Tag Archives: amwriting

A hard lesson–a revised novel

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If there is one thing I’ve learned about trying to “be” a novelist — more accurately, trying to pursue a career as a novelist — it’s that you get knocked on your ass. A lot. Over, and over, and over…

When Libby Met the Fairies and Her Whole Life Went Fey by Kirsten Mortensen
Revised edition coming out this month!

And since I follow a few writers on Twitter, I see a fair number of who are crumpling. In real time.

I can relate. I’ve been there more times than I can count.

The lessons this business teaches are hard lessons, and the tools it uses to teach those lessons can be brutal.

Been There, Done That

One of the worst lessons I’ve had to endure started shortly after I published one of my first novels, When Libby Met the Fairies.

It was 2012. Self-pubbing was still pretty new.

I ran a KDP giveaway. A successful giveaway! A 23,875-people-just-downloaded-my-book giveaway! And I thought I’d made it. I thought that, with that many people reading one of my novels, my future was a gleaming bright golden road with golden coins showering down around my ears from endless sparkling rainbows.

From the days when running a KDP giveaway was so easy, a total newb could do it…

Boy, was I wrong.

Readers hated the book.

Okay, not all of them. And maybe “hate” is too strong a word. But in those days, Amazon used reviews in its ranking algorithms (although I’m told that’s no longer the case now) and I got slapped with enough 1- and 2-star reviews to kill the novel — and with it, my dreams of eeking out anything like a living self-pubbing novels.

At least in the near-term.

I tried to be brave, but in the end, I crumpled. I cried. I (stupidly) tried to argue with the critics on this blog (post since deleted).

And, eventually, I just gave up and unpubbed the book. It wasn’t selling anyway, and those reviews hurt. Better to pretend the novel had never existed …

But this post is about lessons, not mistakes.

Specifically, it’s about a lesson that was once so painful to my ears that I refused to believe it could be true.

I don’t remember where I read it. Probably on one of the lit agent blogs that were all the rage back in the early 2000-teens. It went something like this.

Write your first novel. Set it aside. Write your second novel. Set it aside. Then go back to your first novel and and re-write it.

I remember my reaction when I read those words. It was something like, “Are you kidding me?

“Do you know how much time and effort and energy I put into writing my first novel? Do you know how HARD I worked to make that book as good as it could possibly be? How can you tell me that there is ANYTHING I can do to make that novel any better?”

And so I made my peace with deep-sixing Libby forever. After all, I believe looking forward, not back!

On the other hand, I’ve always loved the novel’s premise. And it’s my favorite type of book to write: a book that set in the real world but admits to paranormal elements. And has romance. And family.

Kind of like real life ;)

So this spring, I picked Libby up and looked at it again for the first time in seven years. And guess what?

The readers were right.

Not in their specifics. They’re readers, not writers. They didn’t really understand why they didn’t like the book.

But since pubbing Libby, I’ve written several other novels and a ton of short fiction. And — even more important — I’ve read, and re-read, dozens of books on the craft (which I’m slowly reviewing for my blog; if you’re interested look here and here).

I’ve learned things. And because I’ve learned things, I could now see huge problems in Libby that I’d missed back when I was laboring away at the novel in 2010, 2011.

So this spring, I took that long-ago advice and began a re-write. Practically from scratch.

I changed a lot.

I switched the voice from third person to first.

I did a major deep-dive into my characters’ motivations — especially Libby’s — and re-wrote plot points to better articulate why they do what they do. (This was critically important with regard to one of the reasons readers disliked the last edition of the novel. They didn’t think Libby showed agency. This criticism baffled me at the time. After all, I knew why she made the choices she did! But I hadn’t done my job, as a storyteller, to reveal her motivations — so to readers, she came across as weak — a pushover.)

I tightened scenes that dragged. I created new scenes to add more texture and depth to the story.

And I found a designer (Lara Wynter) to re-do the cover.

And on October 23, I’m re-releasing Libby.

