IWSG: If I were Queen

 (Reminder: this site is now ONLY my blog. If you're looking for my book links or contact options, events, or any other aspects of my writer life, please visit http://dangerouswhenbored.com )

 

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.  The awesome co-hosts for the July 1 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Cathrina Constantine, and Jacqui Murray!

July 1 question - Is there anything you'd like to see changed, added, and/or rearranged about the book publishing industry?

___________________________________

Hmmm…I guess this is one of those "If I were Queen" kinds of questions, where suddenly I have the power to make sweeping changes. The problem is that I don't want to be queen because I don't know if I know how to fix things. What if I made it worse? 

But if I was going to try, I'd take on the giant (silly little guy with a slingshot that I am): Amazon. 

(leave now if you don't want to hear my anti-big-business rant). 

Indie authors RELY on Amazon. When they first came out with Kindle in 2007, it revolutionized the publishing industry, opening up new pathways to publishing and putting real distribution power in the hands of penny ante folks like me. Without the Kindle revolution, most of us wouldn't be able to get our work into the hands of readers. 

But as often happens as businesses grow and become more powerful (I'm looking at you Google)…it's gotten worse and worse (see: enshittification). 

image source

Amazon killed other bookstore chains (remember Borders?) and made it harder for indie bookstores to keep afloat. What had been a pretty sweet deal for authors got sourer and sourer and every year, with new restrictions and re-stacking the deck to make sure the house always wins. KU page read rates keep going down, making it less and less worth it to participate from the author-side. 

Amazon needs our products, but it doesn't treat as partners. To them, we're another avenue to exploit. So, the very thing that once opened up the world to us has shut down other options. And along the way they stopped being a bookstore and became an AI-driven cesspool full of inferior knock-off products that aren't what you thought you were ordering. 

Have you tried even just FINDING something there lately? Since they switched to AI-driven search, it's like asking your 90 year old aunt with dementia where she left her book. Last time I tried to look up one of my books, I had to type in the title, my first and last name, and change the search drop down to "book" and it still offered me three products that weren't my book above the actual search result. One of them wasn't a book at all. 

(and I feel like puking because I know about data centers and water use and what the environmental impact of all this AI is. I've got enough guilt leftover from my AquaNet days, thanks). 

Selling there is like sailing among pirates in an unarmed rowboat. 

So, when I released my first indie work earlier this year, I knew I didn't want to be beholden to Amazon, even though I knew I'd also need to have my work available there. My work is published widely, so that if any one avenue shuts down, there are always others. 

• Bookshop! My affiliate link pays me an extra commission if you buy from there 
• Curios: a new-to-me platform for direct sales
• Bibliobean Books: an indie bookstore (woman-owned) I consign my romance work with 
• Books2Read aggregators: On my website, I link to as many of the places my books are available as possible, trying to be anywhere readers might look for me.  

Amazon, of course, punishes me for this, making it harder to find my work on their site, making it more difficult to change my prices and run specials, and paying me a smaller cut because I won't give them the whole pie. Good thing this isn't how I pay my mortgage.

And it's hard to get readers to do something less convenient like buying direct from me, downloading from Bookfunnel and transferring a file to their favorite reader. 

Amazon did a really great job making shoppers reliant on them, and now they're pressing that advantage. *ssholes.

So, my current policy is to have my work available there, but funnel people away from them whenever I can, and do my own shopping elsewhere whenever possible, even if I have to pay a little more for it. (The Kobo reader is my favorite right now, and their KU equivalent doesn't require that writers give up the right to sell elsewhere, too).  

So, yeah. This is one Amazon I'd like to raze to the ground. I'll stick to the actual river, jungle, and Wonder Woman. They're all better Amazons.  

 

Ideas Stalk Me

(Reminder: this site is now ONLY my blog. If you're looking for my book links or contact options, events, or any other aspects of my writer life, please visit http://dangerouswhenbored.com )

 

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.  The awesome co-hosts for the June 3 posting of the IWSG are Victoria Marie Lees, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, and C. Lee McKenzie!

