It always disgusts me, watching people complaining about one thing and then when the solution comes up, complaining about that too. A while back, Dungeons & Discourse made a video about some of the big online RPG sellers taking action against AI-written content. She pointed out that there was a lot of really bad human-written crap up there already, and I pointed out that I’d been suggesting for years that Amazon institute a reading fee for every single book uploaded to the site. A human reader makes sure it isn’t a scam, of which there are plenty, and that it meets minimum quality standards.
Imagine my surprise when people didn’t like that either.
I’m rewriting a series of books that I originally put out in 2020. It’s been on my list of things to do for a long time now. Someone in my mailing list pointed out, sometime back in 2022, that a minor point didn’t make sense in the third book. They are seemingly the only ones that ever noticed it. The reviews are good, sales are good, but once it was pointed out to me, I couldn’t see anything else.
I know someone very well who has tried, and failed, repeatedly, to make money writing on KDP. Why? Because he doesn’t actually want to earn any success, he expects instant and unlimited wealth and if he doesn’t get it, he turns to something else entirely.
I think all writers recognize this one, but I had a really hard morning because something really terrible happened.
I’ve been watching some videos from Sci-Fi Odyssey over on YouTube recently, not really because I find them to be great, but because I’ve been bored. That’s not to say that they’re bad, because certainly, they’re not, I just find his take on things to be “interesting”. I say it like that because I simply do not agree with some of his overarching ideas. He seems to think, again, from my limited exposure, that science fiction must, by necessity, be hard, meaning it’s got to be scientifically plausible to be worthwhile.
I’ve seen this too much lately and I just had to say something about it. Tons of people seem to think that writing for publication, it’s just something that you can do on a whim, that you don’t have to put in any effort or cost, everyone owes you automatic success, so there!
I ran into this today, although it isn’t at all uncommon, and I thought I’d write about it because it does come up so often. An author on Facebook decided to whine that “nobody likes my books!”
Today, I finished up another book. It was the third book in the third trilogy of a series that’s going to go fifteen by the end. It came in around 140k, which was completely fair and about as expected. Now, I set it aside to breathe while I start working on a new book, this time, another series where I’m on book four of a thirteen book series.
Right now, I’m kicking myself. I’m getting close to finishing the ninth book in a series that will ultimately be fifteen books long. It’s been going really well, everything is coming along as I’d hoped and, if nothing went wrong, I’d be done by the end of next week, somewhere between 130-135k words.
I’ve officially given up trying to help most people with writing because they don’t want any help. They just want comforting platitudes and I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s skirt.