DO AUTHORS LOVE AMAZON?

 

By Bonnie Stanard

 

Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it. Is a great relationship going bad?

 

We writers, ignored by NYC’s legacy publishers, fell for Amazon in a big way. It seduced us with promises of newfound horizons, priceless connections, and a way to publish our manuscripts. We could forget the painful past. Didn’t matter that agents and publishers refused to accept our queries. Nor, as it has turned out, did it matter whether or not we could write. Amazon arrived on the scene and gave us the means to publish and sell our books.

 

Last week several organizations delivered a letter to the chairman of the US House Antitrust Subcommittee asking the government to look into Amazon’s unfair business practices, which have resulted in its controlling as much as 50% of all book distribution. The letter is signed by organizations representing booksellers (think independent bookstores), publishers (the big and little guys), and writers (Authors Guild).

 

They have accused Amazon of:

1) below-cost pricing of books to squash competition

2) refusing distribution unless the supplier purchases advertising

3) requiring publishers to offer Amazon similar (or better) terms as any competitor

4) requiring publishers to restrict price discounts to consumers

5) steering customers to illegal sellers of counterfeit/unauthorized books

6) manipulating discovery tools to make books hard to find without purchase of ads

7) steering consumers toward Amazon's own products

 

We might ask, “What does this have to do with me? I don’t publish books. I don’t own a bookstore. I haven’t written a best seller.. or second best or third best. So what?” Only the writer with no expectation of reaching an audience has nothing to lose.

 

We may be tempted to say this letter is just sour grapes from the losers. Amazon has taken on the competition and out produced and out distributed books. Now the losers are appealing to the government for help.

 

Should the government curtail Amazon? Let’s consider another question. Where do you buy quality books? Not at a local bookstore. We know what’s happened to them. Online alternatives to Amazon? Wordery, Barnes & Noble, Powell, companies struggling to stay alive or hoping Amazon will buy them. What has happened to retail booksellers?

 

Do we writers have viable options to Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon) for self-publishing? There’s Apple, but if you go there, you have to figure out how to sell the book once it’s published. Amazon cleverly unites publishing with selling, a move that puts a squeeze on other print-on-demand (POD) publishers. In other words, those publishers survive by making a deal to distribute with Amazon. Which is what IngramSpark and bookbaby have done. Does this sound like a bottleneck to commercial traffic?

 

Regardless of how much Amazon has done for us writers, to suppose it can do no wrong is naive. Its position in the marketplace should be secured by innovations, not suppression of the competition. I like Amazon, but I don’t want to be forced to like it, whether to publish a book or buy a screwdriver.

 

 

 

 

  

THE RUSH to PUBLISH

By Sharon May

To learn about using social media as a writer, I started following some writing groups on Facebook and Instagram. On one group, I noticed many questions from group members that make me wonder about their critical thinking and decision-making skills. I try not to be judgmental, but some of the questions make me shake my head.

“Where or how do I start?” This is usually accompanied by “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.” Reminds me of my students who think writing is a magical, yet formulaic task. There is no one, simple answer for such questions. “It depends…” is the only way to start an honest answer. And beginners don’t find that response satisfying, preferring a standard, fill-in-the-blanks recipe.

 

Respondents to beginner questions really don’t have much of a grasp on the nuances of writing either. Just this morning, one writer said he had completed a plot outline, but wasn’t sure what to do next. Most respondents advised him to start at the beginning. Maybe that will work, maybe not. Depends once again.

 

Most of these exchanges reveal that many writers haven’t yet honed the craft. Being from Appalachia, I grew up around storytellers and I am talented one, but I have to learn to be a writer. We all come to the profession with some talents and ambition, but the majority of us have to work hard to get a good product ready for publication. For some of us, that takes years. I’ve seen many comments bragging about how few days it took to write a book as if writing were simply a race to publication.   

One Facebook commenter said she had finished her novel, and asked if she “had to edit.” Really? For the love of writing, you should edit unless you plan to publish a draft, which brings me to my next point. There is too much trash being published because for many, the lure of money and the thrill of being published are more important than the quality of the writing.

Many writers don’t spend the time doing the hard work. Instead, they want the words to leap magically from brain to screen. Sometimes the words may come like that, but rarely for an entire book. And, what if it did come that quickly? I would think you’d still need to edit. I know the “magic stuff” I wrote during my earlier attempts to become a writer is quite horrible. 

To finish a work, writers must read and research (By research, I don’t mean asking Facebook pals.), write and write some more, then revise and edit repeatedly. Even after all that work, there is usually more to be done if we want to be respected authors. 

If you plan to publish, you need to devote time and energy to the craft and make every effort to produce the best writing you can. You owe the reader that much. 

 

 

DO THE WORK: TWO STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVED WRITING

By Jerry D Pate

 

In his Fiction Writing Master Class, William Cane encourages new writers to copy the styles of various writers until they find their own voice. He notes the practice is common in music and art, so why not writing?

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he notes, began playing together in 1957 performing songs done by other artists until they perfected their own style and songs; and were suddenly discovered six years later. They did the work.

Painters are encouraged to study and copy the works of others until their skills are honed. Writers could do the same.

Cane’s point in all of this is keep working at it.

I thought, Do the work.

A few years back I sat in on a class an English professor/instructor at UofSC opened to the public. The professor read various passages from a book and made comments.

