Category Archives: Writing

The Awful Mess is an ABNA quarter-finalist…

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… which means … what?

So far, not much. I peek in at the discussions every once in a while to see if there’s something I’m missing about this process, but apparently nothing much has happened yet.

I’m trying to mostly ignore it. I didn’t enter this contest because I expected to win. “General Fiction” is such a broad category, it could go in any direction. And I am quite sure that my women’s fiction is likely to be regarded as “light” if it goes up against a compelling, manly sort of novel. It’s not terribly literary, it has Christian themes but can’t sell to the traditional Christian audience, and at least a few people would call it a romance. This is not the stuff of contest winning.

I DID want to win the free Publisher’s Weekly review, however, and that I have done.

Of course, I’ve since learned that “Publisher’s Weekly review” is a bit of an overstatement. Apparently these PW reviews are by freelancers who are not the usual PW writers, and they are being paid about $40 a pop to work their way through their assigned titles. At that rate of pay, it’s perhaps not surprising that they sometimes get a little snide. They’re earning even less per hour than I do as an adjunct.

And, alas, I think this also means that it’s unlikely the review will ever actually show up in Publisher’s Weekly.

There might also have been some business risk in doing this. Here’s someone who says that her product description for her self-published title got hijacked by Amazon’s free sample download, ruining her sales while the confusion existed.

I’m not going to freak out if that happens to me, though I think it means I’ll have to postpone some planned promotions (thankfully not scheduled yet). I just enjoyed a nice little burst of sales with the last Kindle Countdown Deal, and I’m currently in that steady drift back down to ignominy that I’ve learned to expect. But I’m not complaining. I tallied up my numbers recently and I’ve sold over 1,200 copies (and have given away over 50,000) since the book came out in June. That’s really not too shabby a reach for an indie debut.

So, if my current Amazon product page gets hijacked for the purposes of the contest for a while, it’s just not that big a deal.

Of course, the contest rules appeared to discourage sex scenes, so my actual book and the contest entry vary in that regard. If that becomes problematic, it’s possible that I’ve found an exciting new way to mess things up.

The next round of five titles for each genre will be chosen in June. I’ll let you know if by some wild stroke of luck I make it into that round. There are also rumors that one needs to have a social media push for support at this stage, but I don’t quite understand why yet. If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know.

If you want to see the list of quarter-finalists for each genre, it’s here, alphabetized by author’s first name.

Kindle Countdown Deal!

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I should probably let you folks know the ebook is on sale for 99 cents through April 6 and $1.99 April 7-10. And 99p that whole stretch in the UK. (Apparently Amazon UK doesn’t believe in increments.)

Thankfully, this time I knew to set up the deal in the UK. Last time I only thought I had, and it didn’t happen.

Share the news with friends who might like it, please! I didn’t invest in any heavy-duty advertising. I decided to reserve that opportunity for when I hit the other retailers, which I hope to do next month.

Hopefully I’ll have the next book ready to go not too long after that. But since I’m selling and buying a house right now, “not too long” may mean the fall. I guess this is when I find out just how efficient I am as a separated lady.

TheAwfulMess_Ebook 200 x 309

I’m pausing this blog…

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… because I just have too much to do right now. Our house goes on the market Tuesday, and I’m hoping to downsize into a smaller house when it sells. I also have two courses to teach, plus writing to do, and possible freelance work on the horizon, not to mention a legal separation to accomplish (we’ve decided that it makes better sense than divorce for now, purely for financial reasons).

While I’ve enjoyed keeping the blog, and truly appreciate anyone who’s reading it, I need to go bone up on how to make it pay off before I invest a whole lot more time in it. It’s not exactly building a big following or translating into significant book sales. I also believe that right now getting the next book published should be a higher priority.

So this blog is going into hiatus, except for quick posts to let you know about any big book news, like promotions or a new release. For more day-to-day news, you might want to subscribe to my twitter feed or become friends with me at my Facebook profile or just like my author page (although I’m afraid just liking a page doesn’t do much to keep you getting news from it anymore).

Many thanks for your support — with special thanks to those of you who have commented or ‘liked’ or shared these posts beyond my little list of subscribers. That makes it seem a whole lot less like I’m talking to myself. Happy Spring!

 

Cleaning out: the slightly traumatic upside of moving

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Usually at this time of year I’m starting veggies and dreaming about the next garden. But this year I’m getting rid of stuff and reorganizing what’s left as we prepare to put the house on the market later this month.

