bestsellers | CW Hawes

Kickstarter for Fiction

We’ve all heard the numbers. Over 7 1/2 million books on Amazon. Over 3,500 new titles added every day.

The gurus tell us we can beat the odds and become a bestselling author. All you have to do is pay them hundreds or thousands of dollars. And they will make it happen.

Hundreds or thousands of dollars? For one book? But, hey, it’s only money and they guarantee that your book will hit some bestseller chart (usually obscure) on Amazon.

The questions I ask are:

- - A bestseller for how long?
  - Will I earn back my investment?
  - Can I duplicate the results on my own?

The odds are you won’t earn back your investment any time soon. Nor will you be able to duplicate the results on your own. Because if you did, the guru just lost a potential future customer and maybe created a rival. And that’s bad for business.

As for how long your book will be on the bestseller list — does it matter?

No, I don’t think it does. Because a bestselling book that ends up losing you money is simply a loss. No matter how many copies you sell.

Think about this: aside from Patterson, Rowling, or King, name me a bestselling author from 20 or 30 years ago. Fame is indeed fleeting.

And if you can name one, that’s only one writer among many, many tens of thousands. That’s something to think about.

Bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson blew the lid off Kickstarter setting an all time record of over $41 million in pledges for his latest campaign. All I can say is that it got my attention. (If being a bestselling author was so great, why was he doing a Kickstarter?)

I took Dean Wesley Smith’s free Kickstarter workshop and took a long look at whether or not Kickstarter was a viable platform for me.

And that’s a valid question to ask about any platform. Is it valid for me?

Let’s face facts. Amazon is glutted. The odds of anyone finding your book are pretty doggone remote.

Most people don’t look beyond page 1 or 2 of the search results. If your book isn’t showing up there, for all intents and purposes — it doesn’t exist.

Couple the above with the fact that a search returns more sponsored ads and Amazon promos than search results — so there’s even less chance for someone finding your book on a search. Even if your keywords are perfect.

To put all of our auctorial eggs in the Amazon basket is, in my opinion, just plain stupid. I didn’t always think so. But years of minuscule sales have convinced me otherwise. There’s just too much competition, no matter what category you put your book in.

Practically speaking we independent authors are also independent publishing houses. Which means, whether we like it or not, we are businesses. Our job is to sell our books. Does it make sense to try to sell your wares in an overcrowded marketplace?

If you were selling apples, would it make sense for you to go to the same place where everyone else was selling apples?

Might you not get better results adopting a different sales plan?

Why do you think these gurus are teaching courses and selling their services? It’s easy money compared to selling books.

Remember: the people who got rich in the California Gold Rush weren’t the prospectors. It was the people selling stuff to the prospectors.

In my tooling around on the Kickstarter site, I was surprised at the number of authors who are in fact funding their projects. Sure there are a lot that don’t fund — but there are a lot that do.

I’ve supported a half-dozen projects and gotten loads of goodies in addition to the items I pledged for. Plus I found myself a couple new authors I want to follow. I’d say that was a win-win situation. Win for the author and a win for me, the reader.

I just finished writing the 9th Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation. I’m going to use it to test the Kickstarter waters.

If I’m successful, I plan on doing more Kickstarters and will hopefully build an audience there, plus earn some cash along the way to fund my business. Others are doing so. Why can’t I?

And remember: Dean Wesley Smith has a FREE workshop to help you get started on developing a successful Kickstarter campaign. He’s run many successful campaigns.

Get the workshop here: https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/p/kickstarter

If you are a fiction writer and haven’t gotten any traction on Amazon, perhaps Kickstarter is a place you need to consider as an option.

My thought is this: if there are too many cooks in the kitchen — find another kitchen.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, keep thinking outside the Amazon box.

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer, with a bestselling novel. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes

Share This!

The Reading Experience

Every reading experience begins in the mind of the writer and is completed in the mind of the reader.

That means every time I finish writing a book, I’m only half done. No communication, no entertainment has taken place until someone reads what I wrote.

Only when there is a reader has the act of writing a novel been completed. And for the reading experience to be a positive one, the reader has to be able to tap into the world I created and been able to take something away from it that he or she can make part of his or her ongoing experience in this journey we call life.

Lee Child, in his 2012 introduction to a new printing of the first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor, says essentially the same thing.

