GENREALITY

Don’t read them.

I should end the blog there, but I suppose more explanation is needed.

“Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.” John Osborne

A review is the subjective opinion of the person doing the review.  As a writer, we understand point of view.  A review is the point of view of the reviewer.  Thus, unless you know the reviewer and respect their point of view, their review should mean little to you.

If you read your reviews hoping they will be good and give you validation, you might want to get another job.  Firemen get pretty good validation when they save someone’s life or house or get a kitty out of a tree.  Being an author is not a job for people who need validation.  One thing I like about publishing on Kindle, PubIt, iBookstore, etc. is that I can check actual sales data at any moment.  Ka-ching—just sold a copy of Atlantis on PubIt since starting this post, ie in the last minute.  That’s validation because it allows me to keep writing, which I love.  I also love readers.  Our motto at Who Dares Wins Publishing is co-opted from my Infantry days: Lead, Follow, Or Get The Hell Out Of The Way.  Writers produce the product, readers consume the product, everyone else, including reviewers, are in between.  There are plenty of great leaders all along the line of publishing, from writers to agent to editors to publishers to reviewers to bookstores to readers.  For the rest . . .

Reviewers are not a representative sample of the reading population.  This is why Amazon reviews are skewed.  Only a certain segment of the reading population posts reviews on Amazon.  One thing I learned doing radio talk shows:  rarely did anyone call in to really ask a question.  They called in to give their opinion.  How many people write letters to the editor saying they need to stop doing something they’re doing?  They always write to tell someone else to stop doing something the other person is doing.  So someone who feels compelled to write a review of a book is not in the center of the bell curve of readers, although most profess to be.  I’m not saying they’re on the bad end.  They could be the sharpest, most careful readers in the world.  But in the end, it’s still just their opinion, which they feel a compulsion to post for the world to see. There is nothing wrong with that and I too post reviews on places like Goodreads. It should not be viewed as anything other than my personal opinion as a professional writer and lover of books.

I’ve had diametrically opposing reviews on the same book from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus and NY Times and yada yada yada, No, I mentioned the bisque.  Sort of like you’ll get diametrically opposing opinions from two agents reading your manuscript.  And editors.  And readers.  I had a reader send me an email that he hated my book so much he burned it.  You know what my reaction was?  I smiled.  Because that’s a real strong emotional reaction.

We’re in the entertainment business.  Entertainment is emotion.  Business is rational (supposedly, though it really isn’t, read Predictably Irrational.).  That’s why ka-ching means more than “It was so wonderful, it made me think the author was saintly in her devotion to her writing”.  Whatever.

“This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”  Dorothy Parker.

All right.  You’re going to read them anyway, aren’t you?  After all, you might get some good publicity blurbs from them.  I use blurbs from PW, Kirkus, NY Times, and other places to promote my books.  That’s when they’re good blurbs.  Bad reviews, dump ‘em and move on.  Or edit them:  This book was the greatest waste of my time, it produced such a guttural reaction, I vomited fourteen times before I was done with page one, and it left me quivering with illness. Can easily become: This book was the greatest.  It produced such a guttural reaction; page one left me quivering.

Joking.

Not.

Along with the tidal wave of self-published eBook authors, there has been a swell of self-anointed book reviewers.  All you have to do is have a web site.  I pretty much view the efficacy of both the same way.

If a reviewer has advertising, sponsorship, whatever you want to call it—money coming in from authors, publicists, publishers, whatever, their objectivity is called into question even further.  It’s not wrong; we all need ka-ching.  But you also open yourself up to having your reviews questioned on other grounds.  Sort of like authors are open to criticism because they are selling their writing.

On the flip side, reviewers should not get upset about authors who take offense at their reviews and write something about it.  After all, the response is the subjective opinion of the author to your writing.  Sort of like, hmm, a review.

Don’t read them.

By the way, Atlantis is currently the #3 science fiction bestseller in the UK, behind a couple of books called something like Game of Thrones.  That’s the kind of thing that gives a little sense of validation.  And Area 51 is outselling the NY Times nonfiction book of the same name on Kindle.

Now that you have a grasp on your protagonist and antagonist, let’s get to the heart of the story, which is the conflict between the two.

A novel runs on conflict.  The entire book has a core conflict lock between protagonist and antagonist.  They either want the same thing, which is clear conflict since only one can get it; or they want different things, but in trying to get those things, they come into conflict.  The thing each wants, must be a concrete, external object.  It must be very clear when one or the other gets that thing.

There also must be conflict in every scene.  Thus, each scene has its own conflict lock.  The protagonist and antagonist of each scene does not necessarily have to be the book’s protagonist and antagonist.

What exactly is Conflict?

