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Traditional wisdom dictates a writer shouldn't respond to reviews, positive or negative. I agree, however, we now live and work in a world of instant reviews from a wide array of unqualified sources. I'm not suggesting the "reviewer" who left the following "review" of The Bottom Feeders (the free edition, FYI) at Barnes & Nobel was unqualified:
Total BS
Each story was crap, the mere idea this is thought of horror is a joke, and frankly free or not it's a horrid read. The plot of each story is crude and the endings are rushed leaving you feel like you just read a middle schoolers ELA story.
Gee, thanks anonymous. Oh, I'm sorry,
Anonymous. It is your proper name.
Remember when I wrote a post about all reviews being equal on the internet? Well, I rescind
part of my statement. Anonymous reviews are more equal than others.
(By the way, Anon, you forgot the apostrophe before the second 's' on the possessive "schoolers"; just saying you might want to pay more attention in ELA class. I haven't even mentioned comma use...but that would just be snarky.)
I've collected four of my 99 cent e-books into one 115K word/39 story omnibus, Monsters Among Us. The price? $2.99.
Why would I guy do a thing like that?
1. Readers can purchase the content of four books for less than they would pay individually.
2. It would take six copies at 99 cents to equal one copy at $2.99 thanks to the 70% royalty rate.
3. J.A. Konrath told me to. *
Think about items 1 and 2: readers gain and I gain. Sounds good. But Aaron, you say, what about those 99 cent books? Aren't you cannibalizing their sales?
Maybe.** But I suspect bargain hunters will still pick them up. Monsters Among Us includes every story in The Bottom Feeders, Thirteen Shadows, and Violent Ends as well as "Black Medicine Thunder and the Sons of Chaos". It's all linked with a handy-dandy table of contents. It's also my first legitimate foray into the $2.99 price point. In the next 24-36 hours my second foray goes live. I'll talk about that come Monday... If you're observant, you'll find out sooner.
It's all a big experiment, after all.
* No, he didn't. But I did take the idea from him.
** Remember what I said about this being an experiment?
Fair warning: It's one of those "Big Experiment" posts.
I should have started this "indie publishing" thing six months ago. Am I going to retire soon? No, not at $0.35 a book, but my sales are definitely growing month to month. And when I write "sales" what I really mean is "potential readers". This week alone, I've seen more sales than the entire month of March. The Bottom Feeders continues to be my bestselling book, with 22 copies and counting out the virtual door. Notice: I'm not selling a ridiculous amount of any one book, but several are selling modestly well. Each book is a potential reader--note I use the word potential. Do you read everything you buy?
Will the trend continue? I hope so. It's a pretty steep curve.
Scott Nicholson, an indie author who has traveled the "traditionally-published path" and man for whom I have a great deal of respect, recently posted a blog entry Marketing is Not Selling. Read it and the companion piece on IndieReader. My favorite bit: "...I am not screaming "Buy my book." I'd rather you feed your family, or buy some seeds, or donate to your favorite local charity. That's what I do when you buy my book."
Feed your family.
For the first time I feel like I might be able to actually contribute to my family through writing rather than taking away. Think about it: years spent banging at the keyboard when I could have been doing something else. I've taken myself away from my family for my fictional worlds. It isn't as simple as that, but the kernel of truth is there.
Look in the mirror, Aaron: You are not evil because you want to be compensated for your time and effort. Got it? Good.
Yes, I've been releasing e-books faster than Jerry puts the smack-down on Tom. I have a pool of over 100 published short stories, some of them smelly as last week's garbage (don't worry about seeing them again) and several unpublished shorts which were "that close". Why let them fester on my hard drive? It's taken me years to arrive at this point. Years and thousands upon thousands of words.
After my current round of edits on The Sons of Chaos and the Desert of the Dead, I'm going to put the finishing touches on Borrowed Saints for a May release. I'm toying with the idea of writing a House Eaters sequel this summer.
