I had an interesting challenge posed to me recently, and by recently, I mean near the beginning of the year. An author friend challenged me to write a horror book, or, if not pure horror, a book with horror elements in my standard genre. In exchange, he was going to add sci-fi elements to one of his books, just to see how it went.
I tried. I really did, but I can’t do it, and it’s not why you might think. So let’s talk about it below the fold.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve watched a bunch of writing videos on YouTube and I’ve started to realize something. It’s probably nothing new and I should have recognized it before, but the people who put out the most videos on writing are also the people who, in general, have written the fewest books.
Seriously, why bother?
I just got done with a long discussion with a young person on Facebook in a writing group. They were claiming that writing is automatically against any young writer. Why? Because they weren’t instantly successful with their very first book with absolutely no effort on their part. Therefore, it’s all a conspiracy!
It’s really sad that I have to explain this stuff, but I do.
This tends to confuse a lot of people, especially beginners so let me give you a couple of pointers on producing a book that will possibly sell, since there are no guarantees. None of these steps are easy or quick. Prepare yourself for that. If you actually want to sell a book, instead of just stroking your own ego, strap in for the long haul because that’s what it’s going to take.
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.
