Last week severe thunderstorms knocked out power to our house in Upstate New York. We were without electricity for several days. During that time a lot of things were a hassle. The things we take for granted like running water, are very hard to live without. For the last two days of the ordeal we were lucky enough to have someone who could lend us a generator, which (just in time) saved a lot of food in our freezer that would have ended up in the garbage.
The only thing we lost, besides a couple showers, was a gallon of milk, some eggs, and a few other already questionable items from our crisper. It was hardly a disaster situation. Nevertheless, it got me thinking about the people of Joplin, Missouri. They didn’t just lose power, running water, and a gallon of milk. They lost entire neighborhoods, entire families in some cases, and entirely too much to even imagine.
My wife and I wanted to find some way to give what we could, but I've been unemployed since February, we have nothing extra to give out of pocket. I decided that the only real way to give back was through my writing. I thought if we could somehow harness the power of Kindle, we could help a little. After consulting a few sources, it seemed that 50% was the magic number.
So, for the foreseeable future, I will be giving 50% of each Kindle eBook I sell to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation’s Joplin Relief Fund. It’s not much, but it’s what I can do. At the very least I hope it inspires other authors to do the same. Not necessarily to the same fund, since there are many in the USA that have been clobbered by wicked storms this year, but perhaps they can pick their own cause and give what they can. If you don’t want to give 50% just give 25%, every bit can help.
A few good people have already donated to the cause and I thank you. These are hard times for everyone economically; donations to all charity across the board are down. If you don’t want to buy my book, but still want to donate, click the link to the fund above and have at it. They have a form you just fill it out. For just $2.99 you can get THE SWEET SIXTEENTH, an action-laced romantic thriller for your Kindle, and give $1.50 to help those that with so little left.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Momma Got Kindle
My 61 year old mother got a Kindle for Christmas. The idea appealed to her somewhat, she thought perhaps she would use it on occasion when she traveled. Now, my mother is not a techno dummy (her son does have a degree in computer science) but she still uses a desktop. She does not Facebook or Twitter, nor will she ever. She did not even have WiFi in her house.
Without WiFi, your Kindle needs to be hooked up to the PC and the books uploaded. That's a few more steps than most people will do on a whim. Of course, that's where I came in. As it turned out, she had a WiFi DSL router in her house supplied by her ISP. So naturally I hacked into the router and enabled the wireless. Then I quickly set of the WiFi on the Kindle and about a million books became a finger push away.
The next time I went to my mother's house, she sent me away with a shopping bag of about fifteen books. My mother has always been a reading machine, devouring books at a rapid rate, and leaving the leftovers to me. I'm usually about ten books behind her at a given moment, so there is always a pile of books for me to read around the house. But since the Kindle, I've been deluged with books. But that looks like the end of the line. I doubt my mother will ever buy another paperback again.
At first I looked at this as a sign of The Coming of Gozer, but it is so easy for people to buy an eBook with this device, they can't help themselves. It's not just easy, it's convenient to the point of books becoming an impulse item once again. Years ago, I remember as a kid supermarkets used to put books on the impulse racks. Over the years they seemed to have been replaced by candy and magazines. But at least where I grew up in New Jersey, books used to be on many of those racks. Most of them were romance novels, but some were thrillers and other genres. I imagine there are places where that still is the norm, but I don't see it often. In most cases markets and drug stores have a book section, but that is usually where the books stay. If you do not seek them out they won't find you.
With the Kindle, it's even easier than an impulse item. You type in a name, or a genre or whatever you want and zap, an 80,000 word novel is in your hand. It's so intuitive it's ridiculous.
I've heard people say these devices are the best thing to happen to authors since the printing press. Right now it is so cheap and easy to buy a book, it may effectively destroy the "second hand" book market. It occurred to me that many of the books my mother used to buy were used books. An author makes no money on a used book. I know in theory said buyer is supposed to then go buy a new book by that author. I agree that's valid on some level. However, the reality is that might not happen either. In which case the author was nothing but a pimp for the store.
Of course, stories of accidental discovery ... "I found this book on the beach and it changed my life" ...will not really have an equal in the eBook world. But on the flip side, authors will sell more directly. People like my mother will take a chance on an unknown author because it's so damn easy to do it. And why not? It didn't cost any gas to get it, it was only $2.99, and if it sucks you can delete it.The Kindle user sees little downside in buying a book they might have otherwise passed on. So authors will benefit in ways they might not have in traditional paperback, even if we lose some of the paper perks.
