Viral Catalysts, Passive Discoverability, Nothing But a Crock of Shit.

"I don't like that guy, Davey. He's not telling us what we want to hear."

Louis Shalako

When Smashwords founder Mark Coker stands up in front of yet another convention packed with wannabes and speaks about viral catalysts, what is he really talking about?

What does he want?

What is he telling you to do?

What he wants is for you to spend $500.00 on a book cover. What he wants is for you to spend $2000.00 on a ‘professional’ editor. What he wants is for you to spend $425.00 on a Kirkus five-star review. What he wants is for you to do the million-blog tour.

He wants to see enthusiasm. The more mindless that enthusiasm, the better.

Enthusiasm is the opposite of critical thinking.

He wants you to put everything you got into it. The odds of you becoming a bestseller are miniscule. 

Your costs are not his costs—but he gets a dime for every book you sell through his platform.

He cheerfully admits that Smashwords and other digital, do-it-yourself vanity publishing platforms have enabled millions of ‘horrible’ books to enter the marketplace. And that’s okay with him.

I don’t even really care either. Your books aren’t going anywhere. You’re the only one that doesn’t see it.

While ninety-nine percent of book buyers might go away satisfied with their purchase, it’s pretty obvious ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of Smashwords authors will eventually go away disappointed too, and I reckon they’ll be walking a bit funny when they do.

It’s a very exploitive business model, and it’s not too hard to predict that at some point in the future, there will be a reaction. There’s going to be some pushback.

This is just the thin end of the wedge.

All the optimism, all the talk of ‘control’ in digital publishing is a crock of shit.

In a previous blog post, I noted that all of my titles appeared on txtr, while there were quite a few missing on OverDrive. I contacted SW staff. Marcus V reshipped all of those titles and they appeared back on the OverDrive website. A mere matter of weeks later, I could not help but note that two-thirds of my titles were unaccountably missing from txtr.

How in the hell did that happen, Mister Coker? When SW staff asked me to provide links to the missing titles I asked them how often I could reasonably be expected to do that. The lady refused to answer the question. I’ll be damned if I can go back once a week to every stinking distribution channel, check to see what books have mysteriously gone missing, and spend a half hour for each pen-name, each platform, and provide SW with those links on the off chance that the titles won’t just disappear again within a week.

What that means is that we are now on our own.

What is professional editing?

Professional editing is when you pay someone two bucks a page and they go through your book, mark it up with red ink and send it back to you. The most substantive editing is content editing. This is also the most expensive editing.

I’m not denying that most writers need and use editors.

Unfortunately my skills are such that finding an editor that is actually better than me is virtually impossible. After twenty years on an Ontario Disability Support Program pension, there is just no way that I can afford thirty-five bucks, or fifty bucks, or a hundred bucks for a book cover. I have a hundred and fourteen titles and five pen names.

I don't have any money.

Mr. Coker is essentially telling me that I write too fast. He’s telling me to slow down. He’s saying he’s not going to make any money off me if I don’t sink more money, a lot more money, into the product displayed in his store.

At fifty bucks a cover, that would be $5,700.00 in covers alone.

It took five years to make my first thousand dollars from this industry. With a bit of luck, the way things are going, I will be very fortunate to make $1,000.00 this year. It is true the bulk of that will come from Smashwords, as passive discoverability, (remember all those viral catalysts?) absolutely does not work on certain other platforms. This is especially true of Amazon, who play all kinds of dirty little tricks to get exclusivity, who are constantly price-matching, and quite frankly Amazon is the biggest crock of shit in this entire marketplace.

At least they have the grace to keep their mouth shut.