A serious disagreement or argument.  A prolonged armed struggle.  An incompatibility between two opinions, principles or interests. As a verb it means to be incompatible or at variance, clash.

Try to have conflict at two levels in every scene.  What this means if your cops are chasing the bad guys (conflict), they are also arguing with each other (conflict layered on top of conflict).

Your Basic Story Dynamic:

The Protagonist (the character who owns the story) struggles with . . .The Antagonist (the character who if removed will cause the conflict and story to collapse) because both must achieve their concrete, specific . . .Goals (the external, concrete things they are each trying desperately to get, not necessarily the same thing).

The Central Story Question:

Will the protagonist defeat the antagonist and achieve her goal?

When the reader asks that question, the story begins.

When the reader gets the answer, the story is over.

DON’T LOOK DOWN:  Will Lucy defeat Nash and save herself and her family?

AGNES AND THE HITMAN:  Will Agnes defeat Brenda and keep Two Rivers?

This question leads us to the . . .

The Conflict Box: A way of diagraming your protagonist, antagonist, goals, and conflict.

You can either have conflict because:

Protagonist and antagonist want the same thing.

Protagonist and antagonist want different things, but achieving one goal causes conflict with the other’s goal.

To diagram a conflict box draw a large square.  Then draw a line down the middle and across the middle, leaving your with four boxes

On the left, label the top two: Protagonist.  The bottom two:  Antagonist.

On the top, label the left two:  Goal.  The right two:  Conflict

Then fill in each box.  For conflict, you put whatever is causing the character conflict in achieving their goal.

Conflict Box

A core conflict based on goals that brings the protagonist and antagonist into direct opposition in a struggle that neither can walk away from.

Conflict Box:  Same Goal: Agnes wants to keep her house, which she bought from Brenda.

Brenda wants to steal back the house she just sold to Agnes

Conflict Box:  Same Goal, Agnes and the Hitman: To see if your conflict is inescapable:  Draw a line from Agnes’ goal to Brenda’s Conflict.  If Agnes is causing Brenda’s conflict, you’re halfway there.

Then draw a line from Brenda’s goal to Agnes’ conflict.  If Brenda is causing Agnes’ conflict, you have a conflict lock.

Conflict Box:   Different Goals, Chasing The Ghost: Gant wants to find out who is kidnapping and killing young girls.

The Sniper wants to kidnap and kill young girls.

The key is the lines must cross.  Each character must be causing the other character’s conflict in order to have a conflict lock.

If you don’t have it, you don’t have a story.

The explosion of eBooks and the number of midlist and new authors choosing self-publishing has brought about some heated discussions on price point and perceived value. How much should we charge for an eBook? 0.99? $2.99?  $6.99? $9.99? $14.99? What is too much? What is not enough?

Many authors are upset over the 0.99 book. They argue that it’s devaluing the work of the writer. That it somehow tells potential readers that the writer and their work is only worth 0.99. We understand the argument. We know what it takes to write a book and our time is worth far more than 0.99 for the year it took to write.

However, if we sold 1500 in one month of that one book (which we have done this month on several venues) then the book is worth 1500 x .99 x .35 = $519.70. That is number of books X price of books X royalty given by Amazon/PubIt = total income for one month. It’s not an earth shattering number, but that is only one book out of many books we offer, most of which we are charging 2.99 for and get 70% royalty.  We have only a few books at .99 and they are leads to series or genres, such as the first Atlantis book, and Eyes of the Hammer, which was Bob’s first thriller ever published.

Price point is a marketing tool and when considering price, a business owner must consider the range for what consumers are willing to pay and it doesn’t have to do with the value of the writers’ time or the value of a single book. The idea behind the bargain book is to pull readers in, hook them on the quality product so they will buy more (at the higher, and valued, price).

When we write a book, we need to get into the minds of the reader or we end up with too much backstory, or too much over explaining, or give the reader information they don’t need. When we enter the business of publishing we have to do the same thing and stop thinking like a writer and think like a consumer AND a business person.

Readers do troll for the 0.99 ebook. If they don’t like the book, no biggie. They don’t buy from the author again, but if they did, they gobble up every thing they can find from that author…and at regular prices.

There is another argument about how eBooks should be the same price or close to a paperback book because the content of the book is the same. Just because it costs less to produce the ebook doesn’t mean content is any different therefore it is worth the same price. Then wouldn’t that be true for the hardcover and the paperback? Identical content. Consumers wait all the time for the book to come out in paperback for the sole reason they refuse to pay the higher price for the same product.  Additionally, let’s consider a $6.99 paperback for which the author is receiving an 8% royalty from the publisher.  That means the author gets .56 per book sold.  For a $2.99 ebook, the self-published author gets a 70% royalty from the distributor, minus some other minor charges, but it comes out to $1.99.  So the $2.99 ebook make the author almost four times the royalty of the print book.