Child wrote in that introduction this gem:

To me, entertainment was a transaction. You do it, they watch it, then it exists. Like a Zen question: If you put on a show, and nobody comes, have you in fact put on a show at all?

The reader is vital to any fiction writing experience. Not awards. Not accolades. Not bestseller status. Those things are nothing.

Bestseller status can be, and often is, gamed. (For example, Joanna Penn wrote a blog post on how you can ad stake your way to bestseller status.)

Accolades can be false. “That was a great book, Chris!” Said not because Jed actually meant it, but because it’s the social thing to do. Or maybe he’s hoping I’ll write him a 5-star review.

Awards basically mean nothing except to those who put value on what other people think. And often the award is based on who gets the most votes. So the winner is simply the one who got his or her fans to cast the most votes. Pure high school.

All that really matters are readers. Because readers read books. It is the reader that counts — and only the reader.

I am a reader. I have been ever since I can remember. Books are my life. Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

What do I look for in a book or short story? First and foremost — character. As Lee Child noted in the above mentioned introduction:

Character is king. There are probably fewer tha 6 books every century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember characters. Same with television. Who remembers the Lone Ranger? Everybody. Who remembers any actual Lone Ranger story lines? Nobody.

But great characters are only a part of the puzzle. There are certain themes I gravitate towards and others I shy away from.

In my life, I’ve experienced a significant amount of injustice. Unfairness. So for me, justice and fairness are very important themes. I want to see an unfair world made fair. I want the characters in the books I read, the good guys, to right wrongs. To see to it that the bullies and cheaters don’t win.

As a reader, so am I as a writer. My private detective’s name reflects it all: Justinia Wright. Justinia comes from the Latin for justice, and Wright to connote that she makes things right.

Pierce Mostyn fights an uncaring, and to us unfair, universe and its minions. He does his best to prevent bad things from happening to good people.

The other theme that is important for me is loyalty. In my world, when I was a child, I often felt like Julius Caesar, crying out “Et tu Brute?”. And in some ways that feeling of betrayal at the hands of those I trusted continued into adulthood. So loyalty and betrayal are themes which gain my attention as a reader.

And loyalty and betrayal also factor in my writing. For all their bickering, Tina and Harry Wright depend on each other. They are loyal to each other, through thick and thin.

Bill Arthur, in The Rocheport Saga, as he seeks to build a new world out of the ashes of the apocalypse, is constantly faced with issues of loyalty and betrayal.

To the extent a writer can tap into what is important to me, that writer becomes memorable.

For the most part, I think most readers don’t give this idea of themes conscious thought. They read books and like some and not others. The books they like they often aren’t even sure why they like them. Most likely, though, they like those books because they tap into things that matter to the reader.

As writers, we have to give this considerable thought if we want a ready audience. What is our message? The more we can identify it and communicate it, the more likely we are to find our fans. And not have to rely on accident or luck.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

Good Books You Never Heard Of

Sometime late last year I started reading three series by authors who advertised themselves as being New York Times, USA Today, and/or Amazon bestsellers.

I was so disappointed with the first book of the one series, I stopped reading a third of the way into the novel. It was just flat-out boring. The main character was an uninteresting unidimensional cardboard stereotypical kickass heroine. With Daddy Issues to boot. Even the promise of her becoming a vampire (and I love vampires) could not rescue my waning interest.

The second series I attempted was a sci-fi action series. I did manage to finish the initial novel. But it was a struggle. The main character was an angry cripple. Unfortunately he was also as flat and uninteresting as a pancake forgotten in the fridge. The villain was as unidimensional as Dr Smith in the original Lost in Space. And just as pathetic. The attempt to introduce a romance subplot was awkward and frigid. I didn’t go on to book two.

I got hooked on the third series from the blurb, but the first quarter of the initial book was just plain bad. The author clearly needed a ghost writer. The writing was wooden. The action unbelievable. The plotting, obviously cribbed from some “expert’s” plot point chart, was mechanical. If the book had been a paper novel, I’d have dumped it at the used bookstore and gotten some of my money back. Being an ebook, I’m just out the cash. One argument against ebooks.

I decided then and there I was not going to line the pockets of anymore “bestselling” authors. My money is too dear. I live on a retirement income after all.

