Tag Archives: writing

Reviews v. Endorsements v. Critiques. A Proposal for Writers.

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Writers want to support other writers, but when it comes to leaving reviews, we’re torn. What if we don’t like a book? What if we spot flaws? Fortunately there are options — if we change the way we think about “reviews.”

If you’ve ever hit the “publish” button on Amazon or Smashwords or D2D, you know how terrifying it is to put your novel out there for everyone to see — and judge.

You also know how badly you need reviews.

And as you meet other writers on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, chances are you’ve faced another dilemma: should you review other writers’ books? And if you’ve read a book and don’t like it — or, worse yet, spot what you think are flaws — what should you do? Share your thoughts publicly? Contact the writer privately? Drop the whole thing and enter the witness protection program? All of the above?

As a writer, you know first-hand how much negative reviews hurt.

Negative reviews dampen sales — and that’s not even the worst of it. Getting a negative review is personally painful for writers. It’s discouraging. No matter how thick-skinned we try to be, it feels so, so personal.

On the other hand, you also know the importance of feedback.

I speak from experience! As much as I hate negative reviews, I learn a LOT from them. I get data from negative reviews that helps me become a better writer and better understand my audience.

I’m currently doing a completely re-write of a novel based on input I got via negative reviews. Yes, those reviews tanked my rankings. I was just starting to get traction as an author, and poof. Everything I’d built was gone; years later, I still haven’t fully recovered. But when I’m done with the revision, the novel will be a better book. MUCH better. (If you’re interested in this story, by the way, stay tuned. I’ll be sharing more about it in a future post.)

In other words, there’s nuggets of gold buried in negative reviews, if you can stomach looking at them.

But that doesn’t mean that writers should use reviews to point out flaws. Especially when there are other ways to support each other. Better ways.

  • Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen
We interrupt this post to remind you that I have a new book out. And it’s the best book I’ve ever written. Available on Amazon for print or Kindle, or click here to browse other e-formats.

A New Framework: Review, Endorsement, or Critique?

As writers, we need to get more comfortable — even a little cynical — with what we all know is true. Reviews exist because the platforms where we sell our books use reviews to drive sales.

Reviews may benefit authors, too, but that’s not really why Amazon lets us post them. Amazon lets us post reviews for one reason only: because it’s good for Amazon!

Writing and posting reviews also requires us to invest time and energy. When you publish a review, you’re creating content and giving it away. Sometimes it makes sense to do that. But every minute you spend creating content to enrich the Amazon platform is time you could have spent working on your novel.

Fortunately, there are two other ways to support our fellow authors.

The first way is an endorsement. You publicly praise a book and recommend it to others.

And see what I did there? Because guess what. You can use a review to make an endorsement. But all that really means is that reviews are a vehicle for publishing endorsements. It doesn’t change the fact that reviews and endorsements are two entirely different animals.

In fact, when I stopped mixing up the concept of “review” with the concept of “endorsement,” I saved myself a ton of headaches, because the question “review or not review?” is now extremely easy to answer.

“No. Nope. And no.”

I never just “review” other writers’ books.

Instead — time permitting — I sample read other writers’ books, and sometimes buy and read other writers’ books, and then, if I really like something I’ve read, I’ll endorse it. I’ll post an endorsement (what everyone else calls a “positive review”) on Amazon. I’ll sometimes share my endorsement in other ways, e.g. Twitter.

“But Kirsten,” you say. “What if I read another author’s book and for some reason I don’t feel I can endorse it?”

Glad you asked, because that leads me to the last category: critiques.

Critiques, unlike reviews, are private. They’re feedback — just like negative reviews are feedback — but they don’t embarrass the writer or hurt rankings and/or sales.

I’m a lifelong reader and a lifelong professional writer. I’m also a self-published author who has been working on novels for over twenty years, now.

I’m far from perfect! But when it comes to novels, I’ve learned a little bit about what works and what doesn’t. And I’ll be blunt: I immediately spot serious flaws in the majority of self-pubbed novel I sample.

Am I going to buy a flawed indie-pubbed book, slog through it, and post a public review that details its problems?

Hell, no.

Because who would benefit?

Not me! I’d be taking time away from writing and from reading books I actually enjoy — not to mention the rest of my life.

And certainly not the writer! See above. Negative reviews do real hurt. And what writer wants to hurt other writers?

