Tag: authors

How did what-his face get back in my novel?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books5 Comments

In the movie “True Lies,” Tom Arnold’s character says, “Women. Can’t live with ’em. Can’t kill ’em!”

I feel that way about characters because, what the hell, I’m drinking Scotch and writing the book while they (the characters) do whatever they want.

People think the author is in charge. Yeah, right.

This time out, I threw that dirty cop Vance McNaughton in the slammer in the last chapter, and then, in this chapter, two ladies are talking about this and that over breakfast at the diner when McNaughton shows up. He’s even driving his squad car when, at the very least, he’s supposed to be riding a desk or sitting in a cell until the nefarious stuff he’s charged with goes to trial.

This kind of thing would happen even if I used outlines because characters are in the book and outlines are outside the book in another universe that people like McNaughton don’t know about. If they did, they’d claim it was something the Presbyterian Church would dream up which is why they’re Southern Baptists.

I guess I can make do, however, if McNaughton figures out who one of those ladies is, he’s going to kill her because he didn’t hear the Tim Arnold quote in the movie.

Actually, fiction is all true lies anyway, so whatever happens, doesn’t really happen. Or, if it does, it’s not the author’s fault.

—Malcolm

While Malcolm was raised as a Presbyterian, he thought the predestination stuff was a bunch of hooey. Actually, a lot of stuff in this old world of ours is a bunch of hooey. That’s why we have writers who write about that hooey so readers will know which lies are true and which aren’t.

Why I Work on My Own Website

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

Web Designer: I’ll create a knockout site for your books for only $50,000.

Me: Will it sell $50,000 worth of books?

Web Designer: Probably not.

Me: Then what good is it?

Web Designer: It will get me more work from the people who see it.

Me: Where does that leave me?

Web Designer: Where you are now with a website that looks like the inside of the kitchen junk drawer.

I run that conversation through my head every time I redesign my website and realize that redesigning it didn’t do any good. In fact, I run a similar conversation through my head any time somebody proposes a great marketing deal for authors: basically, I ask, will this promotion, ad, or publicity package sell more books than it costs me?

If not, then I’m going to be running at a loss in a way that I can’t, as the old joke goes, make up on volume.

The home page of my website has a dark picture of a forbidding forest. Seriously, that tells you more about me than thousands of words. Also, it weeds out the kind of people who are scared of walking into such a forest. If they are, they won’t like my books.

Will it sell any books? Probably not. Writing gurus say every writer needs a website, preferably one they can charge $50,000 to design. So what’s it for? Presence. However, you’ll see just how much presence you’re getting by noting that the average length of your site’s visits is less than a second. Wow: bots and speed readers.

And yet, magazine and book publishers won’t look at you unless you have a website that they probably won’t look at. They just need to see that you have it.

Bookselling is really quite humorous if you last long enough to see how it works.

—Malcolm

Do I really need an e-mail address from this blog site?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn blog, writing2 Comments

This promotion from WordPress has been running on my dashboard for a while. The good news is, it doesn’t seem expensive. The bad news is, it doesn’ seem expensive. I suppose this is a good service for those who can really use it. Yet, for those of us who probably don’t need it, $3.50 a month looks quite different when I add that up to $42.00 per year.

If I’m James Patterson or John Grisham, then maybe having my entire media presence tied together makes sense. However, if I’m any of those people, I don’t really need everything tied together because nobody’s going to notice it or care about it one way or the other.

My first question to WordPress–if we were having a discussion about this–would be: “Will that $42.00 e-mail address sell more than $42.00 in books a year?”

I’ve done a lot of things that were supposed to portray me as a professional writer. My view is that most of them weren’t noticed by the people they were supposed to influence: publishers, movie studios, agents, bookstore, book distributors, and prospective readers. Needless to say, looking bad isn’t good, though looking good may not be as important as the people selling writers all these “makes you look good” services say it is.

It comes down to this: if you can afford to throw money at your book marketing, you don’t need to throw money at it. If you can’t afford it, it won’t help.

You’ve probably guessed that I’m not going to add a malcolm@malcolmsroundtable.com e-mail address to my life.

