Dating her is a lot like trying to get your writing approved by Smashwords
I’ve recently been trying to put some of my novels onto e-readers and Amazon’s Kindle. One way that was recommended to me was Smashwords, a site that actually lets you upload your writing and then helps you format it into the various different types of readers. So far, after two weeks of working with Smashwords, with three different manuscripts, I haven’t made it out of the “pending approval” stage yet, as my work keeps getting returned to me, requiring new changes. I’ve gotten to the point where I am starting to believe that there is no stage beyond “pending approval”. It’s like one of those girlfriends who demands perfection, and no matter how hard you try, you never quite achieve it. But instead of dumping you, she always gives you “one more chance”. Yes, it’s a lot like that.
So, I’m still trying to get my e-reader work approved through them, and hopefully one day, before I turn 95, the first one will go into “you’ve almost been approved” status. Kind of like that girlfriend I was talking about. I mean, you’d dump her if she wasn’t so hot, and no matter how mean she is to you, you have to keep believing that one day you’ll achieve her standards.
Like most writers, I have this recurring fantasy. It involves a large library, thousands of books, a bowl of jello and Jessica Alba. Oh wait, that’s a different fantasy. The fantasy I’m talking about involves this vision of one day looking back on today as a seasoned, professional writer who has made it and wonders why the journey to get where I got was so hard, so long and so filled with obstacles. But one thing that keeps coming back to me, and to many writers like me, is remembering all of those friends who stuck by you through the struggle. And to be honest, I can count on one hand the close friends of mine who actually stuck by me. The rest, not so much.
To be honest, I think this is something most artists deal with on a constant basis. I have a friend of mine who is a struggling filmmaker. He’s actually pretty good at what he does, and I have a lot of respect for his work in that field. As a matter of fact, he finished his latest film just a short while ago, and when it came time for the premiere, of all of the friends at work, only two or three actually attended. The rest kept asking about it, wanting to know when it was going to happen, and then when it did, they all mysteriously had other things they had to do.
That’s what happens to a lot of us artists when we hit that point of trying to actually introduce one of our works into the public realm. When I published my first novel, people said, “oh, that’s great” and that was all they wanted to say about it. None of them were actually interested in reading it. Oh, they’d say nice things in pleasant circumstances, but they really weren’t interested in the fact that I was struggling to be a writer, and it was about the only thing that mattered in my life. They’d talk endlessly about their families, their dreams and aspirations, but when it actually came to picking up a copy of my book, Osama Bin Laden was more popular than I was.
I did a simple experiment a few weeks ago, which I repeated a few days ago, because I was actually interested in how far friends would actually go on this sort of thing. I have most of my normal friends, and former acquaintances, as Facebook friends. So, as I have a simple little comic strip called The Adventures of Stickman & the Unemployed Legospaceman, I thought it might be interesting to start up a Facebook page for that strip itself. Then I sent out a “like” request to all of my “friends”. That was several weeks ago. To this date, five people have “liked” it. One was me. Another was that filmmaker friend I talked about. That means three others appeared from practically everyone else I know. Three.
So, I repeated that experiment by putting one of my books out onto Facebook as well. Six people have liked it. That filmmaker friend of mine, and my friend Melanie from Germany. Including me, that means 3 people have added it, and none of them are any of my actual Facebook friends who have been friends for the years I’ve been on Facebook. Kind of tells you something, if you take the time to think about it. It’s kind of depressing as well.
Which leads me to realize that if most other artists are going through this sort of support from the people they know, it says something really crappy about the way social networks interact with our psyche. I’ve talked to a lot of professional writers over the years in their formulative years, when they were really struggling, and they’ve all said something similar, kind of pointing out that the art is a lonely art, but not just because you have to be alone to write. Quite often writers feel abandoned and write from that place, and once they actually make it, seek out new sources of friendships because it’s very hard to look back at the friends you had before when so few of those friends stood by you during the toughest times.
I’m finding it quite telling that some of my closer companions these days tend to come from people who have found me through my blog, or others who have contacted me through circles of writing, rather than through my normal, already established social networks. While it leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, it also leaves me wondering if the future is a series of connections yet to come rather than the ones that seem to be dislatching from behind.