On the other hand, if you came to me and asked me for an HONEST critique, I’d read a few pages and don my fire suit and tell you what I honestly think could be made better. Even though, mostly likely, you won’t like it. Even though there’s a very good chance you’ll think I am completely wrong and don’t understand your book and don’t understand you as a writer or what you’re trying to do and everyone else who’s looked at your book told you it’s AMAZING.

I know you’re likely to respond that way, because that’s the way I respond to “negative reviews” (which are actually critiques … by people who have chosen to make them public).

But I’d be supporting you in a way that is a lot kinder and more useful than pretending your book is wonderful when it’s not, or telling the world I think your book has issues …

Or staying silent.

So, what do you think?

Maybe, instead of committing to public reviews, we could start offering other writers either:

A. Public Endorsements or

B. Private Critiques …

We’d be helping each other.

We’d be avoiding sticky promises that make us feel deeply uncomfortable.

We’d avoid hurting each other.

What do you think?

Covid-Time Writer Craft: Story by Robert McKee

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Writers gonna write.

But as long as we’re all stuck at home during this pandemic, we can do more than just put out words, right? We can also work on our craft.

Story by Robert McKee

So in the spirit of sharing w/ my fellow writers, I thought I’d share a bit about some of the books in my writing-craft library.

First up, Story, by Robert McKee.

This is one of the more recent additions to my library. I bought it last year as I began work on my current WIP, Once Upon a Flarey Tale.

As you can see from the pic, I use sticky tabs to mark parts that I expect I’ll want to review again–and there are a lot of sticky tabs in this book :)

What You Need to Know About Story (In No Particular Order!)

McKee is a screenwriter, not a novelist. But the building blocks of movies and contemporary novels are so similar that you shouldn’t let that put you off–you’ll find a lot of terrific information here that will help you tell better stories, regardless of the medium you use to tell them.

McKee is a teacher, lecturer, and consultant. Reading this book is a lot like attending an upper-level class on story-telling.

It’s hefty. 418 pages — there is a LOT here. Which is a good thing, IMO, because the more I learn about this craft, the better. Just don’t plan to finish this one in a single sitting ;)

It’s comprehensive. You’ll find everything in this book from the basics of the classic 3-Act story structure to how to develop character motivations to what makes a good title.

Story includes a lot of highly conceptual models for understanding how to make stories work. If you’re the sort of person who benefits by seeing concepts modeled visually, you’ll find a lot of tools to your liking in this book.

The Notes I Jotted Down / Passages I Flagged

In no particular order:

“Story values” are universal qualities of human experience — and they always have polar opposites. Examples are “wise” and “stupid” or “alive” and “dead.” Every scene will have at its heart some value; in ever scene, that value should change. And if the value doesn’t change, it isn’t a scene, it’s exposition — and it needs to be cut.

To avoid cliche, master the world of your story. This was a cool insight, I thought, because when you are completely immersed in that world and relating what you see, you won’t use other peoples’ commonly repeated words — you’ll use your own, the words you invent as you look around.

Research your stories in three ways: by unleashing your powers of memory; by unleasing your powers of imagination; and by what we usually think of as research — chasing down facts.

Create a finite, knowable world. “The world of a story must be small enough that the mind of a single artist can surround the fictional universe it creates and come to know it in the same depth and detail that God knows the one He created.” McKee comes back to this same idea later in this way: “design relatively simple but complex stories.” He then explains that by “simple” he doesn’t mean simplistic, but that we should avoid the temptation to proliferate characters or locations in an undisciplined way. Instead, constrain yourself to a “contained cast and world” and focus on building complexity within that world.

(Pssst … looking for a fast, free, fun read? My romcom caper novella, The French Emerald, is free on Amazon. Click the pic to get your copy!)

But at the same time, you need to create much more material than you will ever use–five times what you use, or even 10-20 times. An example from my current WIP: I’ve written fairly details timelines of each of my character’s lives, matching them to world events as well as personal milestones. Most of this will never make it into my books, but it gives me a wonderful send of fully knowing my characters.

Don’t be afraid to abandon your original premise if you discover, as you build your story, that it doesn’t work any more. (Phew!!! Because yes, this seems to happen to me a lot!)

Related: a story “tells you its meaning.” You don’t dictate the meaning to the story …

Inciting incidents should arouse unconscious as well as conscious desires in our protagonists.

“The most compelling dilemmas often combine the choice of irreconcilable goods with the lesser of two evils.” Related: “True character can only be expressed through choice in dilemma.”