I have mixed feelings, to be honest. My experience in 2012 was incredibly humbling. I’m one of those writerly people who’s been told, my whole life, how good I am. “You’re such a good writer.” I’ve heard that a million times. It was hard to find myself being pilloried — to find myself being told that I was a total loser.

But I’m also hopeful that I’ve made enough progress as a writer that I can redeem this failed novel and turn it into something that readers will love.

Because, after all, that’s what I’m trying to do. Write books that readers will love …

Welcome back, Libby … wishing you the best of luck.

When Libby Met the Fairies and Her Whole Life Went Fey by Kirsten Mortensen

She’s seeing things that don’t exist.

Her boyfriend thinks she’s crazy.

And then the Internet found out.

When Libby Met the Fairies. E-book available now for pre-order at the sale price of only $2.99. Click here to browse available formats and place your pre-order!

Covid-Time Writer Craft: Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass

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Some two decades after its original publication, this how-to by an industry insider is still well worth a read.

While my 2001 edition has bits about the industry that are somewhat dated, there is a lot to be learned from this book.

I met Donald Maass, once. It was at a writer’s conference, a few years after he published Breakout — which gives you a clue about how long I’ve been at this crazy business. Amazon had not yet released the first Kindle. You had only two choices, if you wanted to become a working novelist. You could land an agent. Or you could send your manuscript to a publisher and hope it didn’t get lost in the slush pile.

I was at the conference in the hopes that I’d find an agent for Loose Dogs, and I managed to schedule a pitch meeting with Maass, which felt like a huge deal at the time.

He didn’t take me on. Therefore no, I’m not typing this on a solid gold keyboard. But I also attended a talk he gave that was based on Writing the Breakout Novel, and after I got home I ordered a copy.

And then recently, I picked it up again and realized (cliche alert!) that the book has stood the test of time.

Break-out success = word of mouth

My edition of Breakout was released in 2001; there are industry bits at the front of the book that are definitely dated. But there’s also plenty of material, even in the introductory chapters, that’s as true today as ever. For example, at the time two-thirds of all book sales were going to “name-brand authors” — but even unknown novelists could potentially achieve best-seller status, because, Maass writes,

The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member, or bookstore employee.

“Savvy publishers,” he adds, try to seed this process via ARCs, sending out sample chapters via email, websites, etc. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And uncanny. It’s exactly what self-published writers do, today, to prime the word-of-mouth pump.

Premise and Stakes

Once the book moves from “why write a break-out novel” to the how’s, Maass tackles what he calls premise, which he presents as more of a process than anything else — a process, by the way, that you should start before you begin writing your actual novel. Maass advises that you consider a number of elements that are key to the break-out novel, like originality and gut emotional appeal. It makes for a useful checklist that, in my opinion, can help us novelists become more clear-eyed about our work (and potentially help us avoid creating problems in our novels that will be a lot more challenging to fix 80,000 words in).

The next chapter is about stakes, another thing we need to understand because it’s so fundamental to conflict. Our characters need to care about what happens to them, and they care what happens to them because there is a price to be paid if they don’t get what they want.

Time and Place

Maass then does a chapter on what he calls “time and place.” And you might be tempted to think he’s just found a new way to say “setting” but it’s more nuanced than that. There’s a section on the psychology of place, for example–a concept that fascinates me and that I try to consider in all of my fiction; I think of it in terms of places being characters that impact my human (or humanoid!) characters.

  • 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.

The next chapter, Characters, covers another handful of concepts that you’ll find in other craft books. For example, “dark protagonists” should not be two-dimensional, but have sympathetic qualities, and all stories are ultimately character-driven.

But there are some unique nuggets here, too. For example, one tip (which I’ve internalized since I first read Breakout) is to look for places to combine characters’ roles. In When Libby Met the Fairies (which I’ve revised and am re-releasing next month, now on sale for pre-order! $4 off!) I made Libby’s boyfriend her employer as well. That let me simplify the book in terms of cast of characters (I didn’t have to create a separate character to be her boss and work him into the plot) while also enabling me to add interesting conflict to the dynamic of Libby and Paul’s relationship. She was dependent on him for income as well as intangibles like emotional support. More better stakes!

