Month: February 2014

Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators

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This article by Megan McArdle originally appeared on The Atlantic on 2/12/14.

The psychological origins of waiting (… and waiting, and waiting) to work

Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook messages to schoolmates I haven’t seen in at least a decade, invented a delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something that someone would actually want to read.

Lots of people procrastinate, of course, but for writers it is a peculiarly common occupational hazard. One book editor I talked to fondly reminisced about the first book she was assigned to work on, back in the late 1990s. It had gone under contract in 1972.

I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. “Well,” he said, “first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That’s when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I’m really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write.”

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Atlantic.

 

What You Love Is Where Your Writing Platform Lives

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This post by Christina Katz originally appeared on her The Prosperous Writer site on 2/14/14.

Do what you love and write what you love — sounds like a pretty good plan, right?

But what if I also told you that doing what you love and writing what you love leads to growing a platform you love?

Even better news!

But wait, here comes the punchline.

The challenge is that precisely what a writer loves is almost never apparent…unless the writer has already done a lot of writing.

In fact, I’d say 99.9% of writers I have worked with personally have to write their way to a successful platform.

Rare is the writer who can accurately predict what her platform is going to look like ahead of time without some writing to predict it.

 

Click here to view the full post on The Prosperous Writer.

 

Ask Questions to Find Your Story

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This post by C.S. Lakin originally appeared as a guest post on the blog of Elizabeth Spann Craig on 2/17/14.

I ask a lot of questions in my line of work as a professional manuscript critiquer and copyeditor. Sure, I also give a lot of suggestions and fix badly constructed sentences. But it’s the questions that get to the heart of the story. Asking authors questions helps them get thinking about what they’re writing and why.

So much important information seems to be missing in so many novels—especially first novels by aspiring authors. Novel writing is tricky; there are countless essential components that all need to mesh cohesively. To me, the key to reaching that goal is to ask a lot of questions.

 

Questions Create Story

Starting a novel is asking a question. What if . . .? What would someone do if . . .? What if the world was like this and this happened . . .? Then those initial questions lead to more questions, which shape and bring life to characters and story. Questions are the key.

Thousands of hours of critiquing and editing has led me to notice that there are some questions I seem to ask a lot. Which tells me there are some general gaps that many writers have in common in their novel-constructing process. I thought I’d share these questions, because maybe they’ll help you as you work on your novel.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.

 

How to Promote a Book with Video

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This post by Dana Lynn Smith originally appeared on her The Savvy Book Marketer on 5/15/13.

Videos are hugely popular online, from grumpy cats and music videos, to breaking news and movie trailers. In fact, YouTube (owned by Google) has become the second most popular website worldwide.

Today I want to share with you practical, actionable information on how to create and use video to promote your book and yourself. First, here are a few of the ways that authors can use video:

• For nonfiction authors, content-based videos (where you discuss the book’s topic) can be very effective. You can even do a series of videos dealing with different aspects of your topic. Options include “talking head” video where you are filmed speaking about the topic, demonstrations of how to do something, a slideshow with voiceover, or a combination of these. Be sure to promote the book at the end of the content-based video and include your website link. You can also work in mentions of the book earlier in the video (“Here are some of the top tips for _____ from my new book ______.”) but be sure to provide useful content rather than just promotion.

• Video trailers (short commercial-style videos, similar to movie trailers) work best for novels, narrative nonfiction, and children’s books. Usually these include a series of images and text with music or voiceover in the background, with a promotion to buy the book at the end. Don’t forget the link to your website or a short link to your Amazon page.

• Children’s book authors can post videos of book readings or related activities for kids.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

Self-Publishing – 102

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This post by Rob MacCavett originally appeared on The Editorial Department on 2/6/14.

And so as the sun slowly set over the peaks and valleys of composing a first book, I bid a fond farewell to creative writing as I prepared to travel through the shadowy and murky land of self-publishing. I found this part of the journey to be challenging too, my creative side forced to give way to the business world of production, marketing and sales. Some of this I did not like. I mean, why should I have had to tote this lumbering commercial baggage? I was clearly an accomplished author now!

One of the first of those bags was the legality and proper identification of my efforts. The Editorial Department’s Morgana Gallaway (I told her that her name sounded like that of an Irish flutist) led me through the maze of copyright, to ISBN’s, to forming my own publishing company—Whooping Crane Publishing. Why did I name it that? No, I’m asking you: why did I name it that? Never mind.

