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We've never been to Honduras...

2/26/2013

...and we're betting that these three men have never been to our part of Arizona. Still, as of now, we have a tenuous relationship. And it all started with the legume.

The guy on the far left, the one who looks like he really, really doesn't want to be there? That's Anselmo. According to Kiva, "Anselmo is an honest, responsible and hard-working person", and Anselmo is in the business of buying and selling peanuts. He uses his peanut-profits to care for his three children in Choluteca, Honduras.

Not coincidentally, Harrell loves peanuts. In that way, he is much like George Washington Carver, except that GWC spent the last two decades of his life promoting peanuts and racial harmony, whereas Harrell has mostly spent the last two decades of his life, just eating peanuts.

Harrell has done a few other things -- get married, make babies, write, build a life -- but he has devoted a significant portion of the last 20 years to eating peanuts. Oh, and he's in favor of racial harmony.

So, when we decided to make a new Kiva loan, he wanted to focus on someone male (this will be our eighth and we are gender-unbalanced, according to our Kiva portfolio), someone who was smiling (many of the Kiva recipients are sour-faced), and someone working in peanuts. It took some searching and we had to abandon the "smiling" requirement, but we finally found Anselmo and the G.s. Guasaule N #5 Group.

In order to lend our cash to the peanut vendor, we had to offer a loan to his compatriots as well. The guy in the middle, the one who looks like he's ready to run? That's Walter. He could, presumably, care less about peanuts. He's in the business of buying and selling seeds.
The fellow in the far right? He's Angel. Angel buys and sells chickens. Just by looking at him, you have to doubt if he's a peanut lover.

Working as a group, each man receives an individual loan but all three of them provide support to one another. There's also a little peer pressure going -- "Hey, Anselmo, you pay off your Kiva loan yet?" "Walter, not yet. What do you want? I'm working for peanuts!" -- but, at the end of the day, they're on their own. We hope they do well. We only wish at least one of them looked happy in the photo.

Quote of the day: "Success is for creeps. We already reward narcissism way too much in our culture, so what I’m going to tell you guys is, do what makes you happy and be nice."

-- Bobcat Goldthwait

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We don't dare look back...

2/19/2013

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...because everybody is gaining on us.

(The picture on the left? It's supposed to snow tonight. Then snow some more tomorrow. We're tired of snow.)

Following last week’s blog, we received a couple of emails – y’know, you don’t have to write, it’s okay to use the Comments Section on this thing – and we scored about 50/50 in that limited response. One person agreed with us and, we’re pleased to say, she’s absolutely right to do so. The other person disagreed just in general, believing Robert Heinlein > Renée Harrell, and also believing that only weak writers do a rewrite of their work. Arguing that speed triumphs persnickety-ism and leaves the material fresh and exciting. In so many words, the Other Person told us, it’s better to get your work out in the marketplace and fast, rather than spend hours doing rewrites and editorial changes. More product = more sales and more sales = more royalties.

Continuing to follow that line of reasoning, more royalties = a bigger bank account,
a bigger bank account = financial opportunities never before explored,
financial opportunities never before explored = an appointment with the plastic surgeon,
plastic surgery = no more wrinkles,
no more wrinkles = younger boyfriend,
younger, hot, loves-you-only-for-your-royalties fab-tastic boyfriend = no more sour-faced Harrell in the morning,
no more sour-faced Harrell in the morning = well, nothing good for Harrell, I’ll tell you that.

We responded that quality will out (Harrell was stating this vehemently), but our new friend had a compelling argument against our theory. O.P. directed us toward another writer, one that produces a new 300-page novel about eight times a year. We're lucky to put out one piece a year.

So we scurried over to the writer’s blogsite (which is very nicely laid out, and much more interesting than what we offer here – so, fat chance we’ll give you a link) and, yes, this guy is doing well. In terms of sales, every single one of his novels is ranked above anything we have on Amazon. Looking at his publication dates, and reading his comments, he’s popping out a new manuscript every six weeks or so.

He’s doing well and one of us is jealous. (No, not that one. The other one.) Since our new literary hero had recently put out a new book – great covers, too, did we mention this? – we downloaded a sample. The first chapter wasn’t bad. It had a great hook, the characterization was interesting, the dialogue...okay, so maybe it wasn’t all perfect. The dialogue went along something like this:

            Detective Oates turned to look at me. “I don’t care what you think. You’re not safe.”

            “I have a gun,” I told him.

            “And you think that will help? A gun? This creature can’t be stopped by bullets.”