But we’ll tell you what makes absolutely no sense.  Pricing an ebook between $10 and $19.98, where, strangely, many traditionally published ebooks are priced.  Here’s why it doesn’t make sense:  go below $2.99 or above $9.99, your royalty rate goes from 70% to 35%.  So any ebook over $9.99, up until it hits $19.98, is actually making less money than an ebook priced at $9.99.  Can anyone explain to us why many publishers are clinging to a price that makes absolutely no sense except for the delusion that it will drive people to buy the print version?  Instead of being concerned about the .99 ebook, authors need to really be concerned about the blatantly destructive agency pricing models many publishers are using.

One of the reasons the price has been driven down is because of the influx of books being put out on the web. This is partially related to the law of supply and demand. But another reason the price is being driven down is due to another P in the marketing mix: placement.

You can’t sell if your product isn’t seen. In traditional publishing that meant the racks at the front of the store. Indie Authors are getting their placement via a lower price.

We’ve discovered a key to ‘placement’ for ebooks is to get on a bestseller list in a specific genre.  Amazon breaks books down to subgenres and lists the top 100.  For example, Atlantis, is now in the top 50 overall on UK Kindle sales, and has been as high as #2 in science fiction, just behind Game of Thrones.  It’s in the top 10 in science fiction in the US, nestled among, again, all the Game of Thrones books.  Chasing The Ghost started as a .99 book, hooked a place in the top ten in men’s adventure, we raised the price to $2.99, and it’s still there in the top 10.  Why?  Because it’s a good book.  But we needed that .99 lead to get it that ‘placement’.

Publishing has changed a lot, but it’s still a business. Part of our job is to understand that business. There needs to be a balance. We can’t promote or price a product if we haven’t taken the time to better our craft. But, on the other hand, if we don’t take the time to understand what is happening in the business, we reduce our chances of selling our books to our readers.

Price point is a tool. One that can be abused. But it is one that can send you to the top of the Amazon lists and earn you a nice royalty check at the end of the month.

This is a guest post from Jen Talty, the other half of Who Dares Wins Publishing and the one who does our covers.  We’ve had a huge learning curve on covers over the course of the past year and a half.

From Jen:

A good cover can make or break a book, especially for on-line buying. In a bookstore, most books are racked spine out, so author name sometimes means more. Readers can pick up your book, thumb through, get a feel for story and writing and then decide. On-line, readers see your cover. It has to say, “buy me, I’m a good book” to the reader. If it doesn’t, why would they take the time to possibly download a sample, or even look at product description? The changes in publishing have given the author many great opportunities and self-publishing is a viable option. However, self-publishing requires the author to make a few major decisions, and one of those decisions is cover.

You have a couple of options. You can do it yourself or your can hire a cover artist. There are many programs out there to choose from. There are many do it yourself programs, free programs, even programs that come with your computer that can create cover design. Even Word has the capability of designing a basic cover, but will the cover be good enough to invite the reader in?   The question you have to ask yourself is it worth your time and energy to do it “right”. Hiring someone to do your covers can run as low as $50.00 and as high as $600.00.

This is not an easy decision, especially when you factor in other costs that go into making an eBook available to the reader. We made the decision to invest in the proper tools to do it ourselves because we had the design background, and the technical ability. We purchased the complete InDesign package from Adobe ($1,299.00) partly for the ability to create covers for on-line purchasing, but also because it made it much easier to create the full-jacket cover for our print-on-demand books and for web design.

Even with the proper tools we made a few cover mistakes along the way.

Publishing Mistake #1: Always Judge a Book by its Cover.

This cover sucks. Actually, every single one of the original Atlantis Covers was a disaster except for Assault on Atlantis, which remained almost identical as the original. So why does it suck and why did it make sense to change?

First. It’s too dark. I don’t mean color scheme because you can have a black cover that isn’t bad, but this cover lacks contrast. The color scheme is too similar. The letters and background blend together. If you have a dark background, you want letters that stand out. If you have a light background, you want letters that will pop.

Second. Do you know what the object is in the background? I know Bob does. I’m not going to tell you. You all can guess. Though, if you read the book, you probably know. Point is, what does this cover mean to the reader? I say this cover almost says pass me by.

Third. Logo. Wow. What were we thinking? I know we thought we were being brilliant when we put our very first logo on all our covers for them to stick out like a sore thumb. For those observant readers, you will notice here at Write It Forward we now have a new header. That look will be added to the Who Dares Wins Publishing website. I’ll get into that change in another publishing lesson. The point here is that the logo adds absolutely nothing to the cover. As a matter of fact, it takes a way from the already bad cover, making it worse.