It's a weird new world and I guess we have to roll with it. We are not going to stop this snowball from gathering speed so we either get out of the way, or we jump into the icy cluster and hang on until it explodes into something else. It was my mother's reaction to Kindle that convinced me to eBook The Sweet Sixteenth - I wanted to learn the eBook process first hand before I was scrambling to catch up. Because if my mother can abandon paperbacks, anyone can, and everyone will.
Without WiFi, your Kindle needs to be hooked up to the PC and the books uploaded. That's a few more steps than most people will do on a whim. Of course, that's where I came in. As it turned out, she had a WiFi DSL router in her house supplied by her ISP. So naturally I hacked into the router and enabled the wireless. Then I quickly set of the WiFi on the Kindle and about a million books became a finger push away.
The next time I went to my mother's house, she sent me away with a shopping bag of about fifteen books. My mother has always been a reading machine, devouring books at a rapid rate, and leaving the leftovers to me. I'm usually about ten books behind her at a given moment, so there is always a pile of books for me to read around the house. But since the Kindle, I've been deluged with books. But that looks like the end of the line. I doubt my mother will ever buy another paperback again.
At first I looked at this as a sign of The Coming of Gozer, but it is so easy for people to buy an eBook with this device, they can't help themselves. It's not just easy, it's convenient to the point of books becoming an impulse item once again. Years ago, I remember as a kid supermarkets used to put books on the impulse racks. Over the years they seemed to have been replaced by candy and magazines. But at least where I grew up in New Jersey, books used to be on many of those racks. Most of them were romance novels, but some were thrillers and other genres. I imagine there are places where that still is the norm, but I don't see it often. In most cases markets and drug stores have a book section, but that is usually where the books stay. If you do not seek them out they won't find you.
With the Kindle, it's even easier than an impulse item. You type in a name, or a genre or whatever you want and zap, an 80,000 word novel is in your hand. It's so intuitive it's ridiculous.
I've heard people say these devices are the best thing to happen to authors since the printing press. Right now it is so cheap and easy to buy a book, it may effectively destroy the "second hand" book market. It occurred to me that many of the books my mother used to buy were used books. An author makes no money on a used book. I know in theory said buyer is supposed to then go buy a new book by that author. I agree that's valid on some level. However, the reality is that might not happen either. In which case the author was nothing but a pimp for the store.
Of course, stories of accidental discovery ... "I found this book on the beach and it changed my life" ...will not really have an equal in the eBook world. But on the flip side, authors will sell more directly. People like my mother will take a chance on an unknown author because it's so damn easy to do it. And why not? It didn't cost any gas to get it, it was only $2.99, and if it sucks you can delete it.The Kindle user sees little downside in buying a book they might have otherwise passed on. So authors will benefit in ways they might not have in traditional paperback, even if we lose some of the paper perks.
It's a weird new world and I guess we have to roll with it. We are not going to stop this snowball from gathering speed so we either get out of the way, or we jump into the icy cluster and hang on until it explodes into something else. It was my mother's reaction to Kindle that convinced me to eBook The Sweet Sixteenth - I wanted to learn the eBook process first hand before I was scrambling to catch up. Because if my mother can abandon paperbacks, anyone can, and everyone will.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Wasting The Day Away
Like many writers, I write every single day. I usually work on something in my current WIP, either editing or adding, but usually something. Today, I did nothing. I did not work on my current WIP, and I did not edit my current shopper. I guess sometimes we all have to step back and take a day off. Thanks to things like blogs and chat forums, we can still write these days even when we don't write.
Sometimes you just need to unplug from everything technology, at least I do. Maybe my age is showing. My niece is 23, and she has not been "unplugged" a single day in the past decade from what I can tell. Some piece of technology has been fused to her hand as long as I can recall... That reminds me of a book by my friend Kari Lee Townsend.
My point is (do I have a point here?) that today was not one of those days I needed to unplug from technology, I just needed to unplug from the intensity of crafting a story. Sometimes my brain needs to get out of character and back to me. I guess sometimes all that head-hopping should lead back to your own head.
So today I did just that. I hopped in my own head for a while, just long enough to remember why I'm a writer. I forget how exhausting it is to be in my own head. Because in your own head the real world comes screaming back. All the insanity that faces us daily on the news can be overwhelming, escaping into the written word is hard work but it's also fun. Which makes it even harder to understand why I wasted the day.
I guess the brain wants what it wants, and today it wanted mindless anti-stimulation. I guess I'll just have to make up for it this weekend.