Effective scenes operate at the levels of both text and subtext.

Progression in the story is built from cycles of rising action.

“When a story is weak, the inevitable cause is that the forces of antagonism are weak.”

“Never use coincidence to turn an ending.”

Character dimension springs from that character’s internal contradictions. But those contradictions must be consistent. “It doesn’t add dimension to portray a guy as nice throughout a film, then in one scene have him kick a cat.”

“To title is to name. An effective title points to something solid that is actually in the story.”

What I Liked About Story

This book is so obviously the culmination of many, many years of McKee’s work, teaching the craft of story-telling. There are countless nuggets in here that writers can grab and put to use to improve the quality of our novels.

What I Didn’t Like So Much

So much of what McKee conveys, he does so using conceptual models. The danger for me is that if I get caught up in understanding the model, I lose track of my most effective compass as a writer, which is based on feel: on how I react to something I’ve put down on the page.

How about you? Have you read Story? Do you have a favorite writer’s craft book that you would recommend?

UPDATE: Click here to read the next post in this series where I review Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass.

Writers Love Freedom, or: “Why AB5 Has To Go.”

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This is the text of my speech at the #RepealAB5 Rally on January 24, 2020, in West LA.

I AM A WRITER.

I grab ideas out of the air and pin them down, with words, in space and time.

And writing changes your brain.

I mean that literally.

One of my symptoms: I remember my dreams. Every night, at least three or four dreams. In complete detail.

And I know why I remember them.

It’s because dreams are the world of ideas, and archetypes, and symbols. It’s the world where time doesn’t exist. The past is now. The dead live. The dead are as vivid and real as you are here, now.

And I’ve worn away the veil between that world and this one. I’ve worn it thin, from a lifetime of moving back and forth between these two worlds, in my mind.

… Or maybe it’s not me, that does the moving.

Maybe I’m hitching a ride on Hermes. You know Hermes, right? He’s the Greek god with the wings on his sandals. His job was to carry messages back and forth between humans and the gods.

He carries messages to us from the world of ideas, and archetypes, and symbols, and the dead.

No surprise: Hermes is the god of writing …

Something else that is no surprise:

Writers love freedom.

When you spend your time flying with winged sandals and talking to the dead, you learn some interesting things about what it means to be free.

I have my story about AB5.

I’ve lost work because of AB5.

I have my story about freelancing.

About how I’ve always freelanced, because that’s what writers do.

About how when I walked away from full time salaried work and started to freelance full time, I tripled my income. I came into my own as a professional, respected working woman.

So yeah, the idea that words—some else’s words—can mess with that?

It pisses me off. It pisses me off!

But I’ve been listening, very carefully, to the people who support AB5. I’ve been listening as a writer. And I’ve read the bill.

#AB5 a piece of “writing.”

Quite the piece!

5896 words.

(By the way? The Constitution of the United States – which comes to us [thank you, O Hermes!] from the dead – is 4558 words…)

But why do I care about the length of AB5? Why mention that?

One of my favorite quotes about writing is from the historian David McCullough.

“To write is to think. And to write well is to think well.”

Hmmmm…

We all agree there are ideas out there—ideas related, somehow, to AB5—that are good ideas.

Nobody should be exploited.

That’s a very, very good idea. (“Nobody should be exploited” is four words, by the way.)

Everyone deserves fair compensation.

Also a good idea. (Also four words!)

Here’s a sentence from AB5.

In circumstances which are in essence the loan of an employee from one employer to another employer wherein direction and control of the manner and means of performing the services changes to the employer to whom the employee is loaned, the loaning employer shall continue to be the employer of the employee if the loaning employer continues to pay remuneration to the employee, whether or not reimbursed by the other employer.

What the fuck. (That’s the writer in me, talking…) What the serious fuck …

I said a minute ago: writers know something about freedom.

Because there’s nothing more free than darting around the world of ideas on your winged sandals.

But writers also know that, in this world, words are used to imprison people.

It’s no coincidence that writers are often on the front lines of wars. Or that they are often among the first to die.

Writers want to be free. Writers want YOU to be free. And when it comes down to it, to push and to shove, we will fight to keep you free.

But maybe you’re thinking, AB5? It’s not about freedom.

Isn’t it?

Let me put it this way.

Do you wish, sometimes, that life was simpler?

I do.

I think we all do. I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that things really should be simpler. And technology. Globalization. All those 21st century “isms”?