If you were in traditional publishing it would be too bad, suck it up, go promote it’s the only cover you’re going to get. If you had hired someone, you’re be paying them to redo it. If you did it yourself, you’d be redoing it.

So what is best? I recommended if you don’t have the knowledge of basic design and design programs (for example how layers work) then hire someone. It’s why I do the covers and Bob doesn’t.

Publishing Correction #1.

The content of the book has not changed. However, the cover changed drastically. Why is this a good cover?

First. It has contrast. The color of the letters, while still complement the background, are bold and pop of the page. The background is vibrant and alive. It’s inviting. It doesn’t look dark and drab and boring. Yet, it is a very simple cover. Simple is often better.

Second. The cover says something about the book. Actually, it says something about the entire series, which involves the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea and other strange and eerie places. It invites the reader to take a look inside and see if they are interested in the content. This is critical regardless of whether you are in a store thumbing through all the books in this particular section, or browsing on line trying to find a good read. A good cover can make or break you. We found when we changed the cover, our sales improved.

Third. No distracting white rectangle that means nothing to the reader.

While editing this post, I realized this cover still has one minor flaw. Every thing is centered. We’ve learned that alignment is another aspect you need to consider when designing a cover. Is it time to change it? No.

Publishing Lesson #1.

There is a time when it’s best to leave well enough alone. For a long time the first cover was it. It wasn’t until I had finished with the 6^th and final cover in this series that we realized we had a problem. Not all of the books were in print at that time. We knew that it would cost us to make the upgrade and the book had already earned out and beyond. Our business had grown and we had a different set of tools to work with, specifically InDesign by Adobe which allowed me to create covers that I didn’t have the capability before. After much discussion, we began the revamping process. It took at least 6 more tries before we got to this one. Change was necessary, and unlike traditional publishing when it comes to covers after book release, non-traditional publishing allows us to make this change. However, timing is important as well as not rushing things. We had to get it right, and this time we did.

Lately, we’ve started a new trend to make our cover distinguishable by brand.  We’re re-releasing Bob’s first series on Special Forces.  So we want the covers to look somewhat alike, yet really pop in thumbnail.  Here are the first ones:

We will shortly be re-publishing Bob’s classic Area 51 series and will use the same motif.

The Antagonist: Must be someone the reader respects (fears):  smart, funny, kind, skilled, interesting, different. Must seem real; flawed, layered, and have a blind spot.

The antagonist must be in trouble.  People tend to forget the antagonist has problems too. Usually, the protagonist.

Must be introduced as soon as possible, even if by proxy.  This one drives people crazy.  But you can’t have an antagonist that suddenly pops in for the climactic scene.  Often, the reader meets your antagonist, but has no clue that’s their role.  Or, you introduce a proxy of the antagonist, or a minion of the antagonist.  Either one introduces the antagonist.

For example, in Agnes and the Hitman, on page one, Agnes turns around and there’s a kid in her kitchen with a gun.  He’s a minion of the antagonist.  In Chasing the Ghost, in the first scene, Horace Chase is on a ridgeline looking through a scope on his sniper rifle.  He spots a small glow across the way, realizing someone is ‘mirroring’ him with a sniper rifle.  He has no idea who that is.  Neither does the reader.  It’s a ghost.  It’s the antagonist, which we don’t find out until the climactic scene.

By proxy, if you open with your detective looking at a dead body, the body is a proxy for the antagonist; since the antagonist is the murderer right?

The antagonist must have strong, believable motivation for pursuing her external and specific goal.   We might not agree with what they are doing, but at least it makes sense to us, given who the antagonist is as a character.

You have one antagonist.  And the antagonist drives the plot initially because they introduce the problem.  You must do the antagonist’s plan and it should be very good.  This is the fun part of writing.  You get to be a bad guy.  Please do not google “how to kill my spouse” on your home computer.  You never know.

If you remove your antagonist, the plot collapses.  You don’t have a story, because you don’t have a problem.

Should be a single person so the conflict is personal.  People always ask if nature, or society or something else can be the antagonist.  Yes, but it should have a human face.  Ever notice in a disaster movie, when the antagonist is a tidal wave that will flip the ship, they spend at least 30 minutes introducing you to characters and one, at least, is the jerk?

The antagonist is the person on stage in the climactic scene, fighting the protagonist because . . . their goals conflict.  The reader must believe both will lose everything if they don’t defeat the other.  Their goals are difficult to achieve because of external barriers, primarily each other.

Here is a film clip near the end of Blade Runner.  The antagonist has chased down Blade Runner Harrison Ford.  What’s the antagonist’s motivation?  He want to live.  He’s been designed with a seven year life-span, and wants more than that.  Can we empathize with such a motivation?

1.     BladeRunner understanding Antagonist—time to die

http://www.whodareswinspublishing.com/Char_1_Bladerunner.html