Give up on your book only a little way in (say around 5%) and never say anything about it…
Or, they read the whole book, but give it a scathing one-star review?
Personally, I’d prefer the latter, especially if the review can be thorough and document what the reader didn’t like. Reviews that consist of nothing more than “I hate this,” or similar are useless. But if somebody really tore into it, and explained in detail why they didn’t like this character or that plot element… well, that could actually be useful in future writing projects.
I am quite content to be an amateur author and self-publisher of speculative fiction stories. I enjoy everything I do as a writer and publisher, and avoid everything I don’t. And if I don’t make much money doing so, I don’t lose any either. So, I’m happy. But maybe a little bored.
Back when I published my first three novels, in 2015, there seemed to be the potential for something to happen. For lightning to strike. What did I know? In 2022 I do know. And what I know is that I’ll not be missing any buses to fame and fortune if I hold off self-publishing my new novel for a year while I try selling it to a traditional publisher.
A year and a half or so, ago Mark Paxson wrote about his efforts to get his novel The Dime traditionally published, You can read about his journey in these posts:
I’m embarking on that same journey through what is often called “Query Hell” more or less as a lark. Not having been hatched yesterday, I know that my odds of selling my novel are pretty close to zero. However, I think there is something to be said for simply having tried.
One motivating factor for me was that the British SFF publisher Gollancz had, in June, opened a one month long submission window for manuscripts by unagented authors. Since I wrapped up my novel in June, I researched how a manuscript should be formatted, and sent mine out to them, along with a cover letter and synopsis, as requested. I gather that they expected to receive 1,000 plus manuscripts during the month and hope to get back to everyone within 6 to 9 months. Which is fine, since it gives me a nice 6 to 9 month window to find an agent for my novel while I await word of its fate, with no temptation to fold early and self-publish the story.
I went down the list, copying only the info on agents who are accepting queries and open to the works of non-published writers. I then viewed the websites of their agencies to see their profiles to get a feel for what they were like and what type of stories they were looking to take on. I found 31 agents that I thought worth querying and rated each as to how promising they struck me. I also noted how they wanted the queries – letter only, letter & 5 pages of the manuscript, or letter and 10 pages, or if they used the query tracker web app instead. All this was the work of a few hours over two days.
Then I researched on how to write a query letter. There are plenty of guides online and on YouTube that tell you not only how to do it, but what not to do as well. Alexa Donna has a number of good YouTube videos that you can find here on the entire process: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexaDonne/search?query=query%20letter
I wrote a hundred variations of it (just a guess) before settling on my current one.
I also wrote a 1,000 word synopsis of the novel for Gollancz and any agents wanting to see one.
In short, I think I did my homework. Or as much of it as necessary. I was never a lad for homework.
While there is no reason not to send queries out to everyone on the list all at once, I’m only sending out four a month. Sent out the first four yesterday. Better to savor the joy of the journey. And, with having to wait on Gollancz before I could self-publish the book anyway, I figure that I might as well spread out the query process, renewing my hope every month with a new batch of query letters. We’ll see how that goes…
Though I read Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness in high school, half a century ago, one image remains…
“The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line… we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush… In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.”
I am quite sure Conrad was thinking about querying when he created this image.. Ah, the romance!
All that remains is for me to mutter, “The horror. The horror” six months from now.
I know that readers of this blog have gone through the same process, and no doubt some have succeeded in finding publishers. And there are probably others who are considering giving it a try. So how did you find the experience? Do you have any suggestions for others who would follow you down this path?
There is a slim chance I might speak at a local writing event in November. Slim because I’m terrified of public speaking. But a chance because I am committed to overcoming my fears.
I have an idea for what I would want to talk about, but I’m curious. If you had to fill an hour, including time for questions, and could talk about anything related to writing, what would you want to talk about?
I’m reading a book recently published by F.L. Rose, one of my favorite indie writers. The book is called The Point of Us. I’m waiting to complete it before I reach any conclusions about the quality of the story, but I’m pretty certain it’s gonna be a good one. I’m gonna skip the description of what the story is and go right to my question for this post.
One of the main characters in the story is a writer, a pretty successful novelist. At some point, there is a discussion of writers and why they do what they do and the conclusion is … that it is all about vanity.
So … that’s my question. Do we do this for vanity? Do we slave over our stories and put them out into the world for vanity’s sake?