Sometimes you just need to unplug from everything technology, at least I do. Maybe my age is showing. My niece is 23, and she has not been "unplugged" a single day in the past decade from what I can tell. Some piece of technology has been fused to her hand as long as I can recall... That reminds me of a book by my friend Kari Lee Townsend.
My point is (do I have a point here?) that today was not one of those days I needed to unplug from technology, I just needed to unplug from the intensity of crafting a story. Sometimes my brain needs to get out of character and back to me. I guess sometimes all that head-hopping should lead back to your own head.
So today I did just that. I hopped in my own head for a while, just long enough to remember why I'm a writer. I forget how exhausting it is to be in my own head. Because in your own head the real world comes screaming back. All the insanity that faces us daily on the news can be overwhelming, escaping into the written word is hard work but it's also fun. Which makes it even harder to understand why I wasted the day.
I guess the brain wants what it wants, and today it wanted mindless anti-stimulation. I guess I'll just have to make up for it this weekend.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Everyone can write. Right? Alright.
Writing is a hard thing to do well, we all know that. Some of us were just born with the gift, some of us worked hard to develop it, and some of us have done both. But the one common denominator is hard work. Talent will only get you so far, as is the case with anything you choose to tackle in life. Even the most talented among us have to work hard to craft a novel.
What makes writing unique, is that when you tell people you are a writer, many of them will blurt out how they themselves want to write a book. When I tell people I'm a musician, that I play guitar and sing, they never say "Oh I'm going to write a song and sell it." Why is that?
I guess the reason is that with writing, we all learn it growing up. We don't all learn how to play music or sing. The barrier to entry is far lower with writing because essentially, everyone can write to some extent. Telling stories on the other hand, that is not something everyone can do.
Writing a novel of 60,000 or 80,000 words is far more complex than whim writers want to believe. Of all the "non writer" people I've run into over the years who said "I want to write a book" not a single one of them has done it. A few have tried and quit after about 30,000 words but most never get that far. I used to know a guy who claimed to be a hardcore Sci-Fi writer. He wrote a 120,000 word story, sent it out to two agents, got an unflattering rejection from one, and that was the end of it. I don't know where that writer is today but he's never published anything. I don't even know if he's still writing.
I'm working on my seventh novel length story and that's nothing compared to some writers. Of those seven, only two have ever been shopped to agents. One of those is The Sweet Sixteenth that ended up as my pilot eBook program, the other is being rewritten. The rest of them are junk, practice, good old trunk novels. The point is writing one book is not even enough in most cases. You have to write many before you finally "get it" and rejection is going to come along the way.
Thick skin and determination are just as important as talent in this game. Rejection does suck, no two ways about it. But if you don't get back on the bike, you will never learn to ride. You have to be able to crash, get up, wipe off the blood and/or push your brains back into your skull cavity, and move on. You also might want to leave your teeth on the ground after the first crash, because they will get kicked in again. Just be like a professional hockey player and get your teeth fixed after you retire.
What makes writing unique, is that when you tell people you are a writer, many of them will blurt out how they themselves want to write a book. When I tell people I'm a musician, that I play guitar and sing, they never say "Oh I'm going to write a song and sell it." Why is that?
I guess the reason is that with writing, we all learn it growing up. We don't all learn how to play music or sing. The barrier to entry is far lower with writing because essentially, everyone can write to some extent. Telling stories on the other hand, that is not something everyone can do.
Writing a novel of 60,000 or 80,000 words is far more complex than whim writers want to believe. Of all the "non writer" people I've run into over the years who said "I want to write a book" not a single one of them has done it. A few have tried and quit after about 30,000 words but most never get that far. I used to know a guy who claimed to be a hardcore Sci-Fi writer. He wrote a 120,000 word story, sent it out to two agents, got an unflattering rejection from one, and that was the end of it. I don't know where that writer is today but he's never published anything. I don't even know if he's still writing.
I'm working on my seventh novel length story and that's nothing compared to some writers. Of those seven, only two have ever been shopped to agents. One of those is The Sweet Sixteenth that ended up as my pilot eBook program, the other is being rewritten. The rest of them are junk, practice, good old trunk novels. The point is writing one book is not even enough in most cases. You have to write many before you finally "get it" and rejection is going to come along the way.
Thick skin and determination are just as important as talent in this game. Rejection does suck, no two ways about it. But if you don't get back on the bike, you will never learn to ride. You have to be able to crash, get up, wipe off the blood and/or push your brains back into your skull cavity, and move on. You also might want to leave your teeth on the ground after the first crash, because they will get kicked in again. Just be like a professional hockey player and get your teeth fixed after you retire.
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