It’s a lot like the feeling I’ve always had from my family when I first mentioned that I was going to be a writer. Instead of respect, awe or even interest, I received condemnation and ridicule, almost as if it wasn’t something to be taken seriously. When I received my first positive review on Amazon, rather than say, “that’s great, Duane!” I heard, “so did one of your friends write the review, or did you write it?” That was from my family. So, you can imagine how long the desire for success in this field has been burning for me.
This is the new cover of my latest novel I’m releasing called Loser. It is one of my earlier science fiction novels. The description is as follows:
After the final war, the Councils did what no previous government was able to do: Unify the world under one government. Like societies that victimize their lowest class, the invention of a device to determine someone’s usefulness to a community manages to make that effort even easier. Centuries later, the original intention of such a device loses its original purpose, allowing those on top to determine the survivability of those on the bottom, originally nicknamed “Losers” and with time the nickname becomes an actual designation.
Rem Schlock is a new Exterminator tasked with hunting and finding elusive Losers. During his search, he discovers the rumor of a mysterious “leader” of the Losers. Facing a future darkened by random death, decayed cities and hidden loyalties, Rem hunts this phantom criminal, discovering an underworld he never imagined yet once revealed can never be covered up again.
Some years back, after I finished my first novel, I was faced with a daunting question: Could I possibly write another? For anyone who has never written a first novel, this probably sounds like a no-brainer, but believe it or not, when I came face to face with the blank sheet of book number two, I found myself realizing that I was facing an enemy I had never imagined before.
When I was writing the first book, I had lots of bravado behind me. I mean, I had written a bunch of short stories, and inside me, I knew I had a book in me, so no matter what happened, I knew I was going to finish that first book. But when it was done, after a few months had gone by, I actually came up with the idea for the next book. And then I realized I would actually have to write it.
When faced with the second book, you find yourself in a very interesting dilemma that seems to go something like this: Well, the first book was a fluke, and everyone has at least a book in him or her, but am I really capable of sitting down and accomplishing the second book? The first book was a mystery/suspense novel that was kind of hard to pin down to its exact genre (you can see for yourself as it can be found here). The second novel was going to be a science fiction book, and although I had written a few short stories that had been published in fanzines (not having yet published in larger magazines), I was trying to convince myself that I was capable of pulling off a brand new genre on the second outing.
For days, I sat down and tried to outline the book, but nothing would come to me, because even though I had the basic idea of this novel, which I was going to call LOSER, I had no idea how to create a world that was so bizarre to me that I would have to invent it from the ground up. Yet, each day, I sat down and tried to tackle it.
And failed.
At one point, I convinced myself that this book wasn’t possible, that my first one had been a fluke. I was sure that I might be able to do another suspense book, or maybe an espionage adventure, but science fiction was definitely out of my capabilities.
At the time, my editor was the wife of a colleague of mine who sat down with me and asked me to explain what the story was about. And for hours on end, I sat down and crafted this amazing story of what I wanted to write. As I talked to her, I kept imagining all sorts of great things that would happen. And then, at one point, she told me to just sit down and make it happen.
So, for the next four months, I sat down in my chair and typed away. My first novel had been written on a typewriter, so this one actually got written on a computer with a word processor that we’d probably laugh at today. But by the time I was done, I had crafted my second novel. And even as I typed THE END, I stared at it, still not sure it had actually completed its journey.
A year later, I sat down and started work on that suspense novel I thought might have been the next novel, and it became my third novel. But each time I wrote a novel after the second one, I never imagined for a moment that I would have trouble finishing a novel again. That second one was the one that broke me of the belief I was never going to be a writer.
"I read all of Duane Gundrum's books because he's so dreamy...."
In case you aren’t aware of it, there is a war taking place. I’m not talking about Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m talking about the war that is currently waging over the publication of books. What war? You say. Well, let me explain.
For years, in order to get published, you sent out your work to a publisher (or an agent in hopes of getting a publisher), and if you were very lucky, you might get a bit of an advance. Sometimes, those advances were for decent money. Around the 1970s and on, they started getting really small. Kind of dismal, actually. Unless you were already a famous author, like Stephen King. So, you would get about $5,000-$10,000, and then the publisher would take 18 months or so to create your book. Then it would get released. If it started to sell, great. You would receive about $1.67 for a $20 book for each sale, the publisher keeping pretty much everything else. After all, they were the publisher. That $1.67 would continue to knock down the amount of the advance you received until you actually started to make what are called royalties, which would be additional money the book made after you paid off the advance. Most books tended to not even make back the advance, so you were generally lucky enough if you made somewhat of a decent advance.