On the other hand, if you think I’m wrong about this, please send me $42.00 and I’ll give it a try.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of a lot of books that should be on your bookshelves.

Dear consultant, you want me to pay you to tell me about the software I don’t want?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing2 Comments

Perhaps you saw this e-mail. A writing/marketing consultant sent me an e-mail “offering me a seat which wasn’t free” to an upcoming webinar about novel-plotting software. He did give recipients a free tip: after analyzing multiple programs, he liked Plottr best. Plotter’s slogan is Plan Your Books The Way You Think.

I cruised through the website and what I saw reminded me of the note cards, outlines, and other annoyances that English teachers used to force on us every time we wrote a paper. My answer to Plottr is the same as my answer to English teachers 50 years ago: Nobody thinks like this.

Perhaps a programmer using C, COBOL, or assembly language thinks like that, but writers certainly don’t. I’ve written computer programs and noted the difference between their structure and the structure of a story.

So, after seeing what the consultant wanted me to learn more about, my mood went from pleasant to bad. It got worse when I saw that the way to learn more was through a webinar. Holy hell, I thought, that’s about the slowest possible way to impart information. Very linear. Much slower than a booklet with headings and subheads that let me go directly to the points I want to know more about. With a webinar, I have to suffer through the whole darn thing to get to the points I care about. I have no idea why this is such a popular method of dispending information. It’s probably cheap.

Now, if the webinar came with a transcript I could refer to later, I might give its creator a little slack.

While on the Plottr website, I kept seeing mini-testimonials flashing on my screen from people who loved the application. I didn’t see any testimonials from well-known novelists. Joe Doaks says Plottr is great. Okay, wonderful. What’s the name of a novel he wrote using the program?

You can see, I think, that I’m not in favor of this kind of software. If it helps a writer, that’s fine. Nevertheless, I tend to see it as a detrimental approach that gets in the way of a story’s development. For goodness sakes, I don’t need a thousand-word dossier on every character before writing the words “Once upon a time.”

Enough, already. I’ve said most of this before.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell

Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing

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Amazon Author’s Page

Gurus say authors need websites

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn publishing2 Comments

In previous posts, I’ve noted that sites for name authors and sites for little-known authors are often quite different. The main difference is that prospective readers are searching for name authors’ sites and, I suppose, stumbling across little-known authors’ sites. Name authors can do less to promote their sites because people are coming there anyway.

Little-known authors seem to do better with sites featuring non-fiction than fiction because non-fiction usually focuses on subjects people are trying to learn more about and, in fact, are often just a portion of a larger site that promotes the business itself.

Fiction is a bit harder to sell because it’s tied so strongly to author name (or evolving notoriety), to reviews from major sites, and genre. Little-known authors seldom get reviews from major sites, so nothing “out there” is providing any help for their sites.

I’ve never sold books directly off my website because I don’t have time to handle a business where time spent getting paid and then driving to the post office with a book isn’t worth it. Non-fiction sites seem to be better equipped to deal with direct sales.

Some years ago, I gave up my original website provider because they had two versions of their website publishing software, ultimately keeping the version that was probably easier for them to support, but that had fewer features. The provider offered enough analysis of visitors’ behavior for me to see that the website also wasn’t earning its keep. By that, I mean, that there were too few click-throughs to my books’ links on Amazon and elsewhere.

My current site’s software is cheaper but has no analysis. But, based on the visitor counts (which aren’t too bad), I see little evidence that people are being influenced enough by the information on the site to buy the books.

So now, as the time approaches for me to decide whether to renew or delete the site, I’m leaning toward deleting it because Amazon algorithms and associated book advertisement newsletters have made it harder to sell books; I find that keeping the site is likely to cause me to run at a loss in 2020.

If you’re an author, do you have a website? If so, can you tell whether it’s helping you sell books or not? If it isn’t, do you keep it because it’s rather expected for authors to have a site–or for some other reason?