The bottom line: I want to be read. I might be able to spread some good fortune to my family. Sounds like goals are meeting reality, right?
I just wish I would have started six months ago.
What are you waiting for?
Twitter. Forums. Facebook. This blog.
I've kicked up a little extra self-promotion of late, and, like many authors, fear I've talked about my "stuff" too much. But have I? Who knows. I hope you, dear readers, will tell me if I'm being a boar. Really.
What I do know is that, when marketing, one must put something in front of potential buyers for them to know about it. Most buyers must see a product several times before they purchase. I haven't mentioned Violent Ends on the blog yet, but I am now. Yes, it's another e-book endeavor, but this time I'm pricing it $1.99 (after much soul-searching and self-debate). Of course, the coupon code WY56K will score 50% off at Smashwords. Violent Ends is also available for Kindle at Amazon.com. This is part of the big experiment. This is about planting seeds rather than leaving them in their little paper pouches (see Monday's post).
These are some of the most...well, violent of my stories. Three of them are brand new/never published before including "The Hustle", a story originally slated for an ill-fated anthology. I hope you enjoy.
The Bottom Feeders is *almost* available in print, too, and I've put a fairly reasonable tag of $7.99 on the dead tree edition. Of course there will be a discount on copies ordered directly through Createspace; details to follow once I've approved the proof.
Thanks for your support. Now go hug a writer.
I dipped my toes in self-publishing (or Indie if it suits you) last April with The Bottom Feeders. Since then, between the free edition, Kindle, and Smashwords, well over 200 readers have picked up the book. Much has changed in the world of self-publishing in the last year. To mark The Bottom Feeders anniversary, I'm prepping it for print.
I've written a little afterword for The Bottom Feeders (print), and here she is:
As part of my day job, I tell my students (high school juniors and seniors) never to apologize for their writing. A nervous sixteen-year-old often sputters and us, afraid to show his or her work to the class.
Get over it, I say.
No excuses. No apologies.
I won't make any excuses for The Bottom Feeders. No apologies, either. These stories have their fair share of blemishes and errata. An earlier electronic edition contained several formatting errors. The prose in unwieldy at times, but its mine. All of it. The Bottom Feeders represents the best of my early work. These stories have life and memory. "Everything in its Place" was my first commissioned sale. "The Bottom Feeders" marked the time I juggled the balance between my past and the fictional universe I was creating. "Tesoro's Magic Bullet" will always be a reminder of the struggle: a story accepted to a market which I'd tried to break into a dozen times before getting it right.
Along the way, I found my voice. I hope you can hear something of the small-town Kansas kid with much love for vintage EC comics, Saturday morning cartoons, and Boris Karloff's staggering monster.
I'll keep telling stories.
Thanks for reading them.
(And, of course you can still get the electronic edition for Kindle or other formats at Smashwords for only 99 cents.)
Spring break officially ends tomorrow, but here's a tiny bit to read to day: the first page from the reviewer-favorite "In Hollow Fields" a short story available both in my ebook collection, The Bottom Feeders and Return of the Raven (edited by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli):
"In Hollow Fields"
Rolling fields of golden wheat and green pasture swallowed a silver Honda as it sped along a stretch of snaking asphalt. The driver leaned forward and shrugged his shoulders, trying to stay awake after three hours in the car. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and tightened his grip on the wheel with the other. His passenger, eyes flitting from the asphalt ahead to the side mirror as if measuring the length of road, shifted in her seat.
“How far will we be from a hospital?”
Zach leaned back. “Don’t worry, Court. I think there’s a hospital in Springdale—about fifteen miles away.”
Courtney’s shoulders dropped. She rested both hands on the top of her bulging belly. “I’m just not really comfortable, you know.” She tilted her brown eyes out the window, watching acres of Kansas prairie melt in an amber blur. “I’m seven months along, Zach. Seven months. I don’t really want some redneck doctor delivering our baby.”