            “What do you mean, this creature?”

            “It’s not human.”

            “Not human?”

            “Bullets bounce off of it. It’s skin is like metal.”

            “Like metal?”

            “And it’s super fast. Super strong.”

            “Super strong?”

            “And it lives on blood. Human blood.”

            I felt faint. “Human blood?”

            “And it’s name is Joey Joe-Joe Junior Shabadoo.....”

The name thing? Not in there at all. Damn, we used to love The Simpsons.

But, in our brief view of the master’s manuscript, we couldn't ignore the long stretch of dialogue where the lead character tended to repeat whatever was said to him. It went on for almost two Kindle pages, which probably equals one full page of a paperback book. After a very short while, this became distracting. Throughout the sample, we also found many too many sentences starting with “And”...as in, And this is a first draft and I don’t have time to get this thing edited.

Still, there’s no arguing with Amazon rankings. (Or reviews. The people that like this kind of thing, really like it. Or hate it: the one-star reviews seemed astonished that anyone else was on board this train.) Clearly, if we want to be mega bucks successful, we need a new approach to our writing.

We're just trying to decide if the mega bucks would be worth it.

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Rewriting the rules...

2/12/2013

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...isn't really what we do. We tend to be rule-followers, rather than rule-rewriters. Just for you, though, we're ready to make an exception.

Our desire to rewrite some rules started when a friend fell off of the world a few months back, disappointed in how long it was taking him to write his newest manuscript. He also wasn't delighted by the Amazon sales numbers for his first book. He wrote us, "Sales seemed to have peaked in the first month and the peak wasn't very high. After eight months, my Kindle sales are in the low two digits."

(Have you noticed how many of our friends are struggling to sell their written work? We have, too. Instead of a Red Hat Society, we should organize a Pass the Hat Club.)

We told him that sales take awhile to build, especially for a self-published writer with no fan base, that literary fiction is always a tough field, that...yadda, yadda. It's all true but he already knew the drill. As Jim shared more recently, people could chart his Enthusiasm Trajectory just by following his blog posts. At first, he was pleased and excited. He was also a little lost, trying to drum up any possible publicity for his novel. Soon after, when a blog hop didn't hop any new book sales, he began to push for book reviews. When no one responded to his review requests -- see the earlier comment about "self-published writer", "no fan base" -- he felt hurt. His blog posts reflected some of those feelings, becoming a little more sporadic, then a lot more sporadic, then they just...went away.

Now he's back! Well, not at the blog but back to a few of his writing buddies. He contacted Renee to talk about cover art and we learned what had been happening. Jim has completed a new novel, roughly 70,000 words, and he cranked it out in about six weeks. His last novel had almost the same page count and it took him over two years. His new book is a thriller, with guns, girls, and gorillas.

No, no, there aren't any gorillas in the story, we just wanted another 'g' word to wrap the sentence. There is lots of action, according to Jim. He plans to put it out under a pseudonym.

We like pseudonyms. We've had a couple ourselves.

So how did Jim go from being a slow, cautious writer to becoming a he-man who makes his keyboard whimper? He discovered Robert Heinlein's Rules for Writing. You can find Heinlein's instructions, too, with a minimal amount of internet searching. The rules were published almost seventy years ago in an essay called, "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction".

If you don't care to do the Google dance to find his rules, here they be:

(1) You must write.

(2) You must finish what you write.

(3) You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

(4) You must put the work on the market.

(5) You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

These rules worked for Jim, even though he's never written speculative fiction. When we checked, we found buckets of believers in RH's philosophy, and several that believe his rules fit for all forms of fiction. Robert Heinlein was a huge force in his field, back in the day, and we only wish we had a fraction of his talent and imagination.

(Oh, go ahead and say it: "You do have a fraction of Heinein's talent and imagination!")

We studied the rules and decided we'd like to make a few modifications. Rules #4 and #5 are spot-on but, since we publish through Hunting Monsters Press, we no longer worry about them. Most self-publishers wouldn't, either. As for the first three rules, we've adjusted them so that they make a little more sense when it comes to our work. Maybe yours, too:

(1) You must write...with enthusiasm. (We've tried writing because of the "You must write" rule, and what came out was kind of crappy and then we threw it away and we'd wasted an entire day when we could have gone to the movies, instead, and come back refreshed. Plus, then we wondered if we even had the talent to be writers and thought maybe we should have gone to the Riverside Dental Academy, instead, like Mom wanted.)

