This showed up on my Facebook feed today, some idiot whining that editors were contacting her, but she was poor and she didn’t want to be bothered and people need to respect her financial situation because she can’t afford to do anything!
Yes, nobody should contact you out of the blue without your consent, I agree there. Those tend to be scams. However, the idea that you shouldn’t actually have to do anything because you’re “poor” is stupid. So let’s talk about it a bit.
I had another discussion lately with a prospective writer who claimed they couldn’t come up with anything to write about. I don’t see how that is possible. Open your eyes! There are ideas everywhere! It is literally impossible to have no ideas if you are even remotely competent.
So here’s how I come up with ideas. Keep in mind, I have 40+ books I already know I’m writing in the future. This honestly isn’t that hard.
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.
So now I’m redoing it for a series-wide second edition. Here’s why.
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.
It doesn’t work that way. He’s been told that it doesn’t work that way. His entire life, I have been telling him, my wife has been telling him, why he fails, yet he’s too lazy to do anything else.
Let’s consider this a cautionary tale.
I think all writers recognize this one, but I had a really hard morning because something really terrible happened.
I had to kill a major character in a series of books and I feel really bad about it.
Let’s talk about it.
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.
That’s not how it works, though.
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!
It just doesn’t work that way. I’m here to set the record straight.
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!”
Okay… what’s your marketing like? That’s where all of these things fall apart. If you’re not doing any marketing, then of course you’re going to fail.
That’s where it all started to go wrong.
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.
I decided, perhaps foolishly, to read through the other three books first, just to get myself in the right mindset and I’m having a huge problem!
