Vincent Zandri's Blog - Posts Tagged "david-h-fears"
Sunday Guest Post: Author David H. Fears Talks Marketing vs. Writing
The following blog is now appearing at The Vincent Zandri Vox: http://vincentzandri.blogspot.com/201...
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David H. Fears is a writer. A short story writer, a novelist, an essayist, and all around lover and master of the craft. More than that, he is respectful of the craft and as his guest post will attest, alarmed at how many indie authors, never mind me, are losing track of what's important in the writing game. Namely, the writing. Have we all become so obsessed with checking on our Amazon ranking, hour after hour after hour, that we've begun to compromise what should be of paramount importance to us? Again, the writing.
As David will point out, a whole lot of our efforts nowadays are more about who can make the most racket on Facebook, Kindleboards, Twitter, Myspace, and God knows where else, when it should be the writing that's doing the speaking for us. And when all this self-promotion doesn't result in sales, we drop our prices to $.99 in hopes that we will shoot to the top of the charts.
But does dropping your prices for a time de-value your work?
I believe that it doesn't, so long as it's a temporary measure designed to increase your audience. I also believe that an author should have a variety of books offered up at a variety of prices. In my case, I always have something available at $.99, while my other books are usually priced around $2.99, and some even at $4.99 and $5.99.
In the end, the pricing of E-Books remains an inexact science. But what is apparent for many writers like Fears and myself, is that, if we begin to shift from being full-time writers to full-time ego-obsessed marketers, we will destroy not only our talents, but we will demolish our careers as we know them.
That said, never fear, for David H. Fears is here:
YOU’VE GOT TO (fill in the blanks _________________________) TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
My mother taught me not to brag. That it was low class, boorish, etc. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back when the world was young and the Internet was still the Defense Department’s ARPANET, I used to buy and devour books on the writing craft. I tried to get just one good tip out of every book, and usually I found at least one. You see, I had several decades of stories in me that were clamoring to get out, but mastering the craft (okay, near-mastering) was like trying to have an erotic date with a reluctant bulldog. So I immersed, parsed, filtered, microscoped, and fumbled my way to many short stories written and submitted, because YOU’VE GOT TO BE PUBLISHED, as they would say over and over.
My first winner got published on the outside of a coffee can, with the balance of the story inside. It was a real grind, that story! I once was sent $100 for a story by some obscure Southern magazine no one outside of Tulsa has ever heard of. I hung around writing sites online where every ego bigger than a June bug was pissing in the wind to get published in obscure journals in such popular places as Lichtenstein. All in all I penned more than 100 short stories, and “critted” many times more. I became a college writing instructor for a couple of years just to learn all 29 rules for commas. All through this period what stuck with me was, “YOU’VE GOT TO WRITE A MILLION WORDS BEFORE YOU CAN WRITE ANYTHING WORTHWHILE.”
Turn the clock forward a decade, after four mystery novels, ebooks, two short story collections, one in print, and four historical print reference books of about 1,200 pages each snapped up by every true Mark Twain fanatic from Portland, Oregon to Piscataway, Joizey—not to mention some humble educational institutions like Harvard, Yale (boolah!), Cornell, Princeton, and some bigtime libraries like the Newberry in Chicago, SF Public, Detroit Public, Nevada Historical, yada yada—I figure I’m at about two million words. Still when I read a few of my stories I wrote a decade ago, before a million words, they seem cleaner, fresher, more appealing. I don’t want to change a thing with many of them. I don’t want my writing to get old—hell, I don’t want to get old, which I tell the wife is why I still drive like I’m 18.
All of this is prologue (readers hate prologues, but don’t worry, no novel will follow this), to the current day—today’s always in-flux, chaotic publication and marketing of ebooks, trade books, blogs, twitters, Facebook pages, and on and on. Today it’s YOU’VE GOT TO MARKET TO BE SUCCESSFUL. Of course this dictum overlooks that success, like sexual attraction, is highly subjective, if intoxicating. There’s no one thing that usually brings success, which answers for their next dictum YOU’VE GOT TO DO THEM ALL TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
When I look at the man in the mirror, I ask him if he is successful, and I always trust his answer. I don’t look for validation in any other voice or set of voices. Whether my Mike Angel hardboiled detective novels, sprinkled with romance, seduction, sarcastic humor and complex inside-out plots ever sell a million copies or not, that mirror guy won’t keep checking his sales numbers in order to tell me if I’m successful. He knows that if a man’s blessed, he’s successful. No one will likely ever have on his tombstone, “He sold 100,000 ebooks after lowering his price to 99 cents,” or “When she died she was # 12 in the Amazon Romance category.”
So, What about this MARKETING MANIA and the RACE TO THE BOTTOM OF PRICE? No, one doesn’t have to market, if you mean “shameless self-promotion,” endless posting of links to Amazon Kindle for your books, twitter and flitter and glitter to gain “followers” like lemmings after a Cinnabon, or pontificating on some blog to show you’re not an idiot (but ironically proving same). Momma taught me a better way. Bragging makes you self-conscious and weak. Confidence—true confidence never needs to brag. A great cover only means a great cover and a few fools fooled if you have a poor novel.