Plot

The last third or so of Breakout mostly digs into plot. There’s a chapter on plot basics, one titled Contemporary Plot Techniques, one on elements like viewpoints and subplots, and one titled Advanced Plot Techniques.

In a way, I suppose plot is the real heart of the book, because one thing that is probably true about all break-out novels is that they are plot-driven. They are stories that grip readers from the first page and then keep them interested until The End.

And to my reading, this is where Maass’ background as a long-time industry insider pays off. For example, there’s some excellent material about types of plots (fable, frame story, facade story, visitation plots) that I’ve not encountered elsewhere. Depending on what kind of novel you’re writing, there’s some rich veins in the sections on subplots and advanced plots as well.

Theme

Which brings us to the closing chapter, which is on Theme.

“Have something to say,” Maass writes. “Allow yourself to become deeply impassioned about something you believe to be true.”

Which is interesting advice, considering that Writing the Breakout Novel is a book about crafting commercial fiction, and when we think “commercial fiction” we think about money, don’t we? We think about sales and bestseller lists and the sound of corks popping out of expensive bottles of champagne.

But it’s possible that we writers (with a lot of work and a bit of luck) can have it both ways: we can be commercially successful while also exploring Big Ideas that potentially enrich readers’ lives or even change hearts and minds.

Do you agree?

And have you read Maass’ book? What did you think?

Interested in more posts like this? Click here to read my review of Story by Robert McKee.

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.

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.)

Why Marketing Indie Books is SO Hard (Part 1)

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Getting to the Truth about Indie Author Marketing, by Kirsten Mortensen

Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing: A clear-eyed guide to promoting your self-pubbed book

As a fellow writer, I’m sure you share my fascination with the trickiness of the human mind.

It is, after all, one of the primary sources for conflict in fiction. Pick up any decent book or article on the craft of fiction, and you’ll soon find yourself reading about character motivation: what your characters want or desire.

“Desire drives the action,” notes novelist Carol Edgarian. “It is what makes characters real.”

But characters’ desire is only half the equation. Their desires must also be thwarted.

And very often, the thwarting comes not from external factors but from internal ones. Characters’ desires are thwarted because of their internal flaws and mistakes. Characters become their own worst enemies.

We writers are also, often, our own worst enemies

One of the most fascinating internal character flaws, in my opinion, is what author mentor K.M. Weiland calls “The Lie Your Character Believes.”

A character realizes he has a problem in his life. What he doesn’t realize, subconsciously or otherwise, is the true solution to his problem.

He thinks that if he can just have what he wants, all will be well.

In the the great English novel Middlemarch George Eliot follows a number of characters who are their own worst enemies, because they’re unable to see past the fantasies they’ve erected in their thinking. Their fantasies obscure reality.

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

900 pages later, and she finally realizes it was Rhett all along.

Dorothea, for example, believes that marrying Edward Casaubon will fulfill her deepest desire. It will allow her to align herself with a cause that is larger than herself, that will make a mark on the world. Throughout the courtship period of the relationship, she builds a fantasy in which Casaubon is a man of extraordinary gifts, destined to publish a great scholarly work, The Key to All Mythologies.

Marrying Casaubon is what Dorothea thinks she wants.

But within a few weeks of being married to the man, she begins to realize she’s completely mistaken about her husband’s greatness and destiny. Much of the novel explores the sorrowful consequences of that mistake.

There are a zillion other examples in both literary and genre fiction. Think Scarlett O’Hara’s fantasy about Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, for example. She’s so committed to that fantasy that she fails to understand her true love is right there under her nose. A tragedy for the ages!

But here’s the thing: it’s not just our characters who struggle with this.

All humans do.

Including writers.

We think we know what is “real,” but we don’t.

In Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing, one of the topics I explore is how difficult it is for we writers to really know what author marketing tactics work.

This is hugely important, because if you don’t really know what works, and what doesn’t work, you’re guessing.