It’s all bringing back memories of putting our starter home in New Jersey on the market back in the summer of 2002. We had done a lot of painting and carpeting and such when we first purchased it, especially to the former smoker’s apartment upstairs. We also covered up ugly old asbestos shingles with new siding, and I landscaped with a passion.

But we didn’t really do anything with the cranky little kitchen. We didn’t take out the moldy carpet in the basement or even dump all the junk that had come with the house, like the cabinets from the one-time upstairs kitchen — not until the real estate agent told us we should.

Then when it was done and everything looked better, we wondered why we hadn’t done it earlier. We could have done a great deal to make life in that little bungalow more pleasant while we were still living there, and not all of it would have required big bucks.

The truth is that I’m just not HGTV material. Once things become so much of a part of everyday life that I am no longer actively annoyed by them – even clearly unacceptable  things like the white poster board we used to cover gaping holes from a burst pipe in the kitchen ceiling — I can live with them for just about forever.

I think of this as I check Zillow periodically to see what’s selling in our area. I can often guess just how old the sellers are (or were, in the case of estate sales), by the decor in their homes. A lot of the houses in my price range clearly haven’t been touched since the 70’s or 80’s.

And I can relate.

(This is also something I have in common with Mary in The Awful Mess, obviously. She  fails to redecorate her tiny little house. Later, Winslow shows what a sweetheart he is by taking charge. In real life, I suspect I’d be totally annoyed by that.)

In late 2002 when we moved into this lovely house, it had just been freshly painted almost wall-to-wall in Baltic White. And until last month, it still was. I finally bought paint with some personality back in 2006, but I never got around to doing anything except the downstairs bathroom, which had suffered from a leak from the upstairs toilet and therefore had to be done. I told myself I’d get the rest of the house painted every summer. I never did.

Now we’ve been forced to paint by the necessity of moving, and it’s amazing what clean, freshly painted walls can do for a room. (We hired a guy – it would never have gotten done otherwise.) The paint I’d bought in 2006 was still good (here’s a shout-out for Sherwin Williams Duration paint in plastic cans), but few of the colors were safely neutral enough for a house about to be put on the market.

And then there’s all the clutter we’ve been living with, like…

  • The kitchen cabinets I somehow managed to over-stuff even in a dream kitchen that has more cabinet space than I will ever have again for the rest of my life. I’m talking dishes used twice a year, uni-purpose kitchen appliances, enough wine glasses for a wedding reception, and bulk-buy pantry goods that not only filled the cabinets but spilled over into the dining room and the basement.
  • That basket of menus and phone books. Who even uses phone books anymore?.
  • Binders and binders of gardening articles and notes from lectures and such that I spent hours neatly tearing out of magazines and organizing and then never looked at again because googling that stuff is way easier.
  • The workbench in the basement so piled with miscellaneous tools and junk that no one can ever actually work on it.
  • At least three large boxes of electrical supplies, cables, chargers, extension cords and power strips – enough to electrify a village. And at least half of these were probably purchased only because we couldn’t find the ones we already had.
  • Boxes and drawers and shelves of gardening crap. Yes, I did use a lot of it — but did I really need ALL those recycled yogurt containers, newspapers for mulch, panty hose to tie up tomatoes, blankets to cover plants, old milk cartons for winter seed sowing, plastic produce containers and pie pans for drip trays, and old feed bags once used to haul horse manure? (No, clearly I did not.)
  • Scores of Tidy Cats yellow plastic kitty litter buckets, enough to fill multiple station wagons with free wood mulch from the town. A dozen of these buckets: Handy. Thirty: Obsessive-compulsive.
  • Bathroom detritus: I thought I was keeping things pretty neat, until I tallied up all those old toothpaste and dental floss samples from the dentist, make-up I’d never wear again (never even wore twice, in many cases), expired medicine, band-aids that fell out of their ancient wrappers when I touched them, weird medical devices I hope none of us will ever require again, and enough ivory soap bars to last a decade.
  • The chest freezer that I’m still too afraid to empty out. Yes, it allows me to save my tomatoes for winter cooking, and put away meat when it’s on sale. But the good buy I got on Price Chopper butter did not turn out to be very cost-effective two years later when it happened to taste just like freezer.
  • Clothing. My husband hoards clothes. Our basement is full of them. It doesn’t help that my friends at the thrift store save ugly Hawaiian shirts for him for the sheer joy of hearing my reaction later.
  • Art, photos, and photo albums. I still have old negatives and slides from when I first started using my dad’s old Miranda SLR at the age of ten. Jaime and I managed to take apart a few old albums that needed to be divided between us, but that still leaves three boxes of neatly organized albums for me to lug around, plus two more boxes of loose photographs. It’s ridiculous, really. Let’s not even discuss all the framed and unframed art.
  • CDs and DVDs. At least changing formats made it easy to decide to dump ALL the old VCR tapes and record albums. Yes, I could probably scan all of what’s left into digital files that I could carry around in a purse. I’m sure it would only take a year or two of my life to get it done. (I did at least get rid of a ton of old books because they are now free for downloading off the Internet.)
  • Writing stuff. In a way, foreseeing this day helped me make the decision to publish. I figured it was a way to not have to lug around piles of manuscripts anymore. But I still have the urge to lug them around, if only because I know that famous authors sometimes make big bucks selling their papers. Of course, my chances of ever being famous are probably right up there with pigs flying, but a girl can dream. When I’m in a more practical mood I use old drafts to mulch the garden.
  • Other files. Ugh. I still have six file cabinet drawers to go through, and that’s AFTER weeding through my teaching materials and office supplies. Then there are the boxes of records in the basement…
  • Baskets. They are everywhere. What is it with me and baskets? I’ve managed to let go of about half of them at this point. That still leaves at least twenty, only half of which are actually in use. And I’m still tempted when I see new ones at the thrift store.

