The power of negative thinking?

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In the last few pages of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, she mentions the work of Gabriele Oettinger, who — via 20 years’ worth of research — determined that people who imagine obstacles to achieving their goals are more likely to succeed than people who imagine purely positive outcomes.

Apparently Oetthinger proposes that if you consider obstacles, you become energized to overcome them.

Duke goes on to talk about how being open to the possibility of failure is effective in groups (corporate teams, for example) because it removes the stigma associated with being overly negative. Or seeming to be overly negative. Which gives the group flexibility to think more broadly and prepare for potential setbacks.

But I wonder whether there’s something else at play, also. Perhaps positive thinking — if it is forced or artificial — can function as a kind of denialism or denialist behavior that sublimates doubts/uncertainties/fears and thereby empowers them.

I believe I’ve observed that dynamic, personally. Have you?

The “other” Faust

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Faust seducing Gretchen. This part of the story: easy to follow.

I struggled to understand the “other” part of Goethe’s Faust. The part after Gretchen’s death. Have you ever read it? Crazy.

Then I came across a bit mentioning that the play is an alchemical allegory. Really good piece on that, here. The Alchemical Drama of Goerthe’s Faust, by Adam McLean.

It all makes sense, now. In a cosmic allegorical kind of way.

Countdown to Launch: The French Emerald

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The French Emerald, by Kirsten Mortensen

It’s a mystery! It’s a romance! It’s a … serial novel? =O

I have written a serial novel.

I have written a serial novel. I’ll be publishing on my site, one chapter per week.

The first chapter debuts March 4.

I’ll post more about the how’s and why’s at some point.

But for now, please click here for the teaser copy and how you can play along :)

UPDATE: All 43 chapters are now online and free to read! Click here to start with Week 1.

Going full Keto

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After 6 weeks of Keto, we’ve made our decision.

We’ll keep going. We feel too good.

Personally, I can’t believe the level of mental energy I have. My brain is lit up. Not in a frenetic way. It’s a nice, steady, “always on” thing — from when I jump out of bed in the morning til I start feeling sleepy at night.

Maybe this won’t last. I’ve heard tell that people burn out. But for as long as I feel like this, I am All In.

Fresh Face for Can Job :)

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A New Year, and a new look for one of my favorite novels :)

(Like I can really choose a favorite! Hah.)

The goal: see if a different look can help me position the novel more effectively. So much of Can Job’s plot hangs on what it’s like to work in corporate marketing, and yes, the novel pokes gentle fun at my fictional, fumbling Diptych Corporation. But the book is also a romance, and I don’t feel that the last cover, much as I liked it, conveyed “romcom.”

So here’s to a new experiment….

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.

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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.)