You’re gambling.

And if you’re gambling with your money, chances are you’re going to get burned.

One problem is lack of data.

Professional marketers don’t make uninformed bets.

They make bets that are based on years’ of experience — and on DATA.

We indie authors don’t have data.

But we fool ourselves into thinking we do.

We think that by reading what other authors have done, we’re getting a true picture of how to market our titles.

Okay.

I’m going to be completely blunt here.

That’s a fantasy.

No matter how much time you — as an individual — invest in gathering information about how to market your indie book, you can’t begin to grasp the entire industry. You can’t begin to see the “big picture” information about what authors are doing that works, and what authors are doing that doesn’t work.

Think about it. There are some 300,000 indie titles published every year. In some cases, authors are publishing multiple titles, but even if we account for that, there are hundreds of thousands of indie authors out there.

You could read ten or 20 or 50 or 100 case studies about those authors, and what they’ve done to market their books.

You still wouldn’t have a representative sample of the industry from which you could draw any meaningful conclusions.

There’s a second factor as well: the information you do gather is almost certainly dated.

This industry moves at lightning speed. Factors that influence the effectiveness of specific marketing tactics change overnight. (Just look at the way Amazon’s introduction of Kindle Unlimited roiled the status quo for many authors.)

Third factor: there are so many indie authors out there trying to market their books, that if anyone gets a clever new idea that proves successful, within a matter of weeks thousands of other authors are doing the exact same thing. By the time you tumble to the idea, the novelty has worn off. Readers have tuned it out.

(Blog tours probably fall into this category; I’ll be including a chapter on blog tours in my book, and will write more about my research on blog tours in a future post.)

Last but not least, there’s the issue of cognitive bias. I’ll be exploring that in more depth in a future post, so be sure to come back, but in a nutshell: the human mind is wired in a way that makes it hard to make sense of data, even when we do have access to it.

So Is There Any Hope?

Actually, yes, there is.

However, making money at indie publishing is FAR from “a sure thing,” and if you think it is, odds are you’re going to be disappointed.

What we writers need to do is to approach marketing our books the way experienced, professional marketers approach their consumer products challenges.

We need to use data. We need to cultivate expertise in the principles of marketing so that we don’t so easily jump to erroneous conclusions. And we need to be honest with ourselves.

We need to be clear-eyed about what bets make sense, and what bets are just a waste of money.

More Coming!

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Starting the next book, and it’s gonna be a paranormal

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Those of you who know me, know that I always have multiple novels in process. (Kind of like my reading. I’m reading about 8 books right now. No joke. A little outta control tho…)

Now one of them has grabbed me and based on the surge of excitement I’m feeling, it’s the one I’ll be focusing on for this next lap of my being-a-novelist marathon.

No title yet.

But I can tell you a bit about it. It’s going to be a paranormal. It will have 2 sequels. And I know some of the elements. Communication with animals. Impending environmental apocalypse. What happens when the veil between the collective unconscious and the physical starts to thin.

It’s going to be set in rural Upstate New York; I’ll be drawing very much on the feel and spirit of the heavily forested, wild areas in the southeast part of the state where I grew up.

Hemlock grove chenango country new york

Hemlock grove, Chenango County, NY

And I’m going to indulge in my lifelong fascination with Iroquois mythology. This is a bit of a false lead, so don’t take it too literally but here’s a cool what-if question: what if the Vikings–whose trading posts, we now suspect, penetrated deep within the Great Lakes region–had colonized North America successfully, to the point where culturally they merged with Native Americans? How would their mythologies have merged and cross-pollinated?

This won’t be an alt-history book, so like I said, that’s a bit of a false lead. But there will be elements of a kind of mythological bleed-through.

Oh, and I’m going to try to write faster. I think I can do that, because I’m starting to get the hang of how I do fiction, and what I need to do to push my productivity.

Stay tuned :)

I am editing. Loose Dog.

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So I’ve got this novel, you see.

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

UPDATE: Out now…