As we clear each room of excess furniture and stuff, it becomes so much more pleasant. Check out the difference in just one room:

BEFORE:

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AFTER:

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Probably we should do more. I’d hang the art over the sofa back up, but it’s heavy and I don’t want to make a hole in the new paint. And that tall shelf perhaps should go, too. But I hope this shows how clearing stuff out of a room can help make it more appealing. Which is why moving is very useful, really. Even if I manage to stay put in the next house, I think it would be a good idea to pretend I’m moving every five years or so, just to keep the place in good condition.

Jaime is doing even better at divesting than I am, since he’s moving to an island. Anything he takes either has to fit in his luggage or has to be mailed over, and then he has to find a place to put it on the other end. Sometimes I think I should pretend I’m moving to an island, too.

Are you in control of your clutter? If so, what are your secrets?

“Discoverability” — a problem for writers AND readers

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I’m sure that most new indie authors — assuming they lack a back list or name recognition  — have noticed, as I do, that in the absence of ongoing promotion our titles sink into oblivion pretty quickly. We don’t get bookstore sales of any significance, and once sales drop below a certain threshold, people browsing Amazon or other sites aren’t likely to ever see them.

Mind you, this is often true of traditional authors once their initial release period in bookstores is over, too. And then they’re pretty much stuck, unless their publishers have gotten savvy about goosing sales online (I notice that more are doing just that).

Of course, readers are also in a tight spot. Many of them would like to find good new indie authors. They know there’s good stuff to be had, and pretty cheaply, too. It’s just that there’s also a lot of crap, and sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. Not every amateur writer also has an amateur cover and amateur sales copy to warn us off, and some do mysteriously well at garnering five-star reviews. Conversely, many fine indie books suffer from an author’s lack of experience as publisher, with uninspiring or poorly targeted covers or copy. And pretty much by definition, new authors will lack reviews.

One site that I admire as both reader and writer — I suppose mostly because it is particularly rigorous and specific about its requirements — is Awesome Indies, which requires that indie authors obtain authorized reviews from people with literary credentials. I was pleased that The Awful Mess was included there recently. This site doesn’t get as much traffic as it deserves (not that I should talk, given how little this site gets). It could definitely benefit from more marketing mojo, and I hope to contribute to that effort in the future. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for solid offerings by indie authors, it’s a great place to browse.

Amazon’s own solution for indie authors is to offer (for Kindle Select authors only, of course), free days or Kindle Countdown Deals as options that can get Amazon’s own promotional algorithms working in an author’s favor. I’ve had pretty good luck with these myself, but I’ve also never counted on them to operate on their own. I’ve always done at least a little paid advertising (and free social promotion, too) to get the process going.

Of course, many indie authors don’t operate exclusively on Amazon, so those promotions aren’t quite as effective for them (it is still possible to do free and price promotions, but it’s a lot more complicated).

That’s part of the reason why a plethora of for-profit and non-profit sites and email list operators have popped up to help indie authors make connections with readers and vice versa. BookBub is the best known and most effective in my experience (and also the most expensive), partly because their lists are incredibly responsive, they have standards about what they will accept, and they are geniuses at writing sales copy (aided by their own brilliant use of A/B testing).

Others include Kindle Nation Daily, BookGorilla.com, The eReader Cafe, One Hundred Free Books, and many, many more (some of which I can’t use because my book has graphic details in it). Pretty good proof that they are effective: traditional publishers are beginning to take advantage of some of these operations, too.