I’m of mixed minds on this. On the one hand, I write strictly for my own internal reasons. I don’t believe it has anything to do with vanity. I write because I want to see if I can do it. Turn an idea that forms in my head into a story with a beginning, middle and end, and is … readable. I don’t know. I write because I want to and I want to see that idea through to the final words.
But then … when I post it on my blog or publish something via the Amazon monolith, why am I doing that? The story hasn’t been blessed by the gatekeepers. No agent picked it up. No publisher. I am swimming free and clear of the gatekeepers and still putting my words out there into the wide, wide world … and why am I doing that?
Why do you do it?
In our last video chat we began a conversation about why we read. Maybe a better question for us indie authors is why do we publish?
Years ago, before technology turned the publishing world upside down, there were vanity publishers. Places a writer could go to pay thousands of dollars to have their book “published,” which typically meant getting boxes and boxes of copies of their books that the authors than had to try to figure out how to sell themselves.
Now, vanity publishers have been replaced with KDP and Ingram Spark and SmashWords and countless other platforms that allow us to publish our books with almost no cost up front. (And there are still companies like the old-fashioned vanity publishers — places that promise to publish your book for a small fee of several thousands of dollars and then leave you hanging with no support, no marketing, no nothing.)
The question remains though, regardless of how easy it has become to publish, why do we do it?
For me, I want to reach readers and hope to grow my audience and get more people reading my stories. But why? What does that mean to me if they do? Why should it matter? Particularly in the modern world of indie publishing, where there are so many books getting published it’s virtually impossible to be seen and to be read by anybody other than those who already know you.
I think there’s some truth to F.L. Rose’s thoughts as expressed in The Point of Us. There is some vanity involved. The first definition of “vanity” is “excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements.”
When I read that definition, I begin to reconsider the idea that I publish for vanity. I’m far from “excessive pride in or admiration” of my writing. But I typically do like the end result. My biggest reason for publishing and sharing my stories is to … just put them out there and see if readers like what I’ve come up with. But still, there is a feeling of confirmation when I get a positive review, there is still a good feeling in the cockles of my heart when somebody has something good to say about something I’ve written. If I were to publish and none of those good things were ever said or shared with me … if I just published into a void without reaction or response … I most likely would stop publishing. And if I stopped publishing, I’d stop writing. Because at the end of the day, I write to share and to get a reaction.
Last month I posted about Google’s offer to convert the ebooks published in their Play Store into audiobooks for free. Unlike most audio books that use human narrators, these books would be generated using Google’s AI technology to convert the text into the spoken word. Google suggested that it would best for non-fiction books, but I decided to convert my fiction books anyway, since I don’t think my style of writing demands a lot of dramatic reading. And it was likely the only way I could enter the popular audiobook market. It has now been a month; so how has this experiment fared?
I offer my ebook catalog of 11 titles for free, and since Google was offering to create my audiobooks for free, I was happy to offer my audiobooks for free as well. In May 2022, the first month of their availability, with 11 titles available, I sold 434 audiobooks, in addition to 293 ebooks.
Ebooks first. My peak sales of ebooks to date on Google was 836 copies in October 2021 and they have been declining since then – 643, 633, 459, 409, 303, 390, so that May’s 293 sales total is more or less in line with that gradual decline. The audiobooks didn’t seem to have affected ebook sales one way or another.
As for audiobooks, well, with 434 books sold in one month with no advertising – I only posted their availability on my seldom visited blog two weeks ago – I have to believe that I’ve tapped into a whole new market. Only one audiobook has a rating, and though it is a 5 star rating, the jury is still out on how the AI generated narration fares with audiobook listeners. However, from my own listening, I am optimistic that they are good enough now, and will only get better as time goes on, since Google said that they will update the files automatically as their technology improves.
My standard is “Good Enough,” which is to say that all things considered, something is indeed good enough, even if it may be a couple percentage points short of perfection. If you hold yourself to a higher standard, then perhaps Google’s AI generated audiobooks may not be up to your standard. That said, I have listened to samples of audiobooks with a voice actor who uses different voices for different characters, and found it annoying. It seems that my golden standard for audiobooks is my dad reading bedtime stories to us as kids. I do know that the AI does a better job of reading books than I did with my own kids. So I think my audiobooks are good enough.
To take advantage of this technology, you have to offer your ebooks on the Google Play Store, though of course, you can charge money for them, and for the audiobooks as well, if that is your policy. Selling books for free is a magnitude or two easier than selling them for money, so your results will vary.