After one reading she observed, “Here the author is using this as a metaphor for…”

I thought, Metaphor? Writers use metaphors?

The next day I was in the gym on a treadmill next to Pat Conroy’s brother and was still puzzled about the professor’s comment. I asked him if Pat ever said he was looking for a metaphor to use in one of his books.

He gave me a strange look. “Metaphor? He never asked about metaphors. Hell, when Pat was working on a project he would write and write until he came out the room and said, ‘I got three pages done today’.”

I thought, Maybe you just have to write to be able to write?

My own creative process at times gets stymied by the don’ts, do’s, and you musts of punctuation, grammar, voice, etc. Perhaps getting the story down first and worrying about the format later, might help.

But only if I’m willing to do the work. Writing is a process, not an event.

Resource:

To master the fundamentals of writing, try emulating the work of great artists – William Cane, Fiction Writing Master Class, Writers Digest, 2009, 2015.

ISBN-13:978-1-59963-916-1

 

 

WHAT WORDS MEAN

By Shaun McCoy

 

We huddled around the table, shoulders hunched, our faces hovering over heaping plates of pad thai and panang curry. It wasn’t just any awkward silence we suffered through, it was the worst kind of awkward silence. It was the peculiar flavor of awkward silence that can only happen on a first date—and not the kind which is pregnant with tension and possibility, either. Oh no. This was the kind that follows the moment when you both kind of know that there’s not going to be a second date.

 

And this during the plague times, when even meeting had been a risk. Really, how had we gotten each other so wrong? 

 

Well, because we met online of course.

 

Text—which until this very day had been our only method of communication—just didn’t convey everything we needed it to. There are acres of context in a hello, a thousand tiny character details in the way a person smiles, a Wheel-of-Time-novel-sized-backstory hidden in whether a person’s tone rises or falls at the end of a statement. All these things and a billion more are accessible to us when we meet in person, or when we’re experiencing a scene in person, or when we’re listening to dialogue in person. 

 

The silence was loud, not because silence can really be loud, but because by some auditory trick, things that were normally quiet were yelling at us. The wood of chopsticks as they tap a plate, the quiet chewing, the sound of the air conditioner cutting off.

               

“The food’s good,” she said.

 

And it was. The panang curry was sweet with coconut milk and spicy with the touch of chili powder and the essence of the sliced green peppers which had been soaking in it. It was warm. The jasmine rice was nice and sticky. 

               

Our eyes met for a moment, both of us somehow communicating to the other that we knew this date should never have happened. There wasn’t much we could do, though, other than attempt to enjoy the company of a perfect stranger, a person we’ll never see again, as we ate.

 

“The spring rolls particularly,” I said.

 

She grunted a little because she agreed but couldn’t say so while she was chewing.

 

Interesting, isn’t it, that here we were, eating together because we weren’t better writers. Because we couldn’t convey to each other what we were like in text. And that’s the moral of the story, as if written by Aesop himself. It’s important to take the time to make sure your words convey all you mean them too. But don’t worry. Sometimes, when you mess up, there’s still Thai food.

 

A SIMPLE EXERCISE for PINPOINTING YOUR AUTHOR BRAND

By Kasie Whitener

 

The first question in the exercise is, “Who are you?” and while it’s only three words, the question is a really big one. As I get older, the answer gets clearer, but it’s always evolving. 

There’s a great scene in Moana when she has given up on her mission and on herself and her grandmother’s spirit comes to her and says, “Do you know who you are?” 

Is this not the greatest pursuit in storytelling? A protagonist discovering her passion, her proclivities, her personality are all part of the gift she is to the world around her. 

In this week’s episode of our radio show, Rex Hurst and I are discussing Author Branding. The idea came out of the Jane Friedman book, The Business of Being a Writer, which I’m using as the course text for my fall class at the University of South Carolina’s Honors College: “The Business of Writing.” 

I love the exercise: Who are you? How did you get here? What do you care about and why? 

Friedman suggests we answer these questions to look for our deeper purpose as writers, to understand why we write and what we have to offer through our work. She says our branding is emergent in our work; if we pay attention, we’ll see patterns and themes that point us toward the gift we are offering. 

My bio reads, “At her core is fantasy romance and not quite getting over the nineties,” and “fantasy romance” isn’t a genre, it’s the imagined relationships I bring out of my past and reanimate in my work. I write GenX fiction. My work has echoes of the 90s, a reluctance to forget the decade that shaped me. It’s about freedom and not being constrained by archaic rules. It’s about loss and forgiveness and love. 

Of my debut novel After December, Jonathan Haupt said the book, “questions just how far the bonds of platonic and romantic love can be stretched before breaking beyond any hope of mending. The answer is both redemptive and well worth discovering.” 

The exercise works for my characters, too. Who is Brian? How did he get here? What does he care about and why? Answering these questions for each of the people populating my imaginary worlds helps me to deliver authentically motivated characters. 

Moana sings that she is a girl who loves her island, and a girl who loves the sea. She does not think these things are mutually exclusive. Her dichotomy is what makes her a compelling character and her journey of discovery is the entire premise for the film. 

I want to write more of those stories: characters discovering who they are through a journey in pursuit of what they really care about for reasons that are clear to my readers. As I continue to write those GenXer experiences, not-quite-historical and sometimes mid-life-crisis-y, I remain true to my brand: Unapologetically X.

 

What is your author brand?