Month: April 2018

Being a Better Writer: Keeping Character Variety

Max Being a Better Writer , , , ,

Welcome back readers! If you’re seeing this early early early Monday morning, that means that I succeeded in getting it written on Saturday before my work shift … so that I wouldn’t have to worry about not having written it during my Monday and Tuesday work shifts.

One day I’ll move into that 20% of authors that don’t need a second job. Someday …

But for today, we’re back on track with Topic List 11 and chugging right along with a particularly interesting request topic: keeping characters fresh.

Now, granted, this request came with a bit of an explanation, which I’ll give to you now (and is reflected in the title). Our intrepid seeker of knowledge wasn’t asking about keeping a character constantly “fresh” over the course of the story (that’s another topic for another day) or how much tupperware they’d need to keep them from going stale. No, what they were asking after was another kind of freshness: how to keep their new characters from simply being photocopies of prior ones?

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Being a Better Writer: Subverting Tropes

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Something you’ll often hear when picking up reviews or word-of-mouth for new books that happen to be particularly praiseworthy is that something is “fresh” or “clever.” Maybe that it “does something new with the genre” or that it’s managed to put a “new twist on old ideas.”

Of course, if you’ve hung around authors, particularly a group of young ones, you may have also heard this phrase repeated: Nothing new under the sun. A common enough colloquial, especially if someone new enters a well-established writing group and claims to have written something “new.” Older members will often toss this phrase back at them, sometimes as a dismissal, sometimes as a warning of “Be ready, it may not be as new as you think.”

Notice a disparity here? If there’s “nothing new under the sun” then how do new books get praise such as “new to the genre,” “fresh,” etc, etc? Well, let’s make something clear: Those reviews aren’t lying (well, not outside sometimes well-intentioned misinformation). They’re not misrepresenting something.

Don’t worry, this all ties in to the topic at hand.

See, the crux of it really comes in that last bit I gave from common reviews up in that first paragraph. This idea of a “new twist on old ideas.” Which is why I (and, in my experience, many other authors) don’t quite fully agree with the “nothing new under the sun” sentiment. Because sure, if you strip an idea down to the bare-core, suddenly it sounds like almost any other idea. Boy without parents learns he possesses a rare power and with the aid of a mentor must do battle against evil. Is that Harry Potter? Or is that Star Wars? Or is it any other of hundreds of very different stories out there starring a boy who has a rare power and fights evil. Crud, open up the floodgates there and replace “boy” with “protagonist” and now we have every story under that umbrella as well that has a female protagonist. And suddenly such a blanket statement applies to, well, a good portion of all stories ever written.

Which is why when experienced authors utter the phrase “nothing new under the sun*” there’s always that little asterisk at the end. Because these authors know that it’s a generalist statement used with a large caveat attached. Taking it literally is much like saying that both Boeing and General Dynamics make jet aircraft, therefor both make the same product … when one makes passenger and cargo jet airliners, while the other makes the deadly F-16. Yes, both are jet aircraft … but both are so different from one another you could only that they are the same by boiling the debate down to the most basic of points (such as “This is an aircraft, yes/no,” at which point you’ve lost almost all understanding of the two in the first place).

Okay, I promised this had to do with writing (and the topic at hand), so … how?

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Psst! Over Here!

Max Books! , , , ,

Pssst! You! Hey, you! That’s right, over here! Looking for some good book deals? Sure you are! Well, don’t look around or make it super obvious—I said don’t look around!—but there’s like, a secret sale or something going right now. Limited time only.

Yeah, I don’t know why either. Something about the date. And it probably won’t last because, well, that clock keeps ticking. Time’s moving forward.

Anyway, now you know. The secret sale is live! Pass it along and move along, quick, before someone spots us. Go see what you can find!

Being a Better Writer: When Do You Publish?

Max Being a Better Writer , , , , ,

We’re going to do a shorter one today, folks, so that I can get back to editing (post-edit: It was not that short). Or rather, I’m going to keep it short. So that I can get back to, well, my bit in the topic at hand. Because this is the process I’ve been going through for a few weeks now.

Okay, so let’s just say it outright: How do you know when to publish something? What’s the point where you sit back and say “this is ready?” How do you know when you’ve reached that point?

Well … I’ll be honest, this is one of those answers that’s probably a little different for everyone, where each author is going to have their own “stance” on what being ready to publish actually means, or what “being published actually entails.” For example, for some authors, being “ready to publish” may mean “This story is ready to send to my editors and start the process.” while for others, like myself, it can mean “This story is ready to sell to the public.”