“Everything will be fine. If all goes well, we’ll be out of this little shit-hole in a couple of days. A week at most.” He smiled and patted her leg. “This could be it, Court. The goldmine. The old bastard had his fortune wrapped up in the farm. The land has to be worth thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”
The car crested another hill and sped into the valley below. The town of Broughton’s Hollow lay in front of them, a loose arrangement of graying houses and broken streets, a dying carcass of a village, left to fester in remembrance of an era when family farms, railroads, and general stores ruled the American Midwest. No fewer than four church steeples rose from valley.
Courtney shivered. “Well, at least we won’t be short on Jesus.”
Zach offered a meek chuckle, but neither spoke again as Zach steered the Civic through the dilapidated main street and out the other side, toward his grandfather’s farm.
And on that farm...Want to read more?
Kindle -
Smashwords -
Return of the Raven
February was busy. You've all read, I'm sure, of my 2677 edits for The Saints are Dead. Yes, most of them made the book better....but whoa. Just whoa. I wrote several new stories in February ("What Julie's Dad Doesn't Know" and "The North Lantern" being my favorites) and managed my Write 1 / Sub 1 goal of a story submitted a week.
Three stories "sold" in February: "Poe's Blender" to Death Rattle, "Upon Leaving the Candy Factory" to Bourbon Penn, and "The Ballad of Arkady and Nadia" to 100 Stories for Queensland. The latter was a "sale" sale, meaning no money flowed to the writer because it is a charity antho.
On to the Big Experiment...
Because I believe in full disclosure, I present:
Well...I won't be retiring any time soon, but a few things of note:
- One of those Bottom Feeders sales was a gift. So I sold eleven legit copies for Kindle, plus one through Smashwords.
- February's numbers represent the most copies of The Bottom Feeders I've sold since releasing the book last April. The trend is rising from seven last month. Short story collections don't traditionally do as well as novels (in any format), but I'm not complaining.
- The Bottom Feeders had a crazy little bounce this weekend, selling five copies between Friday and Monday. Not big numbers for some of the Kindle people, but I can't explain the bump. I'll be watching this closely. After all, it is an experiment.
I hope to have
We are the Monsters ready by the end of March. It's a novella (35K), and they are traditionally hard to place, after all. Jekyll and Hyde are welcome to live in one skin as long as they want, because
I've decided I want one thing out of writing: to tell stories.* To do this, you have to have an audience who wants to listen. Anything which puts a barricade between me and an audience is bad form (did you hear that, Hyde?). In addition, I want my "craft" to be top form so the audience keeps listening (keep subbing to those fine markets, Jekyll).
*wait...I've sort of known that all along.
Really, I don't mind. In fact, I encourage you to steal my book. The way I figure it--and I'm stealing the idea from Cory Doctorow, proving piracy of ideas is pretty common--anyone who steals my book wasn't going to pay for it in the first place.
What am I talking about? Well, I discovered (through the magic of Google Alerts...if you are an author and don't have one set to your name do it now) The Bottom Feeders is available through a file sharing site. Another site has it available for $1.99. Ha! Good luck selling it, folks. I'm not doing so hot at $.99. (5 sold in January so far...)
But I digress. Please, feel free to trade my book "illegally". Any of my books, actually. If it means more people read the books--awesome. The problem, see, is that most book pirates probably don't read all those files. Pirates pirate because they can--I'd say some are addicted to file downloading. I want to meet readers who are addicted to reading. So steal my book. Steal it all over the place. Just leave my name on it, okay, because not to do so would be the real theft.
Speaking of free things and reading, you can sign up for a free preview of The House Eaters. Just fill in the appropriate info off to the left. The book is coming. Soon.
In fact, it goes to print tonight...barring any major problems.
Excited?
Yes.