Some sites or lists will accept your title even without an associated promotion. For example, Great Books Great Deals generously offers “new release” promos and/or “Less than a Latte” promotions for indie books that average over four stars. The Fussy Librarian and eBookSoda try to match readers with new books that are like other books they enjoy and these are currently either very affordable or free while they build up their lists. And there are many other similar efforts, some specific to certain genres, like Awesome Romance Novels, a site run by author Donna Fasano.

Book bloggers — often but not always fellow authors — also offer indies a way to reach an audience, although it’s a rather labor-intensive way.

Where do you find good indie authors, if you do? Share your sources! Or do you even notice the difference when you’re looking for books? I’d love to hear your take on this.

Life imitating art?

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When I shared with some friends that my husband and I were planning to divorce this spring after 23 years of marriage, one asked me whether I was now fantasizing about the flowers on the table of my future kitchen the way Mary did in The Awful Mess.

I was taken aback. In fact, I don’t think I ever answered her, possibly because it hadn’t really occurred to me until then how much my situation was like my heroine’s.

For one thing, I first drafted Mary’s story over a decade ago, and I didn’t consider her to have that much in common with me — other than getting laid off from a publishing company, similar fertility issues, and a certain degree of native snarkiness. Perhaps most of all, I felt that I had much better taste in first husbands.

I guess we have a little more in common now, though I’m still quite certain I have better taste in first husbands.

Anyway, like Mary, I now need to downsize pretty radically in order to continue to lead the kind of life I want — in my case, one that will allow me to still teach part-time and write part-time instead of going back to a full-time job. But that’s about it. I don’t suffer from Mary’s traumatized desire for solitude … just my normal introverted writer’s desire for healthy dollops of solitude on a regular basis.

Unlike Mary, I have a college-age son who will be downsizing with me, at least until he goes off on his own. There’s no scandalous pregnancy in my future (at least not one of my own).

Like Mary, I will be coping with an immediate drastic drop in income, but that’s fine as long as I can live within my means, and that’s something I’ve been pretty good at over the years. I started saving for retirement quite young, and at this point I believe I can afford to value flexibility over income while I try to launch my fiction career.

Unlike Mary, I know that if disaster strikes, my parents would be happy to take us in and wouldn’t spend the duration criticizing me, although I can anticipate some tension with my mom. Let’s just say she keeps a much cleaner house than I do.

Mary was married for eight years. Jaime and I were getting close to a quarter century. No one can regard our divorce as the result of some impulsive, youthful mistake, a starter marriage that didn’t work out. And there’s really no point in having regrets about it. We’ve  had a pretty good life together. We’re still friends who can share a good laugh. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on our son, or my grandchildren and my lovely stepdaughter. I’ve also felt very much enriched by Jaime’s Puerto Rican culture. Just not so much that I would want to spend the rest of my days in Puerto Rico, if he even wanted me there, which he doesn’t (well, except to visit — I already have an invitation).

At this point I am less sad than I am relieved. I suppose I’m a bit like Mary in that, though I think Mary is actually much more traumatized than she realizes. I don’t believe that’s true of me, if only because this has been a long, slow marriage-death, the kind that lets you get used to the idea and finally start to poke at it with your foot because, well, it’s beginning to smell.

Unlike Mary, I don’t have to worry about my ex being a jerk. Jaime’s ex-wife Jenny has been a part of our extended family throughout our marriage because that was what it took to remain close with his daughter. I know that he is capable of being civilized with an ex, and a responsible divorced parent, and those are two of the things I most respect about him.

So as I consider my friend’s original question now, I realize that no — I’m not fantasizing about flowers on my table (frankly, I’ll be lucky to get a kitchen large enough to fit a table). But I am definitely fantasizing about the luxury of putting my own happiness first.

This is part of the reason I can sympathize with what Jaime is doing. At middle age, we can’t help but realize that there’s no longer an unlimited amount of time to achieve what we want. He’s 60 and he wants to go back to his homeland. I sincerely hope it will make him happy.

Starting Sheer Hubris Press was certainly a decision made in the pursuit of my own happiness, and although the financial rewards I hope to reap from it are still years away, I am thankful that I have had the opportunity to give it a go, and that I will have the opportunity to keep at it. It’s already brought me great joy simply by connecting me with readers and other writers.

So here’s the plan: Adapt to the changes that are coming, and have fun doing it.

The fundamental truth is that whatever changes I try to make at this point are temporary at best. My aging parents could begin to require more attention from me at any moment. My son is still growing up. And judging from this winter, there’s at least an outside chance that a new ice age is underway.