As I’ve discussed before, a bestselling novel isn’t necessarily an actual bestseller. There are just too many ways to scam the system, or the system itself is rigged. A bestseller may in fact be a bestseller. Then again, the author or publisher or the raters could have manipulated things so the book simply looks like a bestseller.

I’m an avid reader. And it’s very true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or the reader in this case. What I like, you may not; and vice versa.

I don’t like Romance novels. Others eat them for breakfast. I don’t particularly like YA. Others read nothing but.

I’m not a fan of magic. Others love magic, even if the system is flawed. They don’t care.

In my opinion, the kickass heroine has been done to death. But there are those who love every kickass heroine who comes along.

That’s the beauty of art in any form — there’s an audience, whether large or small, for every artist.

Over the next few weeks, I want to shine a spotlight on some books, characters, and authors that are virtually unknown to the larger reading universe. Books, characters, and authors that I think deserve a much larger audience because they are very much worth reading.

Since attempting to read those three “bestselling authors”, I’ve launched a crusade to discover the hidden gems that are out there. Books and writers I thoroughly enjoy. Books and writers that deserve a much, much larger audience.

If you know of any that fit the bill, good books that aren’t selling, do let me know.

Next week, if all goes well, we’ll begin.

As many of you know, I’m in the middle of a major relocation. Moving from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I’ve lived for the majority of my nearly 66 years, to Houston, Texas.

Moving is chaos. Moving companies don’t operate on firm schedules. They have windows. So while they’ll pick up our stuff on Friday, the 24th, they may deliver it as late as the 7th of September.

Consequently, I won’t have ready internet service. So we’ll see what happens, knowing that at some point things will get back to a new normal.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

Bestseller Lists Are Fake

Bestseller lists aren’t what they pretend to be. In other, more blunt, words: bestseller lists are fake.

A few weeks ago I looked at what provides the best reading experience for us readers. Its characters we grow to love (or hate).

Today I want to look at how we readers are duped into thinking a book is a bestseller. And therefore worthy to be read.

I’m going to focus on The New York Times bestseller list because it’s the 800 pound gorilla on the block and has been since the 1930s when it began.

In 1983 William Blatty, the author of The Exorcist, took The New York Times Company to court claiming that the newspaper was intentionally excluding his book, Legion, from the bestseller list for editorial reasons. By looking at sales alone, it should have been on the list.

The New York Times won the case. Their defense in part was that the bestseller list was not supposed to be accurate, but merely reflected their opinion.

Here it is from the court ruling:

“Defendant further argues that inasmuch as the list was compiled in the exercise of its editorial judgment and represented its opinion of which books were best sellers, the First Amendment shields defendant from liability for interference with plaintiff’s prospective advantage by refusing to include his book in the list.” (Blatty v. New York Times Company, Court of Appeal, Second District, Division 7, California. Emphasis mine.)

For decades, The New York Times presented the illusion that the bestseller list was in fact a list based on actual sales of books. And virtually all of us were duped into thinking that illusion was reality. In fact, the list is merely a compilation of sales based on a survey of specially selected sales outlets, heavily edited by The New York Times staff.

In other words, the list is a sham. It’s fake news, as it were. The list is in reality merely the opinion of The New York Times staff as to what books should be bestsellers. It’s an op ed piece telling you what they think you should be reading.

So what does this mean for us readers? I think it means we can safely ignore bestseller lists. Because the books on them are not true bestsellers. They are not a true measure of what people are actually buying and reading.

We associate social proof with quality and acceptance. Author Mark Dawson makes this point all the time to authors when it comes to Facebook advertising. The more 5 star reviews an author has the better. This is part of our herd instinct. We are, after all, social creatures. There is a tendency within us to not go contrary to the group think. The Times knows this and exploits it in their bestseller list to get you to read what they think is best for you. In a way, this is a type of fake news.

The other lists, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today operate in similar fashion.

Even Amazon plays this game by creating micro-categories for books, so that authors can get a “bestseller” tag — which generates more sales for the Zon. One author noted that his book on Washington, DC didn’t sell until he took advantage of Amazon’s Washington, DC micro-category. Suddenly it became a “bestseller”.

What this all means is that the term “bestseller”, when it comes to books, essentially has no meaning. It’s valueless.

Reading, as with all things in life, is a personal experience. What moves me, may very well not move you at all. I’ve laughed my head off at a passage in a book, while my wife doesn’t think it is at all funny.