Well, recently, the publishing industry has kind of been turned on its side. E-books are becoming the new “in” thing, and strangely enough, publishers are still maintaining their dominance in the industry, because they are still the power brokers they used to be. In other words, in order to gain any attention whatsoever, you really needed the publisher to get the attention out that you had published a book. So, not surprisingly, publishers have been publishing e-books, too, and still taking that outrageous amount off the top, leaving writers with very little profit, even though the costs for publishers have diminished to almost nothing.
Something new has started to happen, which is turning the whole industry on its side now. Writers are going directly to the readers and selling their books without the publishers. And needless to say, this is causing a bit of a stir in the whole industry. Publishers need the writers to survive, and so they are doing everything possible to diminish the positive experience for writers, so that publishers still remain the power brokers that they have always been. Unfortunately for them, that model isn’t going to last that much longer.
The publishing industry is a lot like the music industry, and its current dynamic is going through a revolution much like the music industry has recently gone through as well. While there are still seriously powerful music leaders in the industry still calling shots, a lot of artists have gone directly to the Internet with their work, and are bypassing the profit model previously established by the RIAA and other such top-down industry leaders. This has caused all sorts of problems for the industry, but it has done wonders to present new opportunities for artists who may never have received an ounce of attention before.
Move this into the publishing world, and you see the same sort of thing happening there. The publishing industry is still in control right now, mainly because the model hasn’t completely developed yet. Online booksellers, like Amazon, Apple, and somewhat Barnes & Noble, are producing their own e-readers that allow writers to push their content to eager subscribers. However, the battle currently waging is who is going to control the process flow from this point forward.
The publishing industry is counting on its enormous clout to push their agenda forward. They have already pushed back against Amazon (which has forced the others to comply) where they forced the increase in the cost of books being sold on the Kindle. You used to be able to get brand new books for $9.99, but now you’re lucky if you can get one for $12.99. The game changer in the first battle was Ken Follett’s new book Fall of Giants, which publishers forced Amazon to sell at $19.99. The backlash against the book has been interesting as Kindle users included all sorts of bad reviews for the book based on the price alone, taking what would have probably been a five or four star reviewed book down to an average of about 3 stars. What’s interesting is that his reviews on this book tend to resemble an upside down bell curve, with 301 5-stars and 327 1-star reviews, with a tiny amount filling in for 2, 3, and 4-star reviews. In other words, the critics either really liked it or really hated it, and there’s no doubt that the really hated reviews come specifically from people who are pissed off at the price.
If this was the end of the fight, you’d think that the publishers pretty much won, but like most great stories, a new sliver has been added to the mix, with writers being that added variable. Writers, realizing that they need to somehow be able to take advantage of this new technology, have started to show up sans publishers (being their own publishers), and they’re starting to include their own novels at much lower cost than the publishers are forcing down the e-market’s throat. Rather than stick it out at $9.99 (or push it up to the publisher’s price of $12.99), writers are now starting to introduce their books at the $2.99-$4.99 range, providing a more comfortable area for readers to purchase on impulse alone. Some of the more prominent writers, instead of using their fame to push for $12.99, like the gas station economic model the publishers are following (one raises the price, the rest follow), are listing their books at $0.99. According to some of the better known writers doing this, they’ve pointed out that because of the amount of people willing to buy a book at that low price, their profit has actually been better than if they tried to sell their books at higher prices. The economic implications are staggering, the more you think about it.
The biggest problems facing the writers right now is how to actually get anyone to pay attention to them in the first place. The one thing publishers have going for them was that their clout actually got books into bookstores, and without that clout, an unknown writer is essentially that, an unknown writer. If no one knows you exist, the chances of selling a book are dismal, at best. So, right now, the battle has halted, as both publishers and writers realize they’re at an interesting crossroad where both can benefit, but neither seems willing to budge. Publishers aren’t interested in giving up their high percentages they receive for “publishing” books while writers are no longer interested in giving up the entire store just to get their work out there. Which means that once writers figure out how to jumpstart the system in their favor, the whole publishing industry is going to go the way of the recording industry.