A sneak peek into our next video chat, which will be recorded this coming weekend …
One of the topics we’re going to discuss is “why do we read,” which I saw somebody ask on Twitter several months ago. Hell, it’s one of those questions I see people in the Twitter community ask at least once a week over on Twitter. But I thought it was an interesting question so I added it to our list for our conversations about writing.
Why?
Because, well, I guess if we don’t know why people read, how do we know what to write? And maybe even as important a question that grows out of that opening question of why we read is … why do we write?
So … in advance of our weekend chat, is there anybody out there who wants to share in the comments why they read? And for the writers out there, does that play at all into why or what they write?
I finished writing something and have pondered what to move on to next. This month started with me committed to writing a sequel to the novel I published almost a year ago. That particular story is told in first person from the perspective of several different characters.
The story I just completed is told in first person from one character’s perspective. About half way through, I decided to change it to third person and get some other character’s in the mix, to broaden the story a bit. But then I decided to keep in in first person because I wanted the story to be that character’s story and only hers. As a result, it makes for a much more minimalist of a story. We’ll see what people think.
Now I’m moving on to what’s next. I’ve decided to shelve the sequel above for another project. This morning I spent some time at a local books and music festival. I talked with a woman who has spent her life gathering historical tidbits of her ancestors and has spent the last five years putting those bits into stories. Kathy Lynne Marshall has written a handful of books in those five years. She includes information and resources about how to gather historical information about people from the past. So … I’m reading The Mystery of Margaret Booker now. About her great-great-great-great-great grandmother. Born a slave who walked to freedom 30 years later.
And an interesting thing happened when I got to the first page of the story. She tells it in first person. She is allowing Margaret to tell her own story in her voice.
That conversation and seeing the first person approach caused me to shift gears away from the sequel. I’m moving on to something that has been an objective for the last 4-5 years. A story about my grandmother, which I may have mentioned here a post or two ago. When I tried to launch the story back then, it was in third person. Which just seemed natural to me. How can I tell a story in first person from Grandma’s perspective? I can. Or at least I’m going to try.
More and more, it seems my stories are told in first person. My first novel wasn’t. Many of my short stories aren’t either. Most are told in third person, I believe. But lately, it seems like first person is the way to go. There is something about first person that I like. It’s easier to adopt a particular type of voice in first person. It’s easier to get inside a character’s head and see what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.
But I wonder if that’s a good thing. Choosing a point of view or perspective because it makes the writing easier doesn’t necessarily make for a better story. Go back to that piece I just finishedd. I have no doubt that if I switched to third person and told the story from the perspective from multiple characters, the story would be more complex, with more layers. It’s what happened with my first novel — originally written in first person, but completely re-written in third person to allow for more details and more characters to have a place in the story. It definitely was a better story because of that change.
Occasionally, people ask how I decide POV for a story. I believe we’ve discussed it on video chats. My answer will always be … it depends. I still believe that, but I wonder what other writers think. How do you decide on the POV, or POVs, in which you’re going to tell a story? How do you decide between first person and third person? Is it a decision you can even describe? Because for me … it not only depends, it just kind of happens.
The audio book market continues to expand. I’ve read recently that while print and ebook sales rose 5% in 2021, audio books rose 18%. No doubt most self published authors have at least considered offering an audio version of their work. I must confess that I’ve never researched how to go about doing so, or how much it costs to create an audiobook, even though Smashwords offers links to audiobook narrators. Until now. Why now? Now, because the price has fallen to the point where I feel that I can afford it. Which is to say, I can convert my books to audiobooks for free.
Create audiobook versions of your ebooks for free? There must be a catch, you say. And you would be right. Several of them.
The first catch is that you have to publish your books on the Google Play Store. And the second is that this is a limited time beta program. I’ve had my books in the Google ebook store for a number of years now, and I was sent an email announcing this program. I don’t know how widely available it is, or whether or not if you put your books into the Google store now, if you would be eligible to take advantage of this beta version offer. The email implies that the program might not be a free service once it is out of beta. Still, it might be worth looking into, if you are comfortable with the big catch.
The biggest catch is, as you might suspect for the price, that the narration is being done by our AI overlords, not humans. So the question is, is it good enough? And that is one question that I am not equipped to answer, since I’ve listened only to a few parts of audio books – they are not my thing – so I’m not the person to judge whether or not the quality is acceptable or not.
