The Return of the Truth
Every author wants to entertain. That’s why we write. What drives us is the dream of developing characters that people react to. We want our stories to be exciting, to be interactive places where people become passionate about what we’ve created.
In the early years of my publishing I became desperate to get attention. I noticed people were not highly motivated to respond to my work and I started to include material that was extraneous to the stories. It had nothing to do with the tales I was telling. But this material, I thought correctly, would interest the people I was trying to impress with my books. And it DID. They were interested by that material.
But it was at the cost of the stories and of my self-esteem. Not only did these inclusions detract from the books, they sometimes backfired and caused negative reactions from readers. I was quite hurt because, in all honesty, I’d only included these elements to interest the readers. And they WERE interested—without that negative reaction, they had little response to the book at all. “How ungrateful!” I thought. Even when reactions were less negative, I didn’t see any engagement unless I put in irrelevant material.
Trying to change something to get people’s attention is just a way of trying to fit in. If people will only notice you when you change yourself, those aren’t people you should care about. Every author deserves the kind of fans they should really care about—the fans who care about them. In the course of the last 18 months I’ve revised every one of my stories to remove this extraneous material.
These changes aren’t to alter or hide what was in the books, but instead to reveal the true story. In another post I’ll detail exactly what changes were made. In the meantime—just be yourself. You’re a lot better at it than you think.
And here will be more updates.
In the early years of my publishing I became desperate to get attention. I noticed people were not highly motivated to respond to my work and I started to include material that was extraneous to the stories. It had nothing to do with the tales I was telling. But this material, I thought correctly, would interest the people I was trying to impress with my books. And it DID. They were interested by that material.
But it was at the cost of the stories and of my self-esteem. Not only did these inclusions detract from the books, they sometimes backfired and caused negative reactions from readers. I was quite hurt because, in all honesty, I’d only included these elements to interest the readers. And they WERE interested—without that negative reaction, they had little response to the book at all. “How ungrateful!” I thought. Even when reactions were less negative, I didn’t see any engagement unless I put in irrelevant material.
Trying to change something to get people’s attention is just a way of trying to fit in. If people will only notice you when you change yourself, those aren’t people you should care about. Every author deserves the kind of fans they should really care about—the fans who care about them. In the course of the last 18 months I’ve revised every one of my stories to remove this extraneous material.
These changes aren’t to alter or hide what was in the books, but instead to reveal the true story. In another post I’ll detail exactly what changes were made. In the meantime—just be yourself. You’re a lot better at it than you think.
And here will be more updates.
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