They don’t change what’s real.

And in our heart of hearts, we know that. Because in our heart of hearts, we know that our true home is anchored in the world of ideas.

And that world resolves to only a few, simple things.

Love. Family. Peace. Joy.

Suffering … Redemption.

Longing … Fulfillment.

So why do we submit to so many complications?

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote the poet William Butler Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst  / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Is that … us?

Have we abandoned the convictions that we, as Americans – as Californians – as humans – once held so strongly about the things that really matter?

Have we let “the worst” wear us down? Confuse us?

This is not about politics.

This is not about the left, or the right.

In 1981, in his introduction to Unamerican Activities, a compilation by the PEN American Freedom to Write Committee, PEN coordinator Geoffrey Rips wrote about writing and freedom and control. “A government intent on controlling the economic and social realities of a country,” he said, must manipulate the written perception of those realities.

And look at us, 39 years later.

The worst, with their passionate intensity, are burying us with crazy words.

They’re dumping this crazy pile of words on us. And we’re scrambling to try to understand them. To make sense of them. To react to them.

What an awful thing.

To go from what we once were, to a people governed by awful, mixed-up, crazy words.

To wake up one morning and learn that some rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward us to be born. That because of some word salad written by lawyers, that living you were earning? That business you built?

Disappeared.

I had no interest in becoming political. I had no interest in becoming an activist.

But writers? We know what freedom is.

We know that freedom begins with ideas.

Clear ideas.

Ideas truest to your heart.

My story is only one, small story.

But AB5 is not small. AB5 is monstrous.

It is government overreach.

It is the opposite of freedom.

It is unAmerican.

AB5 has to go.

Setting a novel in perpetual summer, plus a Katydid

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My current novels / novel project are, as I mentioned a couple posts ago, set in Upstate New York. It’s a fictional town called Tibbs. But, you know. Tibbs is my hometown :)

I’m still debating one element, however: time of year. Originally, I planned to set all three novels in the summertime. I like the idea of compressing Marion Flarey’s adventures into a relatively short time period. You want to subject your protag to nerve-wracking problems. Having them hit her quickly, one after another, helps to keep the pressure high.

dog in snow
Winter in the Northeast. Black and white and cold all over.

But another reason for keeping everything in the summer is that in Upstate New York, summer is the time when “nature,” in its biological form, is most intrusive and in-your-face. In the winter, nature makes herself known as well, but in terms that are tactile and visual. You feel her cold. Your visual field is smacked continually by that striking palette of blacks and whites and grays.

Summertime is different. Summertime is heat and mud and sweat and bugs and plants. You go outside and living things touch you, crawl on you. And the creatures are all having babies. Laying eggs and spinning cocoons and building nests and feeding fledglings.

It feels like that’s the world where I want my Marion Flarey to live. Green and tangled and damp. A perpetual summer, in fact …

We’ll see. There is still time for me to change my mind :)

In the meantime:

Two critter stories from this summer in Upstate New York

Both from when I was back there visiting this summer.

First: my daughter and I went for a walk around dusk, and a deer crossed the road in front of us, followed by a fawn.

The fawn saw us.

It peered at us.

It started to walk toward us.

That’s not an unusual thing. They are curious, they haven’t learned to be afraid, yet. But it was a magical moment. We stood there, watching the fawn as it stepped closer and closer, trying to figure out what sort of creature we were.

maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid? Scudderia furcata?
Green! Katydid — maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid? Scudderia furcata?

Then it suddenly felt fear and ran into the brush along the road, mewling for its mother.

On another walk, we found a katydid on the pavement.

I picked it up for a photo op, and moved it off the road.

I don’t know what kind it is — there are many different kinds — maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid?

If you can ID please do!

What novel is worth writing, really?

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I am writing a beautiful tale about corpses. Very seasonable weather for it.

–Evelyn Waugh

Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.

–Nick Morgan, Thinking of Self-Publishing Your Book in 2013? Here’s What You Need to Know, Forbes, 2013

If you’ve ever written, or have tried to write, or hope to write a novel, I suppose you sometimes think thoughts like the ones I’m thinking today.

Why am I doing this?

What am I trying to do, exactly?

I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I'm a loon.

I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I’m a loon.

I’m a decent writer. Above average, perhaps. But in this sea of writers — this sea of millions and millions of books — all that being “above average” means is that my head bobs up above the surface once in a while.