I'm feeling like I need to give away some more money and a couple of books. Here's the details (scroll to the bottom for the holiday book giveaway):
Loathsome Reviews Contest (12/9/10 - 1/31/11)
Like to win a $25 gift certificate to an online bookseller of your choice?
1. Write a review of Loathsome, Dark and Deep and/or The Bottom Feeders and post to a blog, Goodreads, or Amazon.com. Better yet, post to all three for triple entries. Each post earns one point (or your name in the "hat" one time).
2. Email me: aaron.polson(at)gmail.com (replacing the (at) with @ of course), letting me know where you posted a review.You can use the subject line "contest" if you wish.
3. Additional points can be earned for buying either book (just email a copy of the receipt), tweeting about the contest (make sure to reference my twitter handle @aaronpolson), or tagging the book on Amazon (just email me at the above addy and let me know).
All entries must be in by January 31st, 2010. Plenty of time to enter this one, folks. I'll send out periodic reminders. If I have enough entries, I just might give away two gift certificates.
Hey...and you're entered even if you give Loathsome a loathsome one star. Be honest!...and the
Holiday Book Giveaway:I'm shamelessly "borrowing" the idea from the legendary Kim Paffenroth.
Check out the Zombie Christmas Contest at his blog.In the spirit of giving, you enter this giveaway for someone else. Email me (aaron.polson(at)gmail.com) with the name of someone you'd like to give a copy of
Loathsome, Dark and Deep along with a sentence (or two) explaining why. Entries for this one are due Sunday, December 12th by midnight (CST). I'll choose two winners at random to receive a free, signed copy of
Loathsome.
Fun? Spread the
horror joy!
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What an eloquent jerk! I wish anonymous posting would go away altogether, but that's wishful thinking. You can't hold people accountable for the things they write!
Take it for what it's worth, which is nothing at all. I hope the writing is going well. New term here, so I'm hoping to get my "at-work" writing off on the right foot this afternoon...
When reading reviews, I always look at the bad reviews because I want to see what their point of reference is. Of course, if the reviewer is anonymous, I tend to ifgnore those reviews because they are obviously trying to hide soemthing. I had soemthing simialr happen to me- got a scathing review for a short story-free shrot story-colelction. I went and looked back at all of her other reviews, and guess what? She hated EVERY Indie boomk she read, and she LOVED everuy classic she read. She loved James Joyces' protrait of an artist, which i think of as crap. Literary crap. And all I can hope is that people who give credence to this woman's review take the time and look at her other reviews and realize that she is prejudiced towards anythign Indie. I still do not undesdtand why someone who loves classics and hates horror easted their time on my work
I'm with Bradley, I read the 1 & 2-star reviews to look for the point of reference and counter the rave reviews of friends. 97% of the time, the review says more about the reviewer than it does about the book being reviewed. ;)
I agree with Dan. If a person can't stand behind their comment they shouldn't be posting it at all. Otherwise 'anonymous' is equated with malicious intent and the commentor has something to hide. Nicely handled, Aaron.
I think that's a grand comment. If the reader finished the book ("every story") and was moved to such massive spite, clearly Aaron is an effective -- and affective! -- writer.
I don't trust any review that slams the writer.
Daniel - New school year (less than 2 weeks in). I think it will be a good one. Good luck--
Bradley - Oh yeah... Indie... :\
Cathryn - Some one star reviews seem like they were for different books.
Alan - Like I said, more equal. ;)
Andre - Thanks. ELA. Ha!
Erin - Good point.
Oh, that's infuriating! I'm like everyone else, though: if a bad review is anonymous, I always ignore it. Obviously the reader has an axe to grind. Someone must be sickeningly jealous of you to want to bring you down so badly!
That's just terrible! If they really do think like that they should be prepared to own their own words. In any case I always belive there is no need to be nasty when reviewing stuff. You could just say you didn't like it or it wasn't for you. After all one man's meat and all that...
All anonymous reviewers are just plain cowards...