have sex and that he was deeply attached to Watson, even though he tended to treat Watson like crap. Take away the interesting bit of his character, and I'm left with the dysfunctional, soap-opera stuff--I MIGHT TAKE DRUGS! I DON'T HAVE SEX! DON'T GO WATSON, I NEED SOMEONE TO CRAP ON!--and no particular reason for me to care about it.

Open Road still not making much sense

This was in the Wall Street Journal (all emphases added):

Forty years ago, "Airport" author Arthur Hailey was one of the country's best-known novelists. Today nine of his 11 novels are out of print in the U.S. and difficult to find even in used bookstores.

That's about to change. This spring, six Arthur Hailey novels, including "Airport" and "Wheels," will be published [by Open Road] in e-book form, priced at $14.99 each.

The article goes on to say that publishers are discovering that e-books are good for backlist revenues.

The re-issuance of the writers' works reflects a broader effort by publishers to mine their inventories of "backlist" titles—books published more than a year ago—in a bid to generate revenue from younger readers.

And it quotes Mark Tavani, editorial director of fiction at the Random House Publishing Group, as saying:

"These [backlist books] aren't front list titles, books that your friends are talking about. But people who shop electronically are willing to load up and try stuff if the price is low."

Notice a slight contradiction there between the first quote and the second two? Younger readers have never even heard of Arthur Halley, and people who read e-books will buy unknown backlist books if they aren't too expensive. So Open Road's plan is to woo readers who have no idea who Hailey is . . . with a FIFTEEN DOLLAR e-book?

Fifteen dollars? For fuck's sake, that's more than any mass market paperback, and many a trade paperback. All for a license to read something--a license that you cannot sell yourself later on.

Oh, and maybe you can't find Hailey in used book stores, but on Amazon? You can buy used copies of his books for a penny. Yes, you have to pay for shipping, so it comes out to a whopping $4. For a hardcover edition.

Hailey is dead. He's been dead for a decade. He's not going to be coming out with a big new book that will create a splash and drive interest in his backlist. If you want to interest new readers in what is to them a new writer, $15 e-books are NOT the way to go.

Certain jobs are REALLY not stories

The HVAC guy took forever yesterday (verdict: the furnace can be saved; the heat pump, not so much), so I wound up reading a bad novel by a writer who is famous, but not for novels. (Which means that all the jacket blurbs were these atrocious, ass-kissy, "What a masterful genius!!!! I only hope you write more of your WONDERFUL novels (and give me a job!)"-type things. I was like, Dear God, don't encourage this crap.)

One of the WONDERFUL aspects of the novel, showing the author's masterful genius!!!, was that the actual plot did not begin until fully a third of the way into the book. Instead, the entire first third of the book was dedicated to describing the day-to-day life of . . . a professional writer.

Not just any professional writer--a professional writer who doesn't write novels (but would like to write one), and who is about the same age and lives in the same area and is the same gender as the actual author. (Yeah, he really dug deep into his imagination for that one. I'm gonna assume that the resentful ex-wife and adult children are his, too.)

I keep reading this. Since everyone who writes a book is a writer, there are a bazillion gazillion not-particularly-imaginative books out there about, you guessed it, life as a writer.

As I've said before, someone simply doing a job is not enough to carry a book. And let's face it, writers have about the most boring jobs imaginable.

Especially established writers. This guy's not poor; he's not uneducated; he's not desperate. What does he spend an entire third of the book doing? Oh, you know, arguing with his agent, worrying about the wording of his latest contract, wondering when he'll get time to write that novel, wondering if he'll have to (shudder) teach another university class (the horror!!!) to maintain his middle-class lifestyle.

These are the kinds of thing that, when Tweeted about, get you on White Whine. Honestly, the only way the stakes of that story could have gotten any lower would have been if the guy was having lots of great sex, but not with the woman he really wanted to have sex with.

Ooops! Sorry! That was in there, too!

In a way, the book reminded me of Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys, if The Wonder Boys had sucked instead of being awesome. Once the plot starts, the guy . . . kind of realizes that there is a world around him? But not really. The book is not, Guy Realizes That He Is a Self-Indulgent Prat so much as it is, Self-Indulgent Prat Learns To Feel Better About Himself, which . . . what are the stakes here, exactly?