"I believe that you should always aim to write the best book that you possibly can, and that alone should be motivation enough to take your time and get it right. Aim high, be patient and see if you can create something that’s truly great. If what you’d prefer is a quick turnaround and to make an even quicker buck, then for me there’s something wrong. And you don’t sound like a writer that I want to read."
Can you really write a book in seven weeks? | Write for Your Life
I did a bit of a controlled rant.
(via iainbroome)
Click the link above to see Iain’s full piece at his site, writeforyourlife.net.
Iain invites readers to share their thoughts, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. After all, his comments are motivated by the comments of an eBook author, and we all know that I have no dearth of opinions, calculations, superstitions, irrationalities, facts, and heresies about eBooks and the new mode of self-pub.
I think that Locke is definitely playing the part of huckster here, since he’s turning his “formula” into another eBook, one that will possibly eclipse his first one in sales, How I sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months. This to me, is the equivalent of an infomercial touting proven keys to wealth that can be mine alone for $99.95, but only if I act now. One could argue that it is no different than a “craft” book. They might be right. But it doesn’t feel like it, does it? Craft books are called On Writing or The Half-Known World or an essay such as “The Simple Art of Murder.”
Looking at his website and the covers to his books, I’m wondering if one of the steps in John Locke’s plan for success is “Put a sexy pair of legs on the cover that seem to have no relation to the title of the book.” I’m waiting for his next book, Christmas at Mom’s With My Wheelchair Bound Aunts and seeing the pair of disembodied sexy legs next to those words.
I also think John Locke will go the rest of his life being asked to write LOST fan fiction.
A book turned out in seven weeks may not be worth reading. Many people will probably agree with that.
We won’t let freaks of nature like Jack Kerouac and Edward P. Jones influence this conversation since those men are outliers.
Then again, there’s always been an audience for thrillers quickly written to make a cheap buck.
The people who turn out books that fast were the authors of the penny dreadfuls, then the pulps, then the genre books, which is where they stand today. These were the middle class of authors who wrote the stories that intrigued the middle class audience when everyone was supposed to be talking about whoever had a short story in The New Yorker or Esquire, or even Playboy (though Playboy ran stories by “elevated” pulp authors - Bradbury, Ellison, Vonnegut, Fleming among others - as well as literary giants).
Transformers 3 can make shit loads of money because people want some form of mindless entertainment, and often people want that in book from as well (Not just the novelization of Transformers 3, which the studio turned down my spec outline for “deviating from the plot,” I guess they weren’t interested in marketing Transformer’s vibrators). This stuff usually sells more books combined than the literary fiction catalogs. Their paperbacks are cheaper than literary fiction, and most do not merit hard cover editions.
The people who write these books, a number are extremely talented, but because of the amount of books they have to put out, there isn’t always the time to refine the hell out of the book.
Hell, it’s quite possible that many literary fiction authors are given too much time to fiddle with their books. So much time spent fiddling with the middle that the ending is completely unsatisfying. Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me is so particularly egregious in this manner, that I’ll probably never read anything else by him.
So, let’s recognize the self-pubbers who have 40 books on Amazon Kindle store as the modern equivalent of the pulp authors, the guys and gals who had to be fast. Turning out as much as they could so they could get paid and move on. Not to make millions, but to literally put food on their table. Some of them were never going to get any sort of contract from a publishing company that would in anyway allow them to do something as say, quit their menial job and write for a living. They may not be selling a million books in five months but that’s ok. Think about if you sold 1000 books at $2.99 every month. 12,000 in sales spread out over multiple books in one year. If you can manage such a figure, as a young single person, or part of a two income couple, that is not a bad a mount of money to be making.
The secret to all this is, of course, that the more books you have, the more money you make. Not just because you have a chance to sell more, but because for some reason, the market currently favors authors with lots of moderately priced eBooks.
So…as a way to turn a quick buck, if you’re writing one book and sitting and waiting to watch the cash roll in, that’s probably not going to happen. The people who have no stomach for writing a second one, who don’t want to improve on what they’ve done, who are not inspired in anyway to try again and are disappointed that they failed the first time out, those are the people that never would’ve been writers anyway.
As J.A. Konrath, another successful self-pubber, willing to dole out advice for free, just said, the most important part of any writing, not just self-pub, is “DON’T WRITE CRAP.”
I guess Iain, that’s what you’re saying, too. Let’s just hope Mr. Sexy Legs put it at the beginning of his book as well.
(via iainbroome)