Commercial fiction has proven that most people do in fact ignore bestseller lists. Starting back around World War I, the pulp writers ignored the academics and literati. They wrote what the average guy or gal wanted to read.

Edgar Rice Burroughs never made the New York Times bestseller list and I don’t think he cared. He got rich off Tarzan. Lester Dent made a decent living writing crime and suspense novels and most of the Doc Savage books. Murray Leinster wrote thousands of stories and made a nice living at it. The same goes for Seabury Quinn, Robert E Howard, and many others.

And this continues today with many indie authors making a very nice living without the help of The New York Times or USA Today. And that means most books which are enjoyed are not bestsellers. By extension that means that most books worth reading, aren’t on the bestseller lists.

William Shakespeare, who predates all these lists, wrote with one thing in mind: give the theater goers a play worth their money, and they’ll be back for more. It was the public Bill wrote for and he made a nice living doing so. In effect, he was a pulp writer.

We readers, I think, can safely ignore the claims made by authors of bestseller stardom. Because such a claim is no guarantee their books are actual bestsellers, or that they are any good. I know that has been my experience more often than not.

I’ve noted before in this blog, there are many gems that have never gotten into the top million on Amazon’s paid Kindle list. Those books are very much worth reading. Often they are far more creative and entertaining than those much higher up on the list.

Jacques Barzun, in his preface to The Selected Letters of Lord Byron, wrote: A letter is in fact the only device for combining solitude and good company.

I think the same applies to books. Leave the fake bestseller lists (and their fake social approval) behind. Be thyself.

Here are 4 articles that go into more detail regarding the bestseller list sham:

Tim Grahl tells us the truth on bestseller lists:

http://observer.com/2016/02/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-and-wall-street-journal-bestseller-lists/

Ken Kurson gives us a look at political bias in the NYT bestseller list:

http://observer.com/2014/01/dueling-ailes-bios-and-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list/

Tucker Max on bestseller list bias:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280520

Noah Kagan on how writers can hit #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list:

https://okdork.com/hit-1-amazons-bestseller-list/

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy non-bestseller reading!

Share This!

The Detective Novel – Some Authors

I don’t know why bestsellers are touted so much. Quite honestly, I’ve read a lot of bestsellers that weren’t any better, IMO, then your average mid-lister — and a significant number that, again IMO, were just plain bad.

On the other hand, I’ve read quite a few books that are nowhere near bestseller territory and have found them to be truly superb reads. They actually deserve to be bestsellers.

Then we have the whole idea of just exactly what is a bestseller. The New York Times bestseller list is not a list of actual bestsellers. It’s a curated list compiled from specially selected outlets, with a dash of editorial tampering to make sure the “right” books are on the list.

And then we have all of these awards writers brag about receiving. The Science Fiction Writers of America called out Readers Favorites, for example, as being more or less a scam. Pay your money and get a favorable review. Not in so many words, but it’s not hard to read between the lines.

Kirkus isn’t much better. Indie writers can pay $500 and get a review. No guarantees, but who wants to disappoint a paying customer?

So what does all this have to do with detective novels? Last week I said I’d mention a few authors who are lesser lights in the mystery field. What I want to emphasize here is that being on a bestselling list or being an award winning author essentially means nothing.

Neither awards nor a “bestseller” badge is a guarantee that the book is a good read, or that the author can even tell a good story. We are in subjective territory here. It’s all opinion. Just like the popularity contest known as Homecoming King and Queen in high school. For example, scifi/fantasy writer Patty Jansen delivers a good read and she is not a “bestselling” author – by her own admission. And yet she says she makes a decent income.

In the end, the consumer more or less determines success. Although the crowd is fickle. If Shakespeare hadn’t been able to sell tickets to his plays, we wouldn’t even know he existed. And E L James is laughing all the way to the bank for a novel that is basically poorly written fan fiction.

I repeat: the public is fickle and tastes change. And often change rapidly. George Frederic Handel was knocking it out of the park writing Italian opera for London audiences. They couldn’t get enough. Then, suddenly, almost overnight, Londoners got sick of Italian opera. Handel went bankrupt, then discovered English oratorio, and the rest is history. Messiah and the “Hallelujah Chorus” are ever with us.

Dead – And Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

Jacques Futrelle

When I was a kid, I loved Jacques Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine stories. I still remember “The Problem of Cell 13”, a classic locked room study.