There are an estimated thirty million books listed on Amazon, the vast bulk of them either unremarkable or downright horrible. No matter how good (or bad) a book might be, it’s not going to be passively discovered there and everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it and that’s why they sign up for Kindle Select, that’s why they blog and spam, that’s why they pay for reviews and that’s why they’re always clubbing together and giving each other as many five-star reviews as they can generate. That’s why they load up the front of their books with crock of shit blurbs, written by crock of shit folks who haven’t even read the crock of shit book…fifty five star reviews written by their friends and relatives before the book ever comes out. 

They make a science of lying to and misleading prospective readers.

There is nothing fair or even reasonable about this industry. Bad books end up on the New York Times list all the time. I’ve read many of them.

The editing for content is shit in some of those books. I’m talking authors like Robert Ludlum, Jack Higgins and Clive Cussler. Some of that editing for content is shockingly bad, and in the case of Cussler, the dialogue stinks much of the time. If Dirk Pitt ties a rope on his ass and plunges into one more God-damned underground river while Al Giordino stands there with a thumb up his ass telling all who will listen that Dirk is the bravest and luckiest and smartest and sexiest man alive, I think I am going to puke.

My books meet or exceed all industry standards in terms of editing and proofreading. One of the reasons for that is because this industry is a cash cow that has never been seriously challenged in the past. It’s also not very good sometimes.

The other thing is that I have the skill, a skill acquired over thirty-one years, and I take the time. This is no guarantee of success, in fact the opposite seems to be true.

I am quite frankly shocked by the number of people who can’t spell, can’t write, or simply can’t be bothered to turn on grammar check. They spend four or five grand on some shit book that is supposed to make them some money. They set the price at $0.99 on Amazon, where it is going to take a hell of a long time, at a royalty of $0.35 per copy, to cover your costs. They still think they have a right to succeed as authors. Why, just look at all the money those bourgeois crocks of shit have spent on their books. For every thousand you spend on your book, you will have to sell two thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven copies just to make the costs back. How many people on Amazon or any other platform do you think sell anywhere near three thousand books? How long do you think it takes for them to do that?

They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t have certain expectations—expectations that they feel are reasonable. If that isn’t a sense of entitlement, I would sure like to know what is. The fact that you spent money on it doesn’t make it a good book, and it doesn’t make you a good writer. It is pure vanity much of the time.

The sooner you get out of the business, the better it will be for you, and quite frankly, the better it will be for readers, and the rest of us who genuinely must be writers, which, under some circumstances, is a fate worse than death.

Trust me on that one.

I'm in a position to know, which is more than can be said for the professional cheerleaders.

END

Still struggling.

Months later, I’m still struggling with depression. In this post, I talked about how depression is like night and day.

What happened? Winter is very hard for me. It’s dark, it’s cold, the days are short and the nights are long. There’s not much to do. I don’t go cycling, swimming, or walking in the woods.

All I do is to work, and at one time that work gave me hope for the future.

Then after seven months of crap, where I struggled with depression every stinking day, spring was dark, wet, cold, miserable, and it went on forever.

This has been the crappiest summer on record in recent years in terms of cold, wet, dark, windy and cloudy conditions…

Some little thing triggers depression, it doesn’t even have to be much. I think I was at a low ebb anyway, since my dad and my grandmother died last fall. Grief has its own logic.

Thinking about my father always brings sadness. My grandmother was over a hundred years old, perhaps that is the difference. She wanted to die—ever since my grandfather died, she prayed for God to take her. For her, death came as blessed relief.

Depression is a physical illness, with physical symptoms.

In spite of that depression, I wrote another novel, my eleventh. That novel has been submitted to a major publisher. The work is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes. Yet there are times when I don’t want to come home.

I have to go home, otherwise I don’t eat and have nowhere to sleep. The thought of going home, working on a book or story, one that is not going to change or even improve my life, is tough sometimes. And yet it’s all I have. It’s all I fucking have.

I have some thoughts on the subject of book submissions. The odds of that novel being accepted are very slim—about one chance in ten or twenty thousand. It will take eight or nine months to get a rejection slip, and the number of major publishers who do not require an agent is small. It’s a short list. It could take years at that rate to go through all of them, and the odds don’t improve in any way.