As someone who writes novels with strong romantic elements, I can tell you this isn’t the plot I had in mind back in 1989 when I got engaged. But there’s a reason most romances end with a wedding. That’s the luxury of being fictional. You can stop while you’re ahead.

Of course, the luxury of NOT being a fictional character is that you still exist afterwards. So here’s to my new life. I am looking forward to it.

 

A struggle to the end (of the story)

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This last week as I buckled down to some actual writing again, I rediscovered a story I’d started and abandoned a couple of years ago, before I ever figured out how to end it — or even decided whether it was a short story, and not something longer. (It’s already at over 5,000 words.)

Here’s how it (currently) begins:

Photographs don’t lie, I was a beautiful baby.  Of course, there are plenty of beautiful babies, but they don’t all get entered into baby beauty contests.  Especially not boys.  But not only did I win the award, my achievement made it up on the sign in front of both our stores: JOHN BLUETT, 6 MOS. OLD, WINNER, MOST BEAUTIFUL BABY.

The way I figure it, Mom got a taste of fame in her high school production of Pygmalion and never adjusted to the way it didn’t bring her money and success for the rest of her life. Or maybe she thought it actually did, since it wasn’t long after that she married my dad, Harry Bluett, heir of the Bluett Furniture Warehouse home furnishings empire.  In a city like ours Harry must have been considered quite the catch – not handsome or smart, but rich. Famous, too.

That’s because the Bluett family always appeared in their own commercials.  Especially the kids.  “You might not be able to show a lady the exact piece she wants in her dining room,” Grandpa Bluett often said, “But you can always win her heart with your cute kids!”

So I spent my childhood as a minor celebrity.  I was the oldest son, and the only kid in the family to win the Most Beautiful Baby Award (not that the others didn’t get entered).  So I was in every commercial they ever made except for that time I had the chicken pox.

“Come schee what my daddy has on special this week!” I’d say.  It was the same line every time.  People watched me grow up saying it at the beginning or the end of some new commercial every month or so.  Some people thought my sibilant s’s were really cute.  Not the other boys at school, who liked to say, “Hey, Johnny, what you got on schpecial this week?”  When I finally got old enough to demand that I not have to say the word “daddy” on television, they got my sister Gloria to do it.  But I still had to stand around and point at furniture.

Now, I like this guy. I like his voice. I also like the problem he soon encounters with a young lady named Palmyra, who has a unique approach to men.

But damned if I know how to get him through it all in a way that satisfies in less than 12,000 words. Maybe even 60,000 words. Do I really have to write a whole novel just to find out how these guys are going to end up? I’m not sure I like him THAT much.

Ending short stories has got to be the single most difficult task I ever face as a writer. Most of the “complete” stories I have just sit around on my hard drive, where I periodically read them and think, “Yeah, okay… but that ending isn’t quite right yet.”

I don’t have that issue with the novels, so far. Even the third one, which is not finished, already has an ending I love. I just haven’t written the novel all the way to it yet. (Yes, I usually skip ahead and write endings when I’m about three quarters of the way through. At that point I need reassurance that I know where I’m going. Then when I really get there I have to rewrite it, of course, but at least I’m confident in the meantime.)

Why is it so much easier to end a novel than a story?

It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this. I’m an English major who studied fiction writing in both college and grad school, so I’ve read plenty of classic short stories. In my classes at HVCC I have taught short stories that have lovely, perfect endings. Through Media Bistro I took an online course with John Rowell, whose stories in The Music of Your Life really impressed me. My friend Lucia Nevai is a real master at ending short stories well (and everything else about them, too — and I’m not just saying this; she won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize). Anyway, Lucia’s been kind enough to read my stuff and give me feedback.

Feedback like, on one of my stories, “you haven’t quite earned that ending yet.” (Though she probably put it more diplomatically than that.)

Damn it.

I’m thinking about this because I’d like to clean out the hard drive of all that work and put a volume of stories out. So I’m just kind of whining, now, about how hard it is to write good short stories, and how there’s also no market for them, really, outside of literary journals that almost no one reads except people who somehow managed to get published in them, which they have only done after collecting hundreds of little rejection slips or rejection emails, or knowing somebody, or somehow being so incredibly talented or awesomely cool that the potential of bright literary notoriety rises off their prose in little clouds.

Even when you’re a real author who has arrived and won awards and such, publishers tend to think of publishing a volume of short stories as a vanity move, something to win some good notices for an author (and publishing house) rather than something they expect to generate serious revenue.