Just long enough for me to suck in a quick gasp of air before I disappear again.

I am also, arguably, a confused writer.

I’m envious of writers who live and breathe genre, because if you’re a passionate fan of genre, and then you decide to write genre, a big chunk of the “why” question is automatically answered. You’re writing to contribute to the genre. Genre readers are always looking for more genre to read. What you’re doing is participatory — reciprocal.

I like genre. I’ve read a fair share of genre. But I have never honestly felt completely at home in any genre community.

And look. Here’s what someone posted in a new review on my novel, Can Job:

Really 3.5 stars because it’s solid, but it never makes up its mind about what genre it wants to be.

You get a sense that this is going to be a romantic chick-lit romp from the cover and some of the scenes, but the majority of it reads like an attempt at big business satire.

Is it "art" if you look like you don't know what you're doing?

Is it “art” if you look like you don’t know what you’re doing?

A totally fair critique, I’m sure. From someone who obviously reads a lot and who doesn’t know me, and so isn’t even subconsciously inclined to just “go along with it” when I color, awkwardly, outside the lines.

And the thing is, it’s intentional. I’m doing this to myself, on purpose.

Sigh.

So I’m working on another novel, one of 3 or 4 WIPs in various stages of done-ness. And wrestling with the same kinds of questions.

What kind of book is this?

What am I trying to say?

I mean: what am I really really trying to say?

Let’s go back again to Faust.

Start in the 1500s with Historia & Tale of Doctor Johannes Faustus.

Faust is the arrogant guy who renounces Christianity and trades his soul in exchange for, basically, magical powers.

Peel that back and the story asks the questions: what is good? what is evil? what is truly most important and why are some people foolish enough to trade the most important away?

The answers are based on the assumed 16th century virtues of obedience and faith. Faust, like Lucifer in the Historia’s tale-within-a-tale of that angel’s fall, “rose up in insolence and vanity.” He thought he was too (good? smart? something) to heed the guidance of the Church.

Goethe’s Faust, written some 300 years later, asks the same questions but frames them completely differently.

Romanticism, suddenly aware of dynamic (even irrational) principles underlying both man and nature, took striving–tentative progression and development, and pure endeavor–and made it the defining quality of mankind.

From “Masterpieces of Romanticism,” edited by Howard E. Hugo, in The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces.

A being of searchings and questionings, living a life of constant aspiration towards goals but dimly seen–this, as described by God, is the being He has created in His own image.

And of the devil’s pact with Goethe’s Faust:

Here is no simple temptation to be naughty …

If Mephistopholes can destroy Faust’s sense of aspiration, if Faust can say of any single moment in time that this is complete fulfillment of desire–then the devil wins, and God and man are defeated.

I.e. “evil” is the cessation of striving toward something.

That something is still God. But it’s not obedience to God in the narrow sense articulated by the first Faust chapbooks. To Goethe, to be “good” is to be an active participant in God’s plan–to actively fulfill your part in God’s plan for humanity.

Obviously we see, here, the ideas of Progressivism in its modern/political sense, stirring in the minds of 19th Century Romantics. Or anyway, in a 1956 essay on Romanticism by an English professor at Berkeley ;)

So two final things and then I hit “publish.”

First, here I am in 2018 pondering two versions of Faust, one of which was published 450 years ago, and the other 200-ish.

And the ideas communicated by these two works are effing immense. You almost can’t get your head around them, they’re so big. Poke at them and they start to rattle you.

And part of me wonders, what is the point of writing a novel that is any less than this — that is any smaller?

Second: what kind of mind could possibly wrap itself around these same questions today?

Set aside that I wouldn’t dare to suggest I am personally capable of such a feat. I’m not that smart, and my world–including my intellectual world–is far too parochial. Pains me to know this, but I know this.

The fact is, it’s quite possible nobody could pull off a new Faust today. We’re drowning in noise–and we’re so fractured by social technology that no one mind can hope to bridge us.

And yet, I keep writing, and I keep thinking there’s no other novel that’s really worth writing, except a novel that tries …

In which I confess: I’ve been completely rethinking my latest draft novel

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Yeah, I’ve been busy doing other things as well. Work stuff.

But I haven’t stopped working on current novel. It’s just that the work has been going on “underground.”

Here’s the quick version.

As a writer, I operate on a kind of cusp. I aspire to writing novels that are well-plotted, because to me action is what entertains. But the questions that most interest me personally — and that (naturally) I want to explore with my books — operate at a non-surface level.