June 3 question - Do most of your story ideas come from one place (the news, dreams, etc.) or do they hit from all over the place?

___________________________________

Story ideas seem to stalk me. They're EVERYWHERE. Some of them just open up like trap doors and I fall in. Others snatch at my ankles and trip me up when I'm trying to go to the grocery store. A few are responses to things I've seen or read or heard.  The weirder ones just sort of drift in like a cloud and rain on me for a moment. Every idea I have calls up her cousins and invites them to the party, too. Sooooo many ideas. 

image source

 The difficulty for me has never been coming up with ideas, but more in the choosing one and staying focused on it long enough to see it to fruition. I think that's part of why it took me so long to "get serious" about my writing life and start finishing things and ushering them down the whole road into publication. 

These days, I'm getting better at assessing quickly which ideas are "good" in the sense of having enough meat on their bones to make a whole story out of and which ones are more like a shower thought that might make a semi-clever social media post. The ones that are going to make it into short stories or books are persistent. They poke me more than once. That's part of how I know. 

How about you?  

A to Z: Going Indie: Z is for Zag

 Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

 

I always intended to be a writer. My definition of what that means has shifted many times across my life so far. 

As a child, I was pretty sure writers were some kind of zany hermits. The kind of people that Raold Dahl might've made up. They somehow still had money to live in interesting places and just create, though.  

Coming up in academia, I really thought there was one right way to do it, and that involved traditional publishing through established routes, winning awards and building acclaim, and writing literary achievement kinds of things that would earn me gold stars from my teachers. 

Looking back now, that seems kind of silly. Literary fiction is only ONE of the kinds of things I read (I'm a omnnivore when it comes to books)…and if you read a lot of it, there's a sameness to it after a while that gets boring. And the stuff that is innovative is often smug, pretentious, and precious about it. Where's the fun? Where's the joy? Where's the creativity? 

So, each of these zags in my path led me to where I am now, a hybrid author (traditionally and indie published) who writes in several different genres, living her best life and having a great time. 

Thanks for coming on this A to Z ride with me. I hope you found something interesting, entertaining, or educational in all these posts and I wish you the best of luck as you zig and zag on your path to whatever it is that you want most.  

A to Z: Going Indie: Y is for YOLO!

 Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

 If you read my post yesterday, you already know that I just turned 55. This isn't me complaining. It's a privilege to have made it this far and I'm hopeful of having many more years yet to enjoy. But, it also means that I've crossed a sort of meridian in my life and there's for sure fewer years left than I have already lived. 

So, it's time to DO IT. Whatever it is that you've been wanting to do and haven't done. For me: that's making a go of self-publishing, taking my writing life firmly into my hands and making all the decisions, accepting all the blame and any glory that might come from it. To BE A WRITER. 

Lucy had the right of it: 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: X is for Xanthic

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Xanthic? I know…but X is hard! If this word was new to you (like it was to me), Merriam Webster tells us that it means: 

So, I'm thinking "yellow" like "you yellow bellied coward!" but I actually have no idea if this word works for the more metaphorical meaning of yellow. But, I'm going with it. 

So, what am I afraid of when it comes to going indie? 

I have two main fears: financial ruin, and that it'll take the fun out of it. 

In terms of financial ruin, I've taken a few steps to protect myself: 

• I waited until the "right" moment in my life, when I had some dollars to spare without sinking the Bryant Family ship
• I didn't invest in all of it all at once, but did a little at a time, spreading it out across months and even years.
• I incorporated as an LLC, because who knows what unknown water lie ahead, and I'd like my family's assets to be safe if I really screw something up and end up in legal or tax trouble of some sort.
• I took some business training and tax advice 

In terms of "taking the fun out of it," I'm still finding out, I think. It has added new types of work to my life (see my post on D is for Decisions for more on that), so I have to be careful to keep some sort of balance and not burn myself out. 

But, I'm not especially afraid of hard work. In fact, it's a joy to focus my efforts on something that is so personally important to me instead of just day job drudgery or dirty dishes!