Writing time doesn’t have to swallow your day, although when in heat it’s best to go with the flow. Neither should “marketing” (which really is just bragging on your own sweet self) be the focus of your life.
Here’s my simple, short & sweet advice: Write a novel (they want novels; unfortunately because a great short story is harder to write); make it the best you can make it, which should include other pairs of “test” eyes, reading it aloud, and every other trick you can grab that works. Revise, revise, revise. That means, in Latin, “re-seeing, or seeing again.” Editing is just picking all the nits off. TIME is important in revision—your story won’t look the same a week, month, year later, so include some gestation time. Your mileage may vary but a novel takes at least a year to do—a good one. Great ones maybe much longer (Huckleberry Finn took Sam 9 years to write).
After watching all these indie writers go nuts on message boards, FB pages, blogs, twitters—you know the angles, dangles of freebies, and marketing finagles I mean—I got the fan-tods trying to keep up. So one day I thought—this is moronic. If I’m a marketing whiz I might steer hundreds or even thousands to my books—but if they don’t catch on it’s only short term gains. On the other hand, If I put the book in say 100 hands though it take a year or two to do so, if my book is popular with the unwashed masses, they’ll market FOR ME. I might even sell a few to those washed masses as well.
Now & then I read of some indie writer who sells hundreds or thousands without ANY marketing. I see writers jumping all over themselves because of the whispering shifting sands of their Amazon “rating numbers.” I enjoy poking these folks, and it’s resulted in a few FB page bannings. Once I posted, “Oh, you mean, LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I’M HOT STUFF AND THEY REALLY, REALLY LIKE ME!”—apologies to that flying nun dame who has osteo so bad all she can do these days is appear in commercials with her dog. I also see damned good writers with damned good books putting them down at 99c, which is what I call DEVALUING the product. In Vegas, it’s called “playing the come line” in craps, which is just what these writers are shooting. Just because some Joe Blow gets wildly popular and sells a dumpload of ebooks at 99c (where you have to sell SIX to earn the same amount as ONE for $2.99, thanks to Amazon’s perverse royalty break), doesn’t mean YOU should jump off the bridge (remember Momma saying that? She was right).
My kind of marketing is simply just being me on my limited Facebook or message board time. My humor is reactive humor. I can’t do stand up. I can react to the dumb (excuse me, erudite) musings of those who market first last 24/7 in their underwear on major holidays. So thanks Mom—I will never make ANY claim about the quality of my writing, because I’m a firm believer in:
YOU’VE GOT TO BE YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
David H Fears
Psst! You there! Wanna buy a great gumshoe novel and series? hahahahah.
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
Concrete Pearl
___________________________________
David H. Fears is a writer. A short story writer, a novelist, an essayist, and all around lover and master of the craft. More than that, he is respectful of the craft and as his guest post will attest, alarmed at how many indie authors, never mind me, are losing track of what's important in the writing game. Namely, the writing. Have we all become so obsessed with checking on our Amazon ranking, hour after hour after hour, that we've begun to compromise what should be of paramount importance to us? Again, the writing.
As David will point out, a whole lot of our efforts nowadays are more about who can make the most racket on Facebook, Kindleboards, Twitter, Myspace, and God knows where else, when it should be the writing that's doing the speaking for us. And when all this self-promotion doesn't result in sales, we drop our prices to $.99 in hopes that we will shoot to the top of the charts.
But does dropping your prices for a time de-value your work?
I believe that it doesn't, so long as it's a temporary measure designed to increase your audience. I also believe that an author should have a variety of books offered up at a variety of prices. In my case, I always have something available at $.99, while my other books are usually priced around $2.99, and some even at $4.99 and $5.99.
In the end, the pricing of E-Books remains an inexact science. But what is apparent for many writers like Fears and myself, is that, if we begin to shift from being full-time writers to full-time ego-obsessed marketers, we will destroy not only our talents, but we will demolish our careers as we know them.
That said, never fear, for David H. Fears is here:
YOU’VE GOT TO (fill in the blanks _________________________) TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
My mother taught me not to brag. That it was low class, boorish, etc. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back when the world was young and the Internet was still the Defense Department’s ARPANET, I used to buy and devour books on the writing craft. I tried to get just one good tip out of every book, and usually I found at least one. You see, I had several decades of stories in me that were clamoring to get out, but mastering the craft (okay, near-mastering) was like trying to have an erotic date with a reluctant bulldog. So I immersed, parsed, filtered, microscoped, and fumbled my way to many short stories written and submitted, because YOU’VE GOT TO BE PUBLISHED, as they would say over and over.
My first winner got published on the outside of a coffee can, with the balance of the story inside. It was a real grind, that story! I once was sent $100 for a story by some obscure Southern magazine no one outside of Tulsa has ever heard of. I hung around writing sites online where every ego bigger than a June bug was pissing in the wind to get published in obscure journals in such popular places as Lichtenstein. All in all I penned more than 100 short stories, and “critted” many times more. I became a college writing instructor for a couple of years just to learn all 29 rules for commas. All through this period what stuck with me was, “YOU’VE GOT TO WRITE A MILLION WORDS BEFORE YOU CAN WRITE ANYTHING WORTHWHILE.”