Let’s make this concrete. Suppose you have a heroine being chased by a monster. The action is all about her attempts to elude, outsmart, or fight her pursuer. And you need all that ducking and weaving and swordplay and making-of-alliances. It’s what pulls us into stories.

But no monster worth the name is “just” a physical threat. What makes monsters truly scary is that they evoke an existential threat. A monster that is “just” a monster is a cartoon. What really frightens us are things like suffering and death — things the monster represents.

Pick up that thread and follow it a bit and we find even more interesting fears. For me, for example, the fear of death is paired closely with the fear of “as if I never was.” All these memories, these experiences, the people who love me and think about me! Will that really all be wiped out one day, lost forever? Horrible!

Another closely related fear is the fear of losing control. This comes into play when people start thinking of “how” they would prefer to die. Compare “peacefully, in bed, surrounded by loved ones” with having your life snatched away from you unexpectedly. No chance to say good-byes, wrap up loose ends, settle back and take some part in the process (“more morphine please, nurse.”)

What’s scarier?

In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll writes that “art-horror” works by imbuing monsters with qualities that invoke dread, disgust, and “the idea that unavowed, unknown and perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe.”

Scary!

And that’s just one dimension of our heroine + monster scenario. A novel has so many layers, subplots, relationships. Ultimately they must all work together, and on that same under-the-surface level.

The novels that I truly love –that I find transporting — operate almost as if the novel itself is a psyche. I’m thinking of novels like The Book of Ebenezer LePage (GB Edwards). Everything about a novel like that seems to be part of a single psychic entity.

It’s not something you’re naturally conscious of (although people who write about GB Edwards’ book are likely to observe that the island shapes the characters, somehow. “You couldn’t write the same book if you set it on the mainland” etc.) But on an unconscious level, there’s a wholeness that transcends the categories we normally think of: character, setting, plot, conflict.

Okay, I said this post would be “the quick version” of what’s going on with my current novel.

So let me wrap it up by saying that I’ve re-titled it. It’s not Third, any more. The title is now Parthenon.Which I adore.

And it went from being basically “done” to being a WIP.

And it’s given me a constant headache as I have wrestled with how to show you, my presumed reader, something that I *know* in my bones about this place I’m writing about, which is fictional and yet not. I want to take you to this place, and show it to you, so that when you return to “the real world” you understand something you didn’t before.

That’s a tall order. I probably can’t pull it off. But I’m going to try :)

Learning from failure (indie book marketing)

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There's a pattern in there, somewhere. If only we could see it ...

There’s a pattern in there, somewhere. If only we could see it …

In my last couple of posts about indie author marketing, (one here and one here) I’ve referenced the need for data.

You need data to market. You need data to even plan how to market.

That probably sounds almost too reasonable to challenge, right?

But it also brings us to a couple more questions:

1. What data do we need, and

2. How do we make sense of it?

It’s All About the Data

The answer to the first question also sounds almost too easy, doesn’t it?

What data do we need? Why, data on how indie authors are successfully marketing their books, of course!

But is that really the best answer?

Maybe not.

The BBC published a fascinating article last week about surviving disasters. It cites the work a guy named John Leach, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth who studies how people respond when their ferry starts to take on water, or their plane crashes, or a terrorist bomb goes off in their office building.

But surprisingly, he’s not interested so much in the people who survive. He’s interested in the people who don’t.

Stories about survival often focus on the 15%, and what is so special about them that helps them stay alive. But Leach thinks this is the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking, why do so many people die when they need not, when they have the physical means to save themselves?

Huh?

This goes against everything we’re “taught” about learning, doesn’t it?

We’re taught to study success. We’re taught to seek out winners and copy them, find mentors and ask them to guide us.

And there’s a place for that.

But we also need to look at losers. We need to look at failure. We need to look at what doesn’t work.

And so often, we indie authors ignore the failures. We focus on the success stories.

Focusing exclusively on success creates problems, guys …

It creates a couple of serious problems.

First, it introduces cognitive bias — specifically, a subset of confirmation bias that’s called survivorship bias.

Author Tobias Buckell wrote a great piece on this in 2013.

It ought to be required reading for every indie author.

“The problem, right now, in eBook direct sales,” Buckell writes, “is that everyone is paying and listening to people” who have broken out. Writers who have achieved bestsellerdom.