Google suggests that it would be fine for non-fiction books without a lot of illustrations. But is it good enough for fiction? I think it might be, but not for the $20-$30 cost of a professionally produced audiobook. But as a low cost alternative… They might be acceptable.
You have your choice of 22 English speaking voices – 7 different American female voices, 5 American male voices, 1 female and 2 male Australian voices, 2 female and 2 male British voices, and 2 female and 3 male Indian voices of different age groups. Which gives you a good variety of narrators, though, of course, none of them are likely to match the narrator or character in your head. But that might be said for human narrators as well.
From the sample that I have listened to, the AI voice is aware of the context of what it is reading. And while it will not match the narration of a good voice actor, it is far from the robotic voices of some years ago. I have been expecting this – AI generated audio books – to happen for some time, and I am sure the process will only get better over time. So while the voice sounds quite human, the biggest downside I see – or rather hear – is that the AI narrates the story in a single voice. I believe that good narrators will narrate characters in different voices, so that you have a better sense of who is saying what. Without that change in voice, it can be sometimes hard to follow who is speaking. Though that will depend, in part, on how you use dialog tags and your writing style.
But when you consider the current price – and the fact that you can download the files and sell them on platforms other than Google – as long as you continue to sell them on Google – it seems like a pretty good deal. A deal that I found that I could not pass up, if only to see what type of sales and feedback I get with them. They can always be unpublished, should I find a strong negative reaction to them. Still, the way I see it is that these would, at the very least, be a way of getting my foot into the audio book door. And, since I can publish them at the cost of my ebooks – which is to say, free – I believe that my customers will get their money’s worth, no matter what.
If you are curious to hear how they sound, you can download one of my free books to sample by going to the Google App Store Book, Audio Books and search for C. Litka.
Anybody out there do this? I’d love your thoughts on how you approach stories that are based on real life and real people.
I write mostly fiction. Almost entirely fiction. I’ve written a few short pieces that were “grabbed from the headlines” so they have a basis in reality, but were at the end of the day fictional.
One morning, I got to work to learn that the body of a man had been discovered to the east of our building. I went home that night and wrote his obituary, without knowing a thing about him. Around the same time, I also wrote a short story about a man trying to survive in Aleppo, Syria, as his country was torn apart by civil war. Completely fictional, but I’d like to think there were some elements of truth in what I wrote.
I currently have a barely started short story that is similar to Aleppo in that is based on one man’s efforts to survive in Ukraine as his country is torn apart by a foreign invader. I haven’t got that far because I want to make sure it is different than Aleppo and I’m still pondering that.
That’s about it, I think. I blog a lot about things going on in my life, but they aren’t really “stories.” But … I have a couple of real-life-based stories I want to write and I struggle with the “how” of writing a real-life story.
The biggest one, the most important one, is a story I want to write about my maternal grandmother. I have an opening scene that is based on a lot of facts I remember about her, facts I’ve uncovered on-line (like the manifest for the ship she came to America on when she was 18), and things my mom has told me. But once I get past that scene, I have no idea how to approach the rest of the story.
One more example. I had an assistant in my day job for more than ten years. She lived a fascinating life in her younger years — involving guns and gangs and casinos and well, all sorts of stuff. She kept insisting that I should write her story. To which I kept responding, “I have no idea how to write a real story.”
Part of the problem is that I’m a pantser, not a plotter. Creative non-fiction, or a true biography, likely requires more plotting than pantsing. If it’s based on real-life events, the story is right there before you. As a pantser, that’s just not how I write and typically, when I have figured out the “rest of the story” is when my block settles in.
Another problem, particularly with my grandmother’s story is that there is a lot I don’t know. A lot. As a result, I’d have to make up quite a bit about her life and that scares me. I want it to be as true to her and who she was as it can be, but how can I be sure of that if I have to make up so much of it.
I know that the solution to this, at least with respect to my grandmother’s story, is to use the facts that I have where I can and then be comfortable with fictionalizing the rest, while trying to be as true as I can to her. But … I haven’t figured out how to get over that hump yet.
My question for you then, if there are any CNF, memoir, or biography writers out there, is how do you approach writing a story that is real-life, based on real-life, or loosely reality-based. I know there are classes and programs out there that promise to teach a person how to do this, but I’m not much of a classroom-learner. I just need some ideas, some methods, some concept of how to approach this and then I can go from there.
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