But what can a writer do to become marketable without already being a famous writer who was selling books already? That’s an important question and one that I’m spending a lot of time studying.
I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately exploring the whole e-reader market. My reasons for doing so are probably obvious, as I’ve pretty much given up on ever getting sustainable establishment from the main publishing markets, as everyone seems to be a writer these days and trying to get an agent to even read a manuscript is like trying to get Charlie Sheen to act responsibly.
Anyway, so some months ago, I put up one of my previously published books onto Amazon for the Kindle, and it has had a few sales, but mostly, it’s a lot like standing on a corner and trying to get people to read printout copies of a manuscript. People just don’t seem interested. And I don’t think it’s that their not interested in me or my writing; they’re just not interested in purchasing books from someone they’ve never heard of. It’s the same dilemma writers have always had, except there’s a lot more of us these days, and practically the only way to establish a career as a writer is to be famous for doing something else. So, if you can cook and have a cooking show, you might make it as a writer. If you’re a reality show star and have gratuitous sex with people who live in your reality show house, you might have a career as a writer. If you were a famous baseball star who took performance enhancing steroids, football star who beat up your girlfriend, musician girlfriend who got beat up your musician boyfriend, washed up movie star who seems to get arrested for practically everything written on police blotters, or some older guy who lived through abuse by your evil stepmom, well, you might have a career as a writer. But if you’re actually a writer who writes novels, and that’s all you really have to share with the rest of the world, your chances of making it as a writer are about as good as you making it as a millionaire by winning the lottery. Okay, maybe a little less.
So, what is a writer to do, if he’s not interested in starting a gunfight with the local police department in hopes that he might live long enough to write about it while in prison, well, the answer seems to be “write an e-book and get famous that way.”
The funny part of that solution is that making it as an e-book star is just as ludicrous as making it as a professonal blogger. Unless you have a gimmick, or you get seriously lucky, your chances aren’t that good. Even if you’re a great writer, it appears that everyone seems to be a great writer these days, so you really have to have something else working in your favor.
So, in actually trying to get established as an e-reader writer, I started with Kindle, and like I said, so far I’ve sold a few books and seem to be as popular as Pee Wee Herman at a stripper’s convention. Okay, I’m wrong on that one. He’d probably be a bit more popular than I am right now.
But what I have been doing is reading everything I can find on how others have actually made it. And what I’ve discovered is that everyone talks about how e-readers and e-books are the solution to the current glut in writers out there, and how it is the solution to getting past the impossible gatekeepers of publishing (even going around the publishing industry itself), but what no one really seems to do is point out exactly how that success is supposed to happen. I’m constantly reminded of the Southpark episode with the underwear gnomes, when the kids ask the underwear gnomes why they’re stealing underwear, and they point out their master plan, which reads a lot like:
1. Steal all of the underwear
2. ????
3. Profit
Yep, that seems to be the consensus of everyone who talks about success as a writer in the e-book market. Somehow, you are supposed to go the same way:
1. Write a novel and e-publish it.
2. ????
3. Profit!
Yeah, I don’t see any logic behind it either. What seems to be missing is how do you actually market yourself as an e-book writer? How do you get traffic to your blog so that people pay attention to you? Whenever I read a book on marketing your blog, it says to first create interesting content and then moves onto capitalizing on that traffic that will then come. Now, I’ve talked to a lot of people who do read my blog, and they tend to agree that I create interesting content, but at the same time, the masses aren’t showing up to read it. A few people do, and a shitload of spam also seems to be paying attention, but that’s about it. Somehow, I’m missing a step here, and I can’t seem to figure out what it is.
It is that same step I believe I’m missing that somehow makes it possible for e-books to actually be attractive to people and sell the mass load that everyone seems to think will happen “naturally”. Well, I’m still working on that one, and I haven’t come up with a solution yet.
So, if real people actually seem to be following this blog, PLEASE COMMENT ON THE BLOG at my actual blog, and I’d love to hear from you. But right now, I get nothing but spam comments (do keep in mind my blog gets imported to Facebook and Open Salon, so if you’re commenting that you actually read it, I’m not talking about those places; I’m talking about my actual blog…the one linked here). It’s really frustrating. I mean, REALLY frustrating.