(2) You must finish what you write...unless it totally sucks. (Because, good God, the thing we were writing last time was terrible, it was always going to be terrible, what made us think it was a good idea to do a serious piece about talking shoes, anyway?)

(3) You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order...if you're Robert Heinlein or, maybe, Isaac Asimov. Both of whom are dead. (The rest of us could use some work. Aly's Luck was edited by the wonderful Steve Haynes and more than once; then we edited the pages again when the manuscript returned to HMP; and we've just done a please-let-this-be-it final, final edit that will be replacing the current edition soon.) Because we're not Robert Heinlein, that's why.

When Jim found RH's Rules, he sketched out a plotline, then sat down and wrote. Six weeks and 70,000 words later, we're impressed by the volume of work. When we asked to see the first couple of chapters, he didn't want to show them to us. Once we talked about it, Jim decided he could probably do better. He was only refusing to do a rewrite because of...well, the Rules.

We say some rules are made to be broken.

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The English really are different...

2/5/2013

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...and in all kinds of fun ways. Instead of saying, "Football", they say, "American Football". Instead of using double quotation marks, as we did in the preceding sentence, our British friends prefer to use single quotation marks. And when they pronounce the word skeletal, they go positively nuts.

They pronounce it skil-ee-tul. Which isn't even a word...except in Mother England.

We know this because we've listened to Alexander McConnell, our audio book narrator, say skil-ee-tul about a buhzillion times. If you wander off to Audible.com, find the sample button for Aly's Luck, you can hear it, too. (If you prefer to go to Amazon, it's here; if you're an iTunes person, try here.)

It sounds freaky, doesn't it? It's as if Al McConnell decided, What the hell, I'm the narrator, I'll just make up a word here. Renée and Harrell, they're in Arizona, they won't know any differently.

We want to point out that, yes, we live in Arizona, but that doesn't mean we're dumm. Also, we checked it out and skil-ee-tul is an accepted pronunciation of the word, skeletal...if only in Mother England. Since the phrase, "skeletal finger" appears really early in the audio, we were a little anxious that other bits of odd pronunciation might crop up throughout the tale. Would survival become seer-vee-vul? Would nudiustertian suddenly be heard as nood-ee-oo-ster-tee-yan? (Nudiustertian is a word but it isn't actually in our novel. We have no idea how the word should be pronounced but, c'mon, cut us some slack. We live in Arizona.)

Now that we've got one under our belts -- Luck came out in mid-December; we meant to tell but we were just so busy -- we've discovered a few things about audio books. First of all, no matter how easy you think it may be, it's a bear to narrate one of these things. The playing time for our novel runs nearly 10 hours long, and the recording and re-recording probably took ten times that. Heck, it took us ten times that and we were just listening and making notes.

We've learned that your voice actor has to have some serious skills. There are scenes when our narrator had to provide different voices for multiple speakers within seconds of one another -- and he had to do this while maintaining the original voices of our recurring characters. Good thing he's a movie star. (A. McConnell asked if he could temporarily step away the Luck recording to jet off to Scotland and take the lead role in a movie. We were good with that.)

We were surprised to find that the price of audio books is all over the place, even with our book. Pick it up at Audible, they'll ask for nearly twenty bucks. Go over to Amazon, which owns Audible, and they'll give it to you for $17.95. Swing by iTunes, they'll provide it for $4.99. The pricing disparity makes no sense but that doesn't matter because...

...we learned that there's no good way to promote an audio book and sales aren't going to happen. Amazon suggests its authors blog and tweet and Facebook the crap out of their projects, so we asked other writers if any of this had worked for them. Without exception, they said it didn't help at all. This blog? It's doing nothing to bump our numbers and we know it. You love you anyway.

Both writers and other narrators have told us that audio book sales are nearly non-existent unless the name on the author's credit is Steve King or Jim Patterson. Sales do appear to take a happy uptick if Neil Gaiman likes your audio book and says so, but the restraining order has limited our ability to chat with Neil lately so that's out. (Darn you, Neil. Don't come crawling to us when it's time to pump The Ocean at the End of the Lane.)

Then something weird happened. Good, but weird; we received our first royalty check from ACX, the Audiobook Creation Exchange. In its first month, without any promotion, the audio version of Aly's Luck sold more copies than a year's worth of the Luck paperback. We don't know why and we may never know why.

We think it's the skil-ee-tul finger of fate, that's all.

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We've never been to Honduras...

We don't dare look back...

Rewriting the rules...

The English really are different...

Come on in! This

Renée & Harrell

It's about time you got here.

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