Turn the clock forward a decade, after four mystery novels, ebooks, two short story collections, one in print, and four historical print reference books of about 1,200 pages each snapped up by every true Mark Twain fanatic from Portland, Oregon to Piscataway, Joizey—not to mention some humble educational institutions like Harvard, Yale (boolah!), Cornell, Princeton, and some bigtime libraries like the Newberry in Chicago, SF Public, Detroit Public, Nevada Historical, yada yada—I figure I’m at about two million words. Still when I read a few of my stories I wrote a decade ago, before a million words, they seem cleaner, fresher, more appealing. I don’t want to change a thing with many of them. I don’t want my writing to get old—hell, I don’t want to get old, which I tell the wife is why I still drive like I’m 18.
All of this is prologue (readers hate prologues, but don’t worry, no novel will follow this), to the current day—today’s always in-flux, chaotic publication and marketing of ebooks, trade books, blogs, twitters, Facebook pages, and on and on. Today it’s YOU’VE GOT TO MARKET TO BE SUCCESSFUL. Of course this dictum overlooks that success, like sexual attraction, is highly subjective, if intoxicating. There’s no one thing that usually brings success, which answers for their next dictum YOU’VE GOT TO DO THEM ALL TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
When I look at the man in the mirror, I ask him if he is successful, and I always trust his answer. I don’t look for validation in any other voice or set of voices. Whether my Mike Angel hardboiled detective novels, sprinkled with romance, seduction, sarcastic humor and complex inside-out plots ever sell a million copies or not, that mirror guy won’t keep checking his sales numbers in order to tell me if I’m successful. He knows that if a man’s blessed, he’s successful. No one will likely ever have on his tombstone, “He sold 100,000 ebooks after lowering his price to 99 cents,” or “When she died she was # 12 in the Amazon Romance category.”
So, What about this MARKETING MANIA and the RACE TO THE BOTTOM OF PRICE? No, one doesn’t have to market, if you mean “shameless self-promotion,” endless posting of links to Amazon Kindle for your books, twitter and flitter and glitter to gain “followers” like lemmings after a Cinnabon, or pontificating on some blog to show you’re not an idiot (but ironically proving same). Momma taught me a better way. Bragging makes you self-conscious and weak. Confidence—true confidence never needs to brag. A great cover only means a great cover and a few fools fooled if you have a poor novel.
Writing time doesn’t have to swallow your day, although when in heat it’s best to go with the flow. Neither should “marketing” (which really is just bragging on your own sweet self) be the focus of your life.
Here’s my simple, short & sweet advice: Write a novel (they want novels; unfortunately because a great short story is harder to write); make it the best you can make it, which should include other pairs of “test” eyes, reading it aloud, and every other trick you can grab that works. Revise, revise, revise. That means, in Latin, “re-seeing, or seeing again.” Editing is just picking all the nits off. TIME is important in revision—your story won’t look the same a week, month, year later, so include some gestation time. Your mileage may vary but a novel takes at least a year to do—a good one. Great ones maybe much longer (Huckleberry Finn took Sam 9 years to write).
After watching all these indie writers go nuts on message boards, FB pages, blogs, twitters—you know the angles, dangles of freebies, and marketing finagles I mean—I got the fan-tods trying to keep up. So one day I thought—this is moronic. If I’m a marketing whiz I might steer hundreds or even thousands to my books—but if they don’t catch on it’s only short term gains. On the other hand, If I put the book in say 100 hands though it take a year or two to do so, if my book is popular with the unwashed masses, they’ll market FOR ME. I might even sell a few to those washed masses as well.
Now & then I read of some indie writer who sells hundreds or thousands without ANY marketing. I see writers jumping all over themselves because of the whispering shifting sands of their Amazon “rating numbers.” I enjoy poking these folks, and it’s resulted in a few FB page bannings. Once I posted, “Oh, you mean, LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I’M HOT STUFF AND THEY REALLY, REALLY LIKE ME!”—apologies to that flying nun dame who has osteo so bad all she can do these days is appear in commercials with her dog. I also see damned good writers with damned good books putting them down at 99c, which is what I call DEVALUING the product. In Vegas, it’s called “playing the come line” in craps, which is just what these writers are shooting. Just because some Joe Blow gets wildly popular and sells a dumpload of ebooks at 99c (where you have to sell SIX to earn the same amount as ONE for $2.99, thanks to Amazon’s perverse royalty break), doesn’t mean YOU should jump off the bridge (remember Momma saying that? She was right).
My kind of marketing is simply just being me on my limited Facebook or message board time. My humor is reactive humor. I can’t do stand up. I can react to the dumb (excuse me, erudite) musings of those who market first last 24/7 in their underwear on major holidays. So thanks Mom—I will never make ANY claim about the quality of my writing, because I’m a firm believer in:
YOU’VE GOT TO BE YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.
David H Fears
Psst! You there! Wanna buy a great gumshoe novel and series? hahahahah.
WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
Concrete Pearl