Just wondering,

Malcolm

The Long, Winding Road to Publication 

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn publishing

I have given a lot of thought to those 15 years, and what I learned from that huge mistake of turning down the offer from HarperCollins. I’ve wondered why I would have been so willing to subject myself to being treated like a commodity, as the major publishers tend to do, rather than working with people who value your work for what it is. And one thing became clear. It’s not the money, although that certainly helps. It’s more a matter of being taken seriously, of having your efforts validated. It’s about avoiding that feeling of meeting writers you admire and having them dismiss you because you’re an unknown author. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve experienced this, and it’s an awful feeling.

Source: The Long, Winding Road to Publication – The Millions

Most published authors can tell you a story like Russell Rowland, if not worse. Editors quit, agents move on, publishers change directions, reviewers only pay attention to big houses and big books, it goes on and on. If you’re an aspiring author, Rowland’s long, winding road is a cautionary tale.

Readers, who enjoy his books are likely to say, “He should have been treated better than this,,” or “If a successful author has to fight to a contract, what chance to those of us right out of school have in this business?” The answer is always “Slim to none.”

A friend on my Facebook list, who is very well known, honestly reports on her weekly writing activity, including rejections. Rejections? What’s wrong with the people who are reviewing her work for possible publication. She is more well-known than Roland but still has to fight for every sale.

Publishing has always been this way though, it appears to me, it’s much harder today than it was 25 years ago to have a manuscript considered by either an agent or a sizeable publisher. I don’t know why. Perhaps publishers were losing too much money considering everything. Or perhaps it’s more difficult now because profit margins are smaller and everyone wants to be a writer.

Dorothy Parker once suggested that if you have any friends who want to be writers, one of the best things you can do is “Shoot them now, while they’re happy.”  When I was a college teacher, several students asked about their odds of becoming successful authors. None of them liked my response and (so far) I haven’t seen any of their names on a bestseller list.

I like writing, but it’s somewhat of a curse; as long as you know that, you’re ready to go.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s most recent novel is a mystery/satire.

 

 

 

 

When you find the work you love it’s no longer work

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn transformation3 Comments

“The one thing you can always count on in life is your work. If you’ve found true, good work to do, it will always be there for you. If you put it aside for a while, it will wait. You may not make money at it, but you will feel that you’ve done something worthwhile.”

– Theodora Goss

Wikipedia graphic

Within the context of her author’s blog, Goss is probably thinking of work as artists and authors view work. Over a half-century, ago, Abraham Maslow in creating his hierarchy of needs said that man’s ultimate motivation is that of fulfilling his/her full potential. He called this level self-actualization. Other psychologists have spoken of this hierarchy using their own terms, but when all is said and done, it defines–for me–why we are here and what our work and other activities are forever drawing us toward.

So, when I think about counting on one’s work, I’m speaking not of jobs/careers that are motivated by power and greed and fame and/or those that turn people into driven workaholics that take them away from family and friends and the wholeness of a balanced life.

Work, it seems, that leads the worker toward self-transformation or possibly toward what Carl Jung called “Individuation,” need not be restricted to artists, authors, composers, dancers. It can be any job or career or hobby that brings joy to the person and that (hopefully) brings love, respect and other similar benefits to his/her family and friends. Some authors separate the kind of work they do with the kind of work a factory worker or a salesman does as though authors are God’s gift to the world and that all other jobs are less important. That kind of vanity bothers me. Sure, some people work jobs they do not like so they can “buy back their time” for activities that lead them toward joy and fulfilment during their off-work hours.

However we define “work,” we are looking for something that makes us better than we were before. Perhaps that work is paying work. Perhaps it’s an avocation or a hobby or a long hike in the high country. Once we have it and know what it is, it’s our personal Nirvana that’s always available.

—Malcolm

 

 

 

Thinking book covers

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books

This is one of the cover pictures I use on my Facebook author’s page. It’s a handy way of showing all the covers in my Florida Folk Magic Series together.

While the book cover is often the last thing an author thinks about, it’s the first thing a prospective reader sees. Some say a reader decides in 15 seconds whether to look inside the book at a physical book store or via the look inside features on book pages at Amazon and B&N. However, as I write I can usually see my characters and their environment quite clearly; it’s almost as though I’m looking at them in a photograph.