In addition to that, the “when” has a bit of a broad meaning in addition to what can be meant by “publish,” based on the context of that publish. The first one, the “send to the editors” one, is going to have a whole different set of criteria from the second, because, well, after all, what you send to your editors is going to be far different from what you send to the buying public. So in that context “knowing” that a story is ready is going to be different.

So let’s break these down and talk about them separately. Starting with the earlier one: How do you know your story is ready for editors?

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Amazonian Advertising Practices

Max Misc , , , ,

So, for the last month, I’ve been experimenting with Amazons Marketing Services. Or, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, what amounts to paying Amazon in exchange for Amazon running ads for your product based on keywords and the like. So if someone searches for, say, The Expanse on Amazon right now in the books section, Colony comes up, because the two are similar Science-Fiction.

After a month, I’m starting to see a few of the things I’ve been told about AMS confirmed. One of the reasons I’d avoided it until now was because my research into other authors trying it out came to the conclusion that it was basically a way to get advertising for your books … but to in turn make almost no money off of them, if not none. This because of the strange way Amazon runs its ads, and the system by which they do it.

See, how it works is you set a book to be advertised, followed by a per-keyword ad cost and a daily limit to how much you want to spend. So the keyword may be “action adventure.” You set a cost of 25 cents, and then a daily limit (say, a dollar).

Now what happens is that whenever someone searches for books with the keyword “action adventure” Amazon performs a “bid” for the highest paying ads for that keyword. The ones paying the most go up, and then if the viewer clicks them, it pays one cent more than what that bid beat—so, for instance if the 25 cent bid beat out a 22 cent bid, then it would pay Amazon 23 cents—and the viewer looks at the book, and that 23 cents is counted towards the daily limit.

A little convoluted, but not bad, right? Well … there’s a catch. There’s obviously a catch. See, as was pointed out to me long before I ever tried Amazon Ads, and one of the big criticisms leveled against them is that Amazon has more data on who buys what than the Ad service uses. It simply acts off of keywords, rather than Amazon’s own “We know you’ll like this” system. And so you may end up with clicks that lead to nothing at all quite frequently, because the person who search “Science Fiction” reads Foundation and Hyperion, not Colony. Amazon knows this, but they let the clicks go through anyway.

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Nips, Tucks, and Other Site Changes

Max Misc , ,

The attentive among you may have noticed some small changes here and there across the site. Particularly the removal of ads, and the rearranging of the sidebar on the right side there. I’ve moved a few things around to make a few of the more important items (like the search function, we’ve got a five-year archive of writing guides here!) more easy to access.

Everything’s still in it’s infancy, however. A lot of these changes are just minor, quality of life changes designed to make the site a bit more user friendly, easier on the eyes, and distinct. Which … is easier said than done. When I learned how to code a web-page, it was not only basic stuff, but it was back when HTML was new. So not all of it carries over.

But past that, I’m trying to work with the look the site already has. Having my own domain and whatnot does open up a lot of other “looks” and ready-made themes other than this one which I can slap across the site (in fact, this one is legacy support, so if I dumped it, I’m not sure I could get it back) but I’ll be fairly blunt about these other options: even the “clean” ones look cluttered and ugly compared to the current setup.

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Being a Better Writer: Character Matters

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So, last week I was browsing the web (one of my favorite pastimes for finding interesting details and acquiring knowledge) when I came across a very … shall we say, interesting post. It was on a book forum, where someone was, if I recall the context correctly, talking about a specific Sci-Fi book they tried to read. A recent award winner, again if I recall correctly, from one of those snooty ‘literary’ awards. Anyway, they mentioned that they’d tried reading it, but had given up because, as they explained, all the characters fell flat. Or rather, were flat, simply mouthpieces to explain the story’s science. They had no other character or uniqueness other than a name. They were just there as, well, robots, to drive the science forward. Other than that, they were simply flat caricatures. As a result, the reader had given up on the book, because there was no character to revolve around.

Now, this post jumped out at me for two reasons. The first, but not the foremost, was that it lined up with a news article I recall reading a few years ago about in which a major publisher, faced with the falling sales of their Sci-Fi and Fantasy, conducted a nationwide survey of their former readers (no idea how they pulled that off, but they have to have some metric for it) asking why their former readers had abandoned them. The answer? That too many of their books just didn’t have good characters anymore, or worse, had characters that were just ideological mouthpieces for the science/social angle of the book. Without strong, compelling, or real characters, their readers had abandoned them.