I doubt there’s a single author in the US today who makes a good living purely from writing literary short stories. (Maybe Alice Munro manages, but she’s Canadian.)

But short stories as a genre are experiencing a bit of a revival thanks to ebooks and indie publishing. And the reason I’m interested in putting together a collection is that on Amazon I could give them away, or charge 99 cents (which is still more than I’d get in a literary journal) and then people who like them might actually buy my other books.

(Also, it’s a way of putting off The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire just a tad, because I expect that one to encounter some push back. Traditionally published writers are a little more insulated from controversy than indie writers, for whom a few ill-timed one-star reviews can spell disaster.)

Anyway, this week I decided I’d share a little work in progress with you. I thought it would be an economical solution to the time writing this blog takes, but of course it took just as long to write as it ever does, or maybe even longer.

If you’d like to hear more about John Bluett, let me know. I could use a little motivation to help me finish his story!

Speaking of problems with endings…

This weekend a firestorm has erupted over J.K. Rowling saying that she thinks she should have had Hermione Granger end up with Harry Potter rather than Ron Weasley. I happen to totally agree with her, but oh my there’s a lot of condemnation going on out there among Potter fans.

Apparently authors need to just learn to live with whatever we’ve published, and leave any regrets for journals or autobiographies published after we’re dead.

For indies, this offers advantages and benefits.

Advantage: So few people read our early books at first that we can often go in and fix them without anyone ever really knowing.

Disadvantage: We don’t have an experienced publishing team guiding us in the first place, especially pulling us back when we head straight for a cliff.

Then again, experienced publishing professionals can and do push pretty hard for what they think the market wants rather than what the author wants. They are often particularly interested in slotting us into just the slice of the market they think we have the best potential to claim, rather than allowing us to explore the questions that most interest us.

And if you ask me, that’s another good reason to go indie.

The fine art of twitter stalking

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When I first tried Twitter — because it was one of those things all authors were supposed to do — I was instantly addicted. I enjoyed getting little tidbits of this and that. At first I was only following a few of my favorite bloggers and comedians and magazines and such, and it was easy to keep up. But as I followed more people and organizations, I began to realize:

  1. I have no hope of keeping up with this.
  2. This takes a lot of time.
  3. This isn’t selling any books.

So I started ignoring it for days at a time. But at some point I dipped back in and came across a post from Joel Friedlander – a man wise in the ways of indie publishing and generous about sharing his wisdom – in which he suggested that authors should build their Twitter networks not by following other authors, but by following people who describe themselves as avid readers.

And that works. A bit. Mind you, it’s laborious. I think of it as hand-selling. I’m doing well with it if one out of every twenty or thirty people I follow gets curious enough to check me out, and then also gets curious enough to buy or borrow my book — but that’s something. It’s enough to keep The Awful Mess: A Love Story from sinking into an utter abyss in the absence of any other marketing efforts.

Probably even more valuable than the sales, I’m building a list of fairly targeted followers. Although not very many people I follow immediately buy my book, a fair number of people do follow me back. Which means I can still talk to them. So there’s some potential there over the long term.

Of course, this strategy only works up to 2,000 or so follows, at which point Twitter decides you’re creepy or something and shuts you off.

When this figure neared for me, I signed up for an account at justunfollow.com. I’m personally not a fan of people’s daily tweets of how many followers and unfollowers they have, so I opted out of that, but I do occasionally tweet my own variation of their suggested tweets. It’s only fair to give this valuable free service some shout-outs now and then. (It’s not the only one available, either, so feel free to look around.)

Anyway, with this one, everyone gets 25 free unfollows a day. The occasional tweet on their behalf entitles you to fifty unfollows a day. And your non-followers are neatly organized with the oldest ones first.

So I go through that list and I clear out most people who haven’t followed me back, unless they happen to be particularly interesting.

I also tend to pretty quickly unfollow people who send me chirpy direct messages without following me back. I don’t mind being hit up with a marketing message, but a direct message suggests a willingness to interact, and I can’t DM back people who haven’t followed me. So that just seems rude. (First I’ll usually wait a week or so to see if they’ve just forgotten to pay any attention to their account.)

I do the same for most of the hapless folks who auto-DM me back to tell me they use TrueTwit validation. (DON’T use TrueTwit validation.)

And I will probably always follow more people than follow me, barring sudden fame (and I’m not holding my breath on that one). I find a lot of people interesting, and as I said before, I enjoy getting these little morsels of information.

Anyway, now that I’ve unfollowed enough to clear up space for more follows, I stalk writers whose work seems enough like mine that their readers might like my stuff, and I follow their followers — if they talk about being readers.