So, I’m lucky that my publisher Thomas-Jacob works with authors to come up with the cover art. In this case, we used two artists. The first did Conjure Woman’s Cat and Eulalie and Washerwoman; then, when he wasn’t available to do the cover for Lena, we found another great artist who was willing to work in the style we needed to make all three books look like they belonged together.

Thoughts behind the cover: The book is set in another era, the 1950s. So, we have an unpaved road through the piney woods. Eulalie, the conjure woman, wore a dress and a hat (unlike the jeans and tee shirts people wear today) when she rode her bike into town to sell stuff out of her garden at the mercantile. Her kitty, Lena, would either side in basket or trot alongside. The railroad tracks figure into the story.

The style of the art tells you these stories are magical in that there’s something ethereal the scenes: the radiance in the first book, the spooky nighttime in the second, and the sudden appearance of an alligator in the road in the third one. The mood here would be quite different if we had tried to do this cover with a photograph of a similar scene or with stock drawings.

I like spending time on the look and feel of the covers because they set the stage for the story. When I look at the covers of some self-published books on Amazon, I wish the authors had worked a little harder to come up with unique covers instead of using stock photography and a boxy layout. Spending the money for original art or custom photography is money well spent.

—Malcolm

 

Don’t Let Your Publisher Become Your Worst Enemy

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books, publishing

I have a wonderful publisher, in Thomas-Jacob, and couldn’t be happier. One of the positives of a small (some say boutique) publisher is that the author and the publisher can actually talk to each other about what the best approach to the book.

Larger publishers often make decisions about books that come from heavenly heights and cannot be questioned.

A long-time online friend of mine is an acclaimed Canadian author. I’ve read most of her books. What bothers me about her publisher’s decision making is the fact that those books have different Canadian and U.S. Titles. Sometimes this is necessary. But in her case, those differing titles cause a lot of reader confusion about what book they’re buying. Frankly, I don’t think the U. S. and Canadian audiences are so different that a book requires separate titles for Amazon and Amazon.ca. I think this kind of thing hurts the author.

I just finished reading a novel by one of my favorite U.S. authors that is set in New Orleans just after the Civil War. I considered posting a review today, but then saw that on Amazon the book was listed as Political Fiction. Those who like southern gothic fiction and historical fiction will never find it there. Pardon my exasperation, but who the hell came up with those genre classifications for this novel?

From what I hear, if one of the major U.S. publishers releases your novel, you may have to put up with some stuff you don’t like. I guess that’s called “paying your dues” or pretending that “the publisher knows best.”

Book genres aren’t perfect. Neither are titles. But they do tend to steer prospective readers toward an author’s book. If you can, I hope you can discuss such things with your publisher before the historical novel you titled “Tough Women” is released as “Porn Babes” in the “How To Repair a Flathead 6 Engine” genre.

I’d say that if you cannot agree on the title and the genre, you have a problem.

—Malcolm

Creating ARC Copies: A How-To

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books, publishing

Once upon a time, Publisher’s Weekly asked for a review copy of a children’s book our small press had in the works. We were new to the business then and had no clue how to accommodate them, so we lost the opportunity for a high-profile review. Ouch! Now that I know better, I won’t make the same mistake again. Better still, I’ll share what I’ve learned so you won’t, either.

Source: Creating ARC Copies: A How-To | Celebrating Independent Authors

I saw a post by author Hope Clark in which she said that she buys copies of her books and sends them out to her favorite readers prior to publication so that then her books go live, there’s a batch of reviews ready to go. (She’s at a mid-seized publisher and buys the books at cost because many publishers don’t send out review copies any more.)

For the same reason, think about creating advance reader copies (ARCs) of your books so that you can send them to review sites before your books are published. In fact, major review sites won’t look at a book after its publication date; many of them expect a copy four months in advance.

You may not get in Kirkus or Book List, but it’s worth the time an effort, I think, to try. This post at Indies Unlimited takes you through the basics. Reviews early on in a book’s life not only draw more readers but improve how your book is displayed on sites like Amazon or in book newsletters.

—Malcolm