There's a lot of it I REALLY enjoy, too! I'm giddy sometimes with all the little delights that have been a part of this process: new things I've learned, new connections I've made, that feeling of "I made this!", positive reception of my work, etc. 

So maybe I'm not really all that metaphorically xanthic after all (if that's even a thing). 

____________________________________________

By the way, today's the day! Release day! Book birthday on my actual birthday! (I'm 55 today!)

So, if you've been interested at all by Not Too Late as I've nattered on about it in these posts, do a girl a solid and go buy a copy today! It's available through Ingram, so you can order it at your favorite bookstore, request it at your library, or buy it online at a lot of different venues. 

 

 

 

A to Z: Going Indie: W is for Writing

 

 

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

Writing is the hardest thing to do while indie publishing, at least for me so far. Every day there are so many business/publishing details to handle, that it's hard to get a good long writing session in. 

Sometimes that's frustrating, but I'm only four months into my adventure, so I'm trusting that over the long haul, some of the business part of things will get easier and I won't have to research every step any more because I'll be able to just do again what I did last time. Muscle memory. 

Here in April, my current ploy to find more time for the creative writing bit is to get up earlier. I'll be 55 this year, so even on a day when my day doesn't require that I wake early, I wake early. Usually 6:30-7:00, when my day-job workday doesn't usually start until 8:30 or 9:00. 

Since my kiddo is now old enough to get themself up and going for their day, my responsibilities are small during that time: dressing, grooming, eating, caffeinating, medicating, doing the dogs' morning routine. I'm a low fuss woman--no makeup, no fancy hair preparation, simple clothes, so the "taking care of me" bit doesn't take me very long. My husband is here, too, so sometimes he takes care of some of the dogs or helps out by making me a breakfast sandwich while he's making his now. 

I don't open my email or go to my to-do list during this morning time, but just write something. This month, that's been a lot of blog posts and interviews rather than time on the work-in-progress novel, but that's still writing and it feels good! Still, I'm looking forward to the day when I can retire, and not give so many hours to the day job. I've got better uses for those hours!

A to Z: Going Indie: V is for Vellum

 

Welcome to Blogging A to Z! My theme this year is Going Indie. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to check out the other participating blogs. 

If you're old like me, you probably saw "Vellum" and thought about that thin, translucent paper you used for school projects back in the day. 

But in this case, I'm talking about software. In particular, software for book layout. (Fair warning: Vellum is a Mac-only software, so you'll have to find another tool is you're a PC user). 

Book layout is something I was kind of stressed about when I thought about Going Indie. It's important to get right, and I assumed it would be difficult. After all, most software I've used related to graphic arts has been complicated and unintuitive (for me at least).  

But Vellum? It was a breeze. 

Now, I'm not trying to be fancy yet. Maybe in the future I'll learn to do things like add custom art as section dividers and all of that. I'm just using the basic settings and options the book itself provides, but it really was as easy as importing my Word file, then playing around with menus until I found a look I liked. 

A few style options from Vellum

Then I went through the document, making sure the import hadn't screwed anything up, like chapter divisions or spacing, fixing the odd little things I found. 

For Acid Reign, I began each chapter with song lyrics from an imaginary song by the imaginary band I created for Abby, so I had to decide how that should look. It took a little finagling, but I settled on putting the lyrics in italics and right justified, with the song attribution in regular text, then adding a little three-star border to indicate where the actual chapter starts. That was as complicated as my layout for these three books got, and it only took me an hour or so to figure out then set up for each chapter. 

 

Page 1 of Acid Reign

Then I use the "Generate" button to create whatever kinds of files I need (in this case, .epub for ebooks and .pdf for print), then uploaded those to my printer/distributor (I went with Ingram for both, then uploaded the ebooks separately to Amazon so I could claim them for ACX and audiobook production). Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom! It was so easy. 

The paper books and ebooks both seem to be working well. It all looks right on the page, indistinguishable really from books that came from big publishers with their our layout specialists. I was pleased that I could manage this bit myself and not have to hire the work.