The second reason that this post jumped out at me was the response to it. This was on a forum that is … Well, let’s just say they’re the kind of readers that the current publishers want to have in greater number. The response was immediate and, shockingly, angry. We’re talking caps and exclamation marks about how dare this reader put down a book because the characters weren’t good. Because—and understand I’m summarizing a number of posts here—characters aren’t important. They’re just mouthpieces to present the science. You’re not supposed to care about them. Or find them interesting. If you do, that’s a bonus, not a requirement. Blah blah blah, you read the book for the message, not for the characters, who cares if they’re shallow, etc etc etc.

Reading over this led me to this post. Where I’m going to say something flat-out.

That stance? That characters don’t matter? It’s wrong. From start to finish. This isn’t even a matter of opinion. That’s why the survey sprang to mind. That survey said that people do care about characters, that people are invested in how characters act and why. And do you know why?

Because they are! Great characters make stories come to life! They sell stories. Not science or social messages. Those can be pandered anyone in a deadpan monotone and still find their audience of those already subscribed to the idea. But a story? That takes characters.

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Shadow of an Empire Preview

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Shadow of an Empire is a new novel set in the world of Indrim, where steam-industrialization combines with magic to forge an empire that spans a continent. Salitore Amazd is an adjudicator, a legally-approved roving arbitrator of law wandering the Indrim Empire’s Outlands keeping the peace. When a trainload of full of dangerous prisoners bound for the worst prison in the Indrim Empire escapes in his territory and announces an intention to lead the Outlands in a revolution against the rest of the empire, and implicates Salitore as an accomplice, Amazd is forced to join forces with a member of the Imperial Inquisitors to try and clear his name.

Right, I need a better back copy than that, but this is spur-of-the-moment. Anyway, enjoy a free preview of Chapter 1 from the Beta for Shadow of an Empire! Coming this Spring!

As you might guess, everything you’re about to read is owned in its entirety by me, Max Florschutz.

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Shadow, Ads, and Other News

Max Books! , , ,

Hey guys, Max here with a couple of noteworthy news updates!

I’ll get to the first and most exciting one first. Shadow of an Empire is now in Beta! The Beta Readers invites have been sent out, several readers have already responded and received their links to the Master Beta Read document, and things are in motion!

Which, if you’re not a Beta Reader, is still pretty cool. After all, a Beta Read is one step closer to Shadow of an Empire being out. We’ve got the Beta Reads, the copy-edit … and then publication.

Whoa. Yeah, it’s getting close. Which means you can probably start looking for a cover preview popping up here before long.

But you know what? That’s not the only preview you should expect. Why stop there? This Monday, I’ve got both another work shift and a doctor’s appointment (my last one for the knee, huzzah!), which means that Being a Better Writer will be Tuesday, right? But why not give you readers something else in its place?

Something like … a full Chapter 1 excerpt from Shadow of an Empire? Beta, sure, but come on, it’s Chapter 1!

So yeah, look for that this Monday morning in lieu of the normal BaBW post!

Okay, shifting gears a bit, because I do have some other news I want to talk about, this concerning the site itself. So, as of last week, Unusual Things is on its own domain: maxonwriting.com. Three cheers, right?

Well, yes, but the new freedom of having Unusual Things be on its own domain came with some questions. And one of the biggest ones was: Ads.

Ads are a pretty strong revenue source. And when my site went to its own domain, no longer dependent on ad-revenue to stay up … those ads vanished. As of right now, the site is ad-free.

Almost immediately, I pointed out that the idea of putting up some ads to bring some of that former revenue my way was … tempting. But at the same time, the more I thought about it … the more I realized I just really don’t like ads. They’re annoying, rarely topical to the site, and worse, a lot of them can hijack web browsers with adscripts, play music, cover content, etc etc etc. No matter how hard a place like Google or other ad companies works to keep ads from doing it, the number of dirtbags who sneak things past are legion.

So here’s the deal. No ads as long as I can afford to keep the site open. You heard me. No ads. Anything you guys see is going to remain 100%-me generated content. All I have to do is be able to afford to keep the site running on book profits and patreon donations.

But hey, as long as I can keep doing that, the site will remain ad-free! Not a bad prospect!

Let’s see … Shadow of an Empire in Beta. No BaBW post on Monday, but a sneak peek at chapter 1 of Shadow instead. And no more ads. I think that’s it!

See you all Monday, folks!