Sadly, Futrelle was only 37 when he went down with the Titanic, telling his wife to save herself. Several Thinking Machine manuscripts also lie at the bottom of the Atlantic.

You can get Tales of The Thinking Machine for free. Well worth reading.

Edgar Wallace

One of the most prolific authors ever, today Wallace is a virtual unknown. In his lifetime, he wrote 175 novels, 957 short stories, 18 stage plays, and reams of news reports (he was a journalist), articles, screen plays, poetry, and historical non-fiction. His works sold over 50 million copies, although few are in print today.

His prolificity was due to his dictating his work onto wax cylinders, the dictaphone of his day, and having his secretaries type the dictations. By dictating, he often produced a novel in 2 or 3 days.

Not finding anyone to publish his first novel, he self-published it in 1905; creating his own publishing company, Tallis Press.

Never heard of him? Does King Kong ring a bell?

Wallace died suddenly, while working on King Kong, in 1932 at the age of 56.

Many of Wallace’s books can be found for free online. One source is ebooks@Adelaide, and there are others. He’s worth checking out.

Patricia Wentworth

Agatha Christie is a towering figure to this day, and Patricia Wentworth had the misfortune to live and write when Christie was in her prime. It’s pretty tough living in the shadow of a towering figure.

However, Ms Wentworth was by no means a hack writer. I think she’s on par with Christie, and the Miss Silver mysteries are as good as Christie’s Miss Marple.

What’s more, Miss Silver is a working woman instead of a gossipy busybody. Miss Silver is a private investigator, the forerunner of Sharon McCone, Kinsey Milhone, VI Warshawski, and all the rest.

Faded Page has all the Miss Silver mysteries, except number 4. And best of all, they’re free!

Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh is another good mystery author who is obscured by Christie’s long shadow.

Her Inspector Roderick Alleyn was a bit unique in the day, because he’s a police detective. While Christie’s detectives are either private investigators or amateurs, we enter the world of the police procedural with Marsh.

Marsh was also heavily involved in the theater and her novels have a certain theatrical flair to them. They are very much worth reading. Check for them on the used market.

A.A. Fish

A.A. Fish is a pseudonym of Erle Stanley Gardner, another prolific author, best known for Perry Mason.

While Gardner and Perry Mason are household names, Fish, Bertha Cool, and Donald Lam, are not.

The Cool and Lam mysteries are good reads. My only complaint is that Bertha gets short shrift most of the time, which is too bad as I think she is far more interesting than Donald Lam. I think Gardner missed a bet here. He could have had something going like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

The books are good nonetheless. Get them on the used market.

Richard & Frances Lockridge

Popular in their day, the Lockridges produced scores of novels, all set in the same world, spread across several different series and characters.

Unfortunately time has not been kind to them, and that is a shame. They were good writers. They’re probably best known for the Mr & Mrs North mysteries.

I like Pam and Jerry a lot. New Yorkers with money (Jerry’s a publisher) and a lot of time on their hands, especially Pam, they get embroiled in some very interesting situations and murders. Pam is the one who mostly helps their friend Lieutenant Bill Weigand solve the crime.

Funny and suspenseful, the books are all around good reads. Pam is a most entertaining female sleuth.

You can find a complete list of all of the Lockridges’s works on GoodOleBooks.

Look for these on the used market. They’re very good.

Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Taylor was on one occasion referred to as the Buster Keaton of the mystery genre.

I’ve only read her Leonidas Witherall series. The man who looks like Shakespeare. Asey Mayo, the “Codfish Sherlock”, is her other and more well-known creation.

The Witherall mysteries are zany fun. Something along the lines of the Keystone Cops in book form. Long on laughs and light on the mystery, they are well worth your time if you want something light and not taxing to read.

Catch these on the used market.

Alive – And Need to be Read

There are a number of writers of the traditional detective story today, featuring either amateur or professional sleuths. I’m not acquainted with them all, but I’ll share a selection of those with which I am.

P.F. Ford

Ford’s Dave Slater and Norman Norman mystery series is dynamite. Full of humor and suspense, as well as the mis-adventures of Slater’s love life, Dave and Norman make the quintessential odd couple.

The books are something of a blend of police procedural and cozy. And while there is plenty of humor, the stories can be on the dark side.

Great books. I’ve read the entire series and am champing at the bit for the next one.