Most people who know me also know that I am a big fan of Shania Twain and her music. At one point, in my numerous writings and articles, I wrote a joke story about how I created a religion completely around Shania Twain, calling in Shaniaism. Since then, I’ve often joked about how I’m obsessed with Shania Twain and she won’t return any of my calls, even though I’ve maintained a collection of all of her restraining orders out on me. For the record, I’ve never contacted Shania Twain ever, nor would I ever, but it was today that I actually found out Ms. Twain actually has a stalker who has been trying to get close to her, sending her flowers and even showing up at engagements trying to get close to her. It kind of makes joking about such things not as funny, and obviously I’ll probably have to stop this line of humor, even though I have great respect for the Goddess Shania and all things that her religion entails. Oh, sorry. Kind of went off the deep end there again.
The point of this post is to address the fact that it’s getting to the point where people are starting to have to actually be very scared of each other. In the era of Twitter, Facebook and blogs, celebrities are now very much out in the public, trying to maintain their celebrity status while appearing to be very accessible to that same public as well. This has introduced a huge problem that I don’t think was ever intended, but we now have a public out there that thinks it’s actually worthy of interacting with those of celebrity, even to the point of misunderstanding the personal nature of celebrity contact with actual beliefs that an invitation has been offered, when obviously none has ever been suggested or imagined.
We should have probably realized this was the direction where we were leading back when some nutcase killed John Lennon for no other reason than he was obsessed with the musician. Over the years there have been people overly obsessed with famous people, who have gone and done some really ridiculous things, all in the name of believing that somehow they are living a part of that celebrity’s life, convinced that if that star or starlett just got a chance to know them, everything would work out smashingly. That’s always been a part of the joke of my Shaniaism, which in case you haven’t figured out was more a criticism of organized religions than an actual worship of the Great Shania Herself. Years ago, I thought of actually sending a copy of my published article (it was originally a newspaper article) to Shania Twain herself but then decided against it, realizing that if I was a star and some unknown person sent me something that indicated that person saw me as some kind of deity, I might not understand it’s a joke or analogy, and it might freak her the hell out. So I never sent it to her, figuring that she probably had enough on her mind as it was without having to worry that some professor across the country was going to show up on her doorstop hoping to worship her in person. Unfortunately, she’s already got an alleged nutcase that’s doing that already (and he’s supposedly some well-to-do person himself, which brings me to realize that these antics aren’t limited to crazed loners who live in their parents’ basement).
So, I guess my point that I want to make is that we really need to be cognizant of the fact that there are these people out there who have a limited grasp on reality. And because our communication mechanisms these days are designed more about bringing the celebrity closer to the audience, we have to realize that some of these audience members are probably going to think that the star is actually talking directly to him or her. You see this sort of thing in strip joints a lot, which should probably have scholars studying them nonstop, if it wasn’t for the fact that I suspect scholars would gladly do so but then actually not do any academic work while visiting strip joints on university dimes. But the point I was going to make is that quite often audience members will actually think that these women working in these places are dancing specifically for them, thinking that they actually have a chance at hitting it off with the attractive woman who is really there for the sole purpose of earning a living. This often leads to a lot of antisocial behavior, and quite often it leads to a lot of misunderstandings as well. But it is so easy to see how this same type of behavior is exactly the same kind of behavior that is taking place between celebrities and their audiences. It doesn’t matter if the celebrity is in front of them, on television, on the Internet or even in a magazine. The dangerous fact is that a lot of these audience members see themselves as the direct recipient in the funnel of communication, not realizing that the funnel broadcasts to numerous audience members instead of just the one person who sees himself/herself as the sole recipient.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know the solution to this problem as I believe the problem is only going to get worse as we develop more and more technologies that put us closer and closer to our celebrities. Perhaps the interaction will eventually create a back and forth conversation between an avatar that is disassociated from the original celebrity (thus being more of an android-like participant), but that still leaves the audience member believing that he or she is sharing an intimate encounter with the celebrity. We see this similar action with music quite often, when a musician plays a tune, and the listener feels that he or she has shared an experience with the musician, even though the experience may have been a recording or an encounter where the two entities are not even in the same location. Because the recipient has experienced an emotion with the deliverer of the message, there is a sense in that recipient that both shared the encounter, leaving a potentially awkward future encounter should the two ever meet in person, as the deliverer of the message never experienced the initial feedback to understand how a shared experience could have taken place.