This isn’t all that easy, because most of the authors I idolize don’t have Twitter accounts, and Jane Austen, for example, has been dead way too long to be tweeting anybody, although she is associated with a surprising number of Twitter accounts. So I hunt for readers of women’s fiction and “smart chick lit,” or just about any Episcopalian who will admit to reading. Also, if anyone mentions being a Kindle addict, I’m on them like fat on bacon.

Of course, I’m late to this game, clearly, because other indie authors are in fact the majority of the followers of most published authors. I ignore them unless they speak of avid or voracious reading themselves or just seem to be an unusually kindred spirit. I usually ignore librarians and booksellers, too, because neither will have easy access to my book right now and will probably sniff at me in disdain. I also ignore people with locked accounts, people who haven’t tweeted in weeks, people whose politics and religious attitudes suggest they’d happily consign me to hell, and people who do nothing but tweet contests and marketing messages.

Along the way I’ve noticed that dark chocolate and red wine merit A LOT of mentions in women’s profiles. It’s actually quite fascinating to see how people from all over the world sum themselves up. (I’m stunned that I haven’t yet come across a single mention of long walks on the beach. It’s not really a hook-up oriented medium, apparently, or maybe I’m just looking at the wrong demographic for that.)

My next stage with Twitter will be organizing the people I follow into lists. I had no idea what that was until recently, and it makes so much sense. You can put the people you follow into categories, public or private, and then focus on that category only when you’re interested in it. Sounds like a good January project.

Do you have any Twitter tips, techniques, or pet peeves that you’d like to share?

Twitter Screenshot 2013-12-16 11.02.37

Staying the course

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I’m in the midst of (distractedly) grading the final research papers for my four English composition classes, so this will have to be a short post.

My paperbaPaperbackck went live on Amazon this week, which was interesting because, as I pretty much expected, the only people to buy it immediately were my parents. Which is just funny, really.

A few friends and family have requested multiple copies, so there’s that. (Yay, friends and family.)

I haven’t been able to do much marketing to support the release, what with the four classes and the unpredictability of the process, but that’s okay. At a friend’s suggestion I’m trying to throw together a little book launch party, but that’s not looking too healthy, either. This is a crazy time of year to squeeze one more thing in.

And sales even of the Kindle version have been slow. But I need to remember what the agents knew much better than I did: even a good debut novel is a challenge to sell in this market without some sort of compelling platform for the author. And I need to remember: That’s why I’m doing it this way. I can afford to fail and just keep writing and getting stuff out there until I gain some traction. In the meantime, I’m in print. And I’m learning.

So far I’ve actually been pretty fortunate, with more sales than the majority of first-timers, and some very nice positive reviews.

So, I really need to get back to what ought to be my primary focus — getting more books out there. Not that I’ll stop marketing, because that’s just too hard for me to do. It’s part of my professional background after all, so I find it embarrassing to just let it go. (On the other hand, my clients have always had much bigger budgets for marketing than I do.)

So the real focus here has to be getting more material out there.

And now I need to go back to grading (where I just discovered that one of my students and I — since I’d approved her source — were fooled by a fake scholarly journal. There’s another hazard of the brave new world of online publishing!)

For now, I wish you happy reading, and good luck with storms, semesters, holiday prep, and all the rest.

Pride goeth before a fall (or at least a misspelling)

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One of the risks of calling this enterprise SHEER HUBRIS PRESS is that there’s a little extra irony — a wonderful soupçon of inevitability, really — when I screw up.

Only on this last revision of The Awful Mess: A Love Story did Amazon’s converter notify me of a spelling error I didn’t even realize was a spelling error. And I’m an English teacher and a former editor! (No, I won’t tell you what it is. You get extra points if you can find it, but it’s already gone in the Kindle store.) Alas, it was NOT caught before I’d ordered my book proofs. That’s expensive and time-consuming, because it means another round of proofs.

Most of the stuff I caught this time around was minor. There were words not italicized when I wanted them to be, and some inconsistent use of italics in general (I won’t pretend to have fixed that). There was a scene in which my heroine managed to fit “showers” into a space of time that would only allow one. There was a comma outside single quote marks. (The horror!)

Then there was my p013anic attack about apparently skipping an entire chapter in my chapter numbering. Thankfully, the guy working on the book told me my numbering was fine, since I later found the missing chapter under the desk, where it had hidden after Bo knocked over my neat stack of pages. (He’s not a great office assistant.)

I also developed some concerns about my use or non-use of the subjunctive tense. But this one’s a little tougher, because there’s an argument to be made that English is gradually losing this tense. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s something I have observed in common practice. And that’s how English always evolves — in common practice.