You can pick them up on Amazon.

J.P. Choquette

Tayt Waters is a contemporary private investigator who is quite a colorful character.

The mysteries are funny and suspenseful. Clean reads with a lot of grit and a splash of the dark about them.

There are currently 2 Tayt Waters mysteries, I hope more are in the works. You can get them at Amazon.

J.A. Menzies

Menzies’s Manziuk and Ryan mysteries start off with a bang in a classic country estate murder. Shaded Light: The Case of the Tactless Trophy Wife. Who would have thought there were “country” estates in suburban Toronto, but I guess the rich get it all.

Manziuk and Ryan are another odd couple team police procedural team. Much more at odds with each other than Ford’s Slater and Norman. Their goal is to try and work together as a team.

I enjoyed the Golden Age feel in a contemporary setting of Shaded Light and look forward to reading the other books in the series, which may be found on Amazon.

Ellen Seltz

Ms Seltz writes a classic English-style whodunit, complete with that droll understated British humor and memorable characters.

If that’s your cup of tea, then her Mottley and Baker series is for you. Get them on Amazon.

Summing Up

As I’ve noted before, I prefer the traditional whodunit over the thriller. And while thrillers are all the rage these days, I take comfort in the fact that we do have (myself included) writers who wish to carry on the tradition of the classic detective novel.

While the mystery audience is aging (it can be a bit disconcerting to a writer to see your audience dying off), I find hope in younger characters, such as Tayt Waters entering the fray; or mixed race teams such as Manziuk and Ryan, making their appearance; and the contemporary issues Slater and Norman deal with. This approach will help to make the traditional mystery more relevant to a younger audience.

The western died off quickly. But now with the indie revolution, I see the western making a comeback. Not dependent on the bottom lines of big corporations, indie authors can write what they love and target very specific audiences.

While the mystery isn’t dead by any means, I see hope that, like the western, indie authors will give this venerable genre a continued lease on life. And who knows? Tomorrow the thriller just might be passé.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

Book Review: A Quiet Life in the Country

Superb indie writers abound. Many readers complain about the indie revolution and all the crappy books out there. Granted, there are a lot of crappy books being published. But they aren’t all indie. A very sizable portion of them come from the corporate giants on their never-ending quest for the next blockbuster.

Some of the best books I’ve read this year and last year were written by indie authors. And some of the worst books I’ve read last year and this year were published by the big corporations. In this day and age, who publishes a book is no guarantee of the book’s quality.

Last week, I reviewed indie author Agatha Frost, who writes contemporary cozy mysteries. This week, I want to take a look at cozy author T. E. Kinsey, who started out going indie and then accepted a publishing deal from Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon imprint.

When I picked up a copy of A Quiet Life in the Country it was #1 on Amazon’s list of Bestselling Cozy Mysteries. That was on 2 July 17. As of yesterday (7 August), the book was #15. A long ride being in the top 20.

So what makes Kinsey’s 1908 aristocratic sleuth, Lady Hardcastle, so popular? To me the answer is simple: appealing characters, humor, and good storytelling.

The same combo that works for Agatha Frost, works for Mr Kinsey. In fact, it’s the same combo that pretty much works for every author or book I like.

The only downside to A Quiet Life In The Country is that the pacing tips towards the glacial. What saved the book for me was the humor. The jokes and puns and banter made the slow spots bearable.

The storyline is the same as in all mysteries. Lady Hardcastle and her servant, who is also her friend, have moved to the country after a life of adventure. And then they stumble across the body and then another.

Through a ruse they are allowed to work with the police detective. Eventually Lady Hardcastle and the detective solve the murders.

All pretty standard. Which is why character and humor are so important, as well as good storytelling — which turns the already familiar plot into something interesting.

Highly recommended! Get yourself a copy of A Quiet Life In The Country. You won’t be sorry.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

Goldrush

We’re familiar with the California Gold Rush of 1848, or the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896, or the Victorian Gold Rush of 1851 in Australia, or the Witwatersrand Gold Rush of 1886 in South Africa.

Today we are in the middle of another gold rush. It’s called self-publishing.

Every gold rush has a life-cycle that moves from low investment, high return to high investment, low return. The key to success is to get in big at the beginning of the cycle. When panning and placer mining are effective. Simple tools and big returns.