So, I’ll break with that, figuring that the future will probably fill in a lot of the detail that I do not yet have to share. Perhaps the Goddess Shania might bring me the answers in my sleep. After all, she is all great and holy and all that. Isn’t that how those things are supposed to happen?
In a move that is certainly going to cause stock markets around the world to increase and decrease at different levels, depending upon other, important national and international news, the unknown author Duane Gundrum was finally able to gain control of the domain name duanegundrum.com. Up until this time, the author was limited to using littlesarbonn.com, which his many fans (often referred to lovingly as “my stuffed animals”) know is the name of one of the characters in one of his equally unknown novels. Duane, quoted in while reading an issue of the New York Times, stated: “I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. I mean, it’s my name. Why not actually use my name for my actual web site?”
Fans across the globe have responded immediately upon hearing the news. Lindsay Lohan was quoted as stating that her career is most definitely not over, even though new work has not been forthcoming for her from major studios, although it is not exactly clear what this has to do with the acquisition of Gundrum’s new web site. Other celebrities also responded with quotations that were equally baffling, none of which seemed to have anything to do with this breaking story. Charlie Sheen replied with something that sounded like profanity, although it is not clear if it was a response related to this story. President Barrack Obama was questioned by the White House Press Corps, and he responded that even though Gundrum has acquired this web site, President Obama still feels that the need to control airspace over Libya is a priority for the United States and NATO.
We here in the media, charged with following all things Gundrum, vow to continue to bring you breaking updates on this important story.
The other day, I was reading through different blogs, specifically looking for information about a political theory that’s always been one of my pet projects. Because my theory has never made it into the mainstream as theories go, I’ve always followed the ideas that resonate around it, wondering if the political atmosphere of academia will ever change to where my idea might start to have a bit more merit. Anyway, the other day I was following a conversational trend on a particular economic impact on international negotiations when I came across a drawn graph that immediately struck me as very similar to my theory. Well, to be honest, it was not only similar, it was the exact same graph I had drawn five years ago as an explanation of my theory.
I checked for attributions on the graph, wondering where my name would appear, but none was given. As a matter of fact, the “author” indicated through lack of any information that the graph was completely of his own doing, that he had come up with the economic graph to prove a point that he was making.
I just stared at it, flabbergasted that someone would actually take my own work and claim it as his own. I read through the rest of his theorical post, and what I discovered was that he didn’t even use the graph correctly. So there was my information, used, abused and done so wrongly.
I sent off an email, asking for clarification of where he got the information, but never received a response. I sent off another, and still got no response. I posted a comment on his blog following the article, asking for some clarification, and a few days later, my comment was deleted. No explanation.
I had heard there were people like this, but I never believed it would ever actually happen to me. I mean, my theories are generally nuts, or so out of the mainstream that I don’t expect anyone other than a deranged scientist to ever agree with me. But there it was. Right in front of me. I sent one more email asking for any type of clarification, and the next thing I saw, the whole post just disappeared. The author never responded to me once.
What bothered me the most was that the “author” is somewhat respected in the field, which means that if the two of us were ever in the same room together, everyone would have wanted to talk to him and probably would have ignored me completely. Personally, I have no desire to drag someone’s name through the mud for reasons that really substantiate doing so, but an inner feeling asks me how many others this guy probably does the same to as well. For all I know, my situation is a very isolated incident. But who knows? Certainly not me. Or I. Never really got that grammar rule right.
As a writer, I always assumed that somewhere down the line someone would probably steal one of my ideas, but as an academic, I never actually believed it would happen in academia, or from someone who actually has a lot of respect in the field. Dont get me wrong. I’m not bitter, and I have no desire to go after someone for something like this. Personally, I’ve always accepted that most of my political theories will die with me before they ever get implemented by anyone with the ability to use them.
So I guess I’m just ranting. That’s what blogs are for, aren’t they? I mean, what would Charlie Sheen do? Don’t we always ask that when stuck in a dilemma?