This section reserved for grammar nerds

Generally speaking, if you construct a conditional sentence about something that is not true, the subjunctive tense (or mood) is required. In other words, if Arthur says “It would be much worse if I was taking this kind of interest in you and you were in my church,” I’m pretty sure he is being ungrammatical.

I believe that “was” should be a “were” because Mary is not, in fact, in his church. Though since he is interested in her in fact and it’s in a compound sentence, I suppose we could debate the matter — after all, the second part could be subjunctive rather than just straight past tense, and English isn’t mathematics with handy parentheses to help us figure out in which order to solve the equation. That’s why I didn’t do it the first time. But being consistent with tense within a sentence is a good thing. So I edited that one this time around.

I did this since Arthur is clearly well-educated, so he should probably use the subjunctive instinctively. However, people speaking are not always as grammatical as they are on paper. So … I don’t know. Honestly, I think I could have gotten away with it. (Feel free to weigh in.)

Later, I’m quite certain I could have gotten away with it if Annie had said, “Maybe if he was about twenty years younger and not so damned religious.” Annie has already confessed that she hates writing and can’t spell. She probably wouldn’t know the subjunctive tense if it came up to her in a bar and bit her on the butt. However, in my book she actually says “…were about twenty years younger.” That’s because I used it unconsciously. Should I have? Probably not. But I left it as it was.

The reality is that 99% of readers won’t notice a missing subjunctive tense and 50% of the remaining 1% won’t care even if they do.

The challenge of regional colloquialisms

At another point I wimped out on something I had done intentionally wrong in the book, and had always meant to include somehow because it was something I so enjoyed hearing when I lived there. Many New Hampshire residents routinely employ the double negative. For example, you might hear:

“I need to make a trip to Keene.”

“So don’t I!”

I wanted Winslow to sound at least a little local and at one point I had him saying, “So hasn’t everybody.” But then I just couldn’t stick to it. People who were not familiar with the local grammar would think I’d made a mistake. Maybe if I’d found a way to get Bert to say something like that, I could have stuck to it. Maybe if I’d added something like, “lapsing into the local dialect, Winslow said, ‘So hasn’t everybody’.”  But that would have taken people out of the flow of the narrative. So he just says, “So has everybody.”

Sometimes it might make sense to do things wrong on purpose. For example, every once in a while I have found that there is really no good way to avoid an instance of poor agreement like “Your child never knows when they might be called upon to perform” without resorting to an awkward “he or she, ” which is one of the clunkiest constructions in the English language, and one that very few people use it in common speech. In my days in educational publishing we used to take pains to alternate between the he and she, always choosing the less gender-stereotypical gender. (“Your child may wish to become an engineer. So she needs to…”) Usually I try to find a way to avoid the problem, but in advertising we’ve sometimes just knowingly committed the error instead.

Other times, I’m the stickler. I can remember an unexpectedly bitter debate once with another writer who declared that semi-colons should never be used in dialogue. I disagreed. If we’re going to punctuate based on what people are actually thinking as they speak, there’s not much call for any punctuation. But people are reading our dialogue, not listening to it. Even in a script, actors have to read that dialogue and make sense of it. Punctuation is simply there to help our words make sense. Semi-colons are a useful part of the arsenal of sense-making. Of course, I also know from my students that there an awful lot of people who have no idea when they should be fired.

English is always flowing and changing. Consider the news that “selfie” has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries. Or just watch your local evening news, or commercials. Certainly our local stations appear to have decided that copy editors are a luxury they can’t afford anymore. Brian Williams also seems to delight in constructions like “What about them Red Sox,” though I hope that’s just his idea of sounding cool.

I wasn’t trying to be cool with my errors, and I have no excuse other than trying to do all this stuff myself. Someday, I hope to make enough money at this to be able to hire the most tight-assed proofreader in the universe to check my work. In the meantime, I make do with what I have at hand: me, the friends who read my early drafts, and a few sharp-eyed readers who are willing to share.

Do feel free to help me out with that by catching my errors.By the laws of irony, there should be at least one or two in this very blog post.

Book updates

This week my book has a wonderful new cover — if it ever shows up. Amazon is taking a very long time to update it. It appears that they require actual humans to look at new covers before they publish them now, which is probably smart given that it has a (tastefully) naked person on the cover.

For those of you who are waiting on the paperback, I’m sorry. Thanks to that spelling error, I now have to do another round of proofs, which also requires waiting for book proofs to arrive in the mail. Hopefully it will be available for order by the end of the week, but I can make no guarantees.