Smaller publishers have fewer production slots to begin with. They tend to be more conservative, they tend to take fewer chances with the corporate wallet on new, unknown and untested authors.

My books are always just a little bit different. They’re looking for the next Harry Potter, and I don’t write that sort of thing.

And when all else fails, the specter of do-it-yourself vanity self-publishing looms before me.

You know what I’m talking about: Amazon, Smashwords, Nook’s Pub-It, Createspace, etc.

It is clearly vanity publishing—for to publish in vain is what it is for most of us. Some of us don’t have much ego left. It’s all been smashed out of us.

I get to stand on a big cliff and pitch my book into the black hole that is the fate of most self-published authors. I get to read enthusiastic blog posts by newbie authors, who are brimming with confidence and have no idea of what they are talking about, and then there are the blog posts by successful authors, brimming with confidence and who have no idea of what they are talking about.

I’m sick of it all. Unfortunately, I’ve spent thirty years leading up to this writing, this ability to write well.

It seems like a terrible waste of time.

I have never considered what else I might do.

That was clearly an oversight, but nothing else really interests me. I’m fifty-four years old, after all.

See, here’s one of my problems: book cover images. It might cost as little as $35.00 for a pro marketing image, an image that will be virtually indistinguishable from ten thousand other marketing images in a given genre. Good covers help to sell bad books. We all know that.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on a provincial disability pension—one that is thirty-five percent below the poverty line, for the last sixteen years. I’ve lived in pain, poverty and deprivation for over twenty years. I can’t afford twenty or thirty marketing images, all of which would have to be paid for by subsequent books sales. I would still have to go without food, or make some sacrifice to come up with the money in the first place. I’m already lining up at food banks three or four times a month. I would like to know where is the slack in my budget, where I could cut something out and get that money in a reasonable time-frame.

A better solution would have been to use my Smashwords royalties, along with a GST cheque and a Trillium Benefit cheque, and buy a $500.00 computer, one that has a minimum of Pentium IV, so that it is capable of running Adobe CS-6. I would have to go through the learning curve, and then I could create my own covers.

Kick-Starter and other crowd-funding sources would be deeply misunderstood by the Ontario Disability Support Program, and so it’s unsuited to my needs. They would consider it ‘income,’ even though I might not have access to the funds and the funds would of course be dedicated to those marketing images, (a legitimate business expense if almost any other person in the whole wide world were to do it.) I can’t do it on the sly, as the world is full of rats, and I have been subjected to trolling in some small degree in the past. It’s not worth losing my pension over it, and then having to fight the ODSP for the next two or three years while they wriggle, squirm, and force me to prove my innocence—a perversion of justice in anyone’s book.

Unfortunately, Smashwords decided to withhold 30 % of my earnings in taxes. This is a bit odd as they cheerfully admit to having my ITIN, (U.S. tax number) on file. So no new computer for me.

It took me four fucking years to earn that computer. Unfortunately, Smashwords knew better.

The neat thing about depression is when it flips over into anger mode. When I think of all the crap people keep bottled up inside, out of politeness, or not wanting to draw negative attention to themselves, for surely few people will understand, (or admit to understanding,) it’s no wonder people go postal sometimes.

They can’t deal with it.

They keep it inside just a little too long, maybe.

When that happens, all bets are off.

Here I am looking at another long winter without much to do except…fucking write, in the rather forlorn and unrealistic hope that it will, eventually, help to change my life. And with every year that goes by, my time on this Earth gets shorter, and shorter, and more precious and valuable with every passing day. I despise wasting my precious time. I fucking loathe wasting my time, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m also a bit tired of being alone all the time.

Surely I deserve so much better than this.

***

All my books and stories are currently free from iTunes and other fine online bookstores.

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/artist/louis-bertrand-shalako/id412091968?mt=11