Amazon introduced the first Kindle on November 19, 2007. It sold for $399 US and sold out in 5 1/2 hours. On April 2, 2010 Apple released the iPad and sold 300,000 on the first day. These two devices were the game changer that spawned the self-publishing gold rush.

Authors such as Amanda Hocking, John Locke, JA Konrath proved self-publishing was a viable money making enterprise. Now the ability to become a millionaire was for the first time in the hands of the self-published author. No need for agents and no need to battle publishers over draconian contracts. The gold rush had begun.

All one needed in those early and heady days of self-publishing was to offer your book permafree or for 99¢. And write your series as fast as possible.

By the time I got involved with self-publishing, in late 2014, the easy money was gone. Now, like the old Smith-Barney commercials, if you want to make money writing books, you have to earn it.

As with any gold rush, once the easy money is gone, the people who begin to profit are the ones who do so at the miner’s expense. These are the people who sell things to the miners. The infamous middleman.

We see it in the self-publishing world. Writers, hungry for virtual shelf space and recognition, are making loads of money for the middlemen. Everywhere I read about this, I read figures such as $500 or $600 (or more) for editing, $500 for a cover, a couple hundred for formatting. And the list can go on.

That’s a lot of pressure to put one’s self under coming out of the gate. To date (2 years of receiving royalties), I’ve made $533 with virtually no advertising. I made back my investment in initial website cost and copyright fees. If I had editing and cover fees for 20 books to add to my expenses, I’d have to seriously consider becoming a middleman to “help” writers instead of being a writer.

The people who are getting the “easy” money today are:

Editors (often self-proclaimed)
Cover Artists (many using nothing more than stock photos and Photoshop or Gimp)
Review Services (like Kirkus and Reader’s Favorite)
Other authors “selling” the secret of their success so you can be successful (usually by means of high-priced courses)

And success hungry writers, dying to leave their day jobs, are shelling out big bucks for all of the above.

So let’s be honest, shall we? The easy money is gone. We now have to earn it.

How We Earn The Money

The path to self-publishing’s success in 2017 is not unlike trying to drop the ring into Mount Doom. It’s simple, but not easy.

I am obviously not making big bucks writing. But I’m retired. I’ve already dumped the day job. My monetary goal is a bit more humble. Nevertheless, the path is the same for all of us.

Mindset. The first thing we author-publishers must remember is that we are writers and publishers. We must think business. And the first thing we must realize is that self-employment ventures generally take 3 to 5 years to get established — if they even survive.

The second thing is we are direct mail marketers. The mailing list has now replaced permafree and 99¢ books as the building block of our business.

Mail order businesses can’t survive without their mailing lists. And we author-publishers are at base mail order businesses.

Once we have that mindset, we can start to go places. There is no quick money anymore. But there is money to be made. Mark Dawson makes around half a million from Amazon. A nice bit of pocket change that.

My Plan For Success

Plan your work and work your plan. Based on my observation of what universally works for authors, coupled with sage advice from the greats, this is my plan to work:

Write well. This should go without saying and yet needs to be said. Write a good story. Many writers forget to do so.
Write lots. Prolificity is key. No backlist = no sales over the long haul. All successful writers, traditionally published and self-published, say this.
Publish frequently. The reading public that buys indie books tends to be voracious readers. Feed their habit. Frequent publishing also helps to keep you in the forefront of the reader’s mind.
Follow Heinlein’s Writing Advice. The master said it best. In a nutshell — persevere.
Build your mailing list. We are essentially mail order marketers. I wish someone had told me this 3 to 5 years ago. It makes sense, but the reality was obscured by the early success of writers in the Gold Rush. Now that the easy money is gone, the mailing list is the direct marketer’s — and indie author’s — best friend.
Don’t resort to gimmicks. Today there so many authors I never heard of who claim to be New York Times, USA Today, or Amazon bestsellers that the claim is virtually meaningless. There are so many authors winning so many awards, the words “award winning” are equally meaningless. I’ve read plenty of crappy best-selling and award-winning books. And some that are really good that made nobody’s list and have received no award.

That’s my roadmap to success. Which for me is pretty modest. I don’t need beaucoup bucks. Anything from $25K to $50K a year will be just jim dandy. Those of you who need more than that to quit your day job — well, it’s just going to take a bit more work. But you’ll get there.

As always, comments are welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!