“They’re listening to everything they say, and sifting everything they say as if it’s a formula for success.”

That ignores the vast — the overwhelming — number of indie authors who never sell more than a handful of books.

And what can we learn from them?

What have they tried that does not work?

How many times have failed authors applied the same “proven formulas” as successful authors?

We don’t know.

We. Don’t. Know.

And because we don’t know, we don’t really understand what variables are at play.

Focus on that for a moment.

Variables. Those tricky little gremlins that sneak in and try to skew every experiment ever conducted.

You have to control them if you want to understand the experiment.

But you can’t control them if you don’t know what they are.

I’ll write more about cognitive bias in a future post (or posts). But today I want to focus on the psychological consequences of falling under the sway of survivorship bias.

Don’t be hypnotized by dangerous illusions

Buckell touches on one of those consequences in his post:

Like in most cultish behavior, if you follow the rules and don’t get the results, you’re either ostracized, ignored, or it’s pretended you don’t exist. Many who don’t get the same results just shut up and go away.

When you apply some “winning formula” and it doesn’t work, you often find yourself marginalized.

And that hurts.

Now we’re all big boys and girls. And you know this as well as I do: we must grow thick skins if we’re going to survive as indie authors.

So I’m not bringing this up to whine. I’m not bringing it up so that I can decry how horribly unfair it all is.

I’m bringing it up because you and I and every other indie author out there on the long tail needs to be aware of what’s going on. We need to wake up. We need to know what we’re up against.

Which leads to the second psychological consequence of survivorship bias:

Discouragement.

You look out there and it seems like everyone else is succeeding.

And that’s a dangerous illusion.

You are a writer.

Write.

Don’t become transfixed with an illusion.

Don’t start comparing yourself to Internet spirits who seem to have achieved something that you also want.

Write.

Write.

Write.

Like This Post? Want to Stay In Touch?

Everyone who subscribes to my Getting to the Truth email list before midnight, E.S.T., on Sunday February 15 will be entered in a drawing to win a free e-copy of the book.

Subscribers will receive brief, periodic updates on the book, including links to blog posts like this one that share information I’ve dug up about indie marketing. These will be hard-hitting, extremely useful posts that you do not want to miss.

I will not share your contact information with anyone else, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Subscribe by using the form below, and please pass along this link to your indie author friends so they can participate as well.

Thanks for your interest. Thank you for your support.





Why marketing indie books is so hard: competition, value, pricing (Part 2)

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You can’t market without data.

Well, okay, you can. But you’re shooting blind. And if you’re spending money, you’re throwing it away.

There’s not a professional marketer in the world — and by professional marketer, I mean someone with education and experience in marketing, who has been hired by a bona fide company to run its marketing programs — who would dream of spending marketing budget without first validating a whole slew of assumptions.

Another word for it is metrics.

Hang out on any marketing forum for any period of time, and the conversation will turn to metrics.

When social media first became a “thing,” the marketers became obsessed with metrics. They’d ask each other all kinds of really hard questions.

  • Have you tested Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? That other social-media-platform-of-the-day?
  • What were your results? How many visitors did you get? How many clicks per visit. How many conversions per click?
  • What was your cost per click?
  • What was your cost per conversion?

Dear fellow authors: have you ever once heard any indie book marketing company talk about ANY of those things?

Bet you a steak dinner you haven’t.

Because those kinds of questions poke holes in most of the author marketing “strategies” out there. Holes big enough to heave a trad pubbed book through.

What Indie Books Are Up Against

You can’t find a solution unless you understand the problem.

So pull up a chair, because I’m about to lend you my brain so that, together, we can understand a bit more about the challenges we face when we decide we’re going to “market” our indie titles.

The way I’m going to do it is through a little thought experiment.

Put on your pretend business person hat. Pretend you were going to found a new business which would be based on an ideal product, and you were going to launch it in an ideal marketplace.

I’ll go into this in more detail in my book, Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing (click for details) but here’s the gist. Here are a few characteristics that define an ideal product in an ideal market:

  • The product would have an enormous potential market.
  • It would have little-to-no competition.
  • Prospective customers would need the product. Or if they didn’t need it (as in, they die without it, like food) they want it so badly it hurts.
  • The perceived value of the product is very high.
  • The cost of producing the product is very low, relative to the price you can set for it.

Now comes the painful part.

(I’ll wait while you find the Kleenex …)

How do indie books compare to that marvelous ideal?

Answer: they don’t.

The only possible exception is the first  bullet — market size — and that comes with a few caveats.

If you’re writing genre, for example, you may be creating a product with a large potential market. Sources day that the market for romance novels is around 29 million readers, for instance.

But if you’re not, your potential market is smaller — potentially much, much smaller.

And market size hardly matters anyway, because of the other factors we’ve listed.

Competition? Hey, you know how flooded the market is. Amazon carries over 30 million book titles, guys. That’s not even a flooded market. That’s darn near a saturated market.

So what about bullet #2. Do prospective customers need books? Guess what. They don’t. They might want them — and there’s a segment of the market that wants them badly — but nobody’s gonna t die tomorrow if he/she doesn’t get his/her hands on a new book.

Perceived value? Tell you what: if the perceived value of books was high, people wouldn’t be giving them away. They wouldn’t be pricing full-length novels at 99 cents.

Which leaves us cost. I’m having a lot of fun with cost in my book! But the bottom line (har har) is that you have to look at cost in terms of cost per unit sale.

And here’s the cold truth, my fellow writer: most indie authors aren’t going to sell more than a few dozen copies of their books.

Yeah, I know, I know, e-books are forever, your title might take off someday, and so-and-so sold zillions of copies, didn’t he/she? (Don’t worry, we’ll come back to that last claim early and often in future blog posts!)

But you’re investing your time and money today.

You’re paying your bills today.

No professional marketer in his right mind would ever dare turn to his boss and say, “I know, my marketing program didn’t result in any sales this year. But not to worry! I’m sure you’ll recoup you costs sometime in the next coupla decades.”

So suppose you churn books out at lightning speed, and keep your costs to almost negligible levels.

You’ve got to clear at least $5000 per title to break even.

At least.

(I will show the math on that in a future post.)

So plug that number into your calculator, along with how you’ll price your book and your expected royalty cut. And figure out how many copies you’ll need to sell.

1500?

2500?

5000?

I’m hunting down numbers as I research my book. Numbers. And one of the numbers I’m researching is how many copies/title the average indie author sells.

Not the big guys. Not the Hugh Howies and the Amanda Hockings and the JA Konraths.

The no-names.

I have yet to find any source that puts that number at higher than a couple hundred copies.

Got that?

On average, indie authors can only expect to sell a couple hundred copies of any given book.

Have you soaked your Kleenex yet?

Look, I have a huge problem, here, and I know it.

Nobody wants to buy a book that’s a total downer.

Hunt around on Amazon for titles on how to market your indie book. You’ll find a happy place, I promise. This works! That works! Five simple steps! Seven simple steps! All you have to do is xyz!

It’s a fantasy.

And I have nothing against fantasy. In fact, I adore dreams, fantasies, imagination. I write novels because there’s almost nothing in the world that makes me feel better than conjuring a fantasy and committing it to a Word file and then sharing it with other people.

So if you want to buy into some fantasy about how easy it is to market indie books, I say: more power to you.

But speaking for myself, I’m a professional writer. I’m in this as a career, not a hobby. I’m into this indie publishing thing as a business.

Not a get-rich-quick scheme.

A business.

So I want a clear-eyed view of what I’m up against.

Won’t you join me?

Everyone who subscribes to my Getting to the Truth email list before midnight, E.S.T., on Sunday February 15 will be entered in a drawing to win a free e-copy of the book.

Subscribers will receive brief, periodic updates on the book, including links to blog posts like this one that share information I’ve dug up about indie marketing. These will be hard-hitting, extremely useful posts that you do not want to miss.

I will not share your contact information with anyone else, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Subscribe by using the form below, and please pass along this link to your indie author friends so they can participate as well.

Thanks for your interest. Thank you for your support.





Speaking of misinformation

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Quote of the day:

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a business where there’s so much poor advice or lousy, limiting thinking than the writing business, nor so much misinformation.

—Russell Blake, novelist.

He’s writing about the myth that only “hacks” write novels quickly, but that observation could be applied to a looooot of other things as well.

(For context, see my posts on indie author marketing, e.g. here and here.)

Speaking of data

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a terrific blog post up that looks at a number of publishing metrics that have been reported by industry peeps lately.

I’ve just added this line from the post to my list of favorite quotes:

There’s an awful lot of common knowledge floating around in the publishing industry, most of which is not based on any reality at all.

Yep.

(For context, see my posts on indie author marketing, e.g. here and here.)