This might be a good place to mention the notion of using friends and family to help with chores your book has generated, like proofreading or editing. It might work for you, but it didn’t for me because (a) it’s a big, big job that (b) requires a certain expertise, plus (c) they don’t want to hurt your feelings—I paid TED to do that. Something to think about.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Editorial Department.

 

Anne Rice Owns the Bullies

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This post originally appeared on STGRB on 1/26/14.

We’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Sorry we are so late in doing it.
In our last post on Anne Rice, we showed you how she has been lighting up the Amazon fora with her wisdom and advice for authors. We also mentioned her unfortunate encounter with the bullies:

Note her Warning to Authors at the bottom. Unfortunately, like everyone else who has braved the discussion threads of Amazon, Anne too has noticed the hostility and general contempt that the AFT (Amazon Fora Trolls) have for authors. In fact, we published some of her comments on this topic in our post, Words of Wisdom From Anne Rice.

So… do you think she got attacked for her warning? You bet.

Has she stopped posting and offering her advice to authors? Nope.

In fact, she has responded to the trolls with such sophistication and eloquence, it seems they don’t really know how to respond to her. She’s too smart and trolls tend to be … well … not so smart.

In our post today we’ll show just how smart she is. She was immediately able to see right through the Amazon bullies and make intelligent observations that get right to the heart of the matter and reveal these nasty people for who and what they are: internet trolls. What’s more, she managed to isolate all of the most well-known trolls who stalk authors and their books simply because they have nothing better to do with their time.

First we’ll show you her general view of the Amazon bullies:

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes many screenshots of exchanges between Amazon reviewers and Anne Rice, on STGRB.

Isabel Allende Thinks We Suck

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This post by Steve Hockensmith originally appeared on Inkspot on 2/12/14. From the post:

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the Friendsozoic Era — which is to say the 1990s — my pal Mo Ryan edited a music ‘zine (remember those?) called Steve Albini Thinks We Suck. I always loved that name. Steve Albini was, at the time, the go-to producer if you wanted to grunge up your rock’n’roll for the flannel-flaunting masses. He had what I recall as a surly, mouthy, bad-boy streak — sort of like Liam Gallagher if he’d been born in the States and knew how to spell. So it was easy to imagine him thinking many, many, many things sucked, even the wonderful and talented Mo Ryan. (Mo told me the real reason her ‘zine got its name around 1998 or 1999, which is why I can’t remember it now.)…

I haven’t thought about Steve Albini or the ‘zine named in his honor in a long, long time. But they came to mind this week when I saw some of my colleagues in the mystery world reacting to a dis from Isabel Allende. Allende, as you might know, is a highly successful purveyor of the sort of middlebrow storytelling Barnes & Noble stocks under “Fiction” and some people call “literature.” Perhaps having grown tired of being all literary or examining the endlessly fascinating subject which is herself (Allende’s written at least four memoirs, which seems excessive for anyone who’s not Winston Churchill), she recently made the puzzling decision to write a mystery.

I call it puzzling because Allende’s been promoting her mystery by talking about how much she doesn’t like mysteries.

 

Click here to read the full post on Inkspot.

 

A Tale Of Two Author Brands

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn blog on 2/3/14.

Here’s an outline of my two brands and how they contribute to my business, as well as my recommendations if you’re thinking about these issues. I get a lot of questions about this topic so I thought I would address it head on 🙂

 

What is a brand anyway?

Whether you like it or not, you have a brand as soon as you publish a book, or you start tweeting, or blogging or anything.

It’s how people perceive you.

It’s the words and images that are associated with you and your books.

It’s the emotions and feelings you trigger in the person who notices you or something you put into the world.

Therefore, it’s important to control the perception of your brand.

You can do that by making sure everything you put out there in the world represents what you want people to see.

 

TheCreativePenn.com – and me as Joanna Penn

The site is aimed at writers, publishing industry folks, authors and people wanting to write and be creative entrepreneurs. I am always upbeat and I want to be a positive force for good 🙂 so I will only share what resonates with that. Of course, I have down days like everyone else, but I don’t share them here.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn blog.

 

Death By Promotion

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 2/11/14.

Getting Real About the Costs to Authors and Readers in the Current Marketing Environment

My name is Heidi Cullinan, and I’m here to write stories and publish books.

I’m not here to market. I’ll do a little of that because one must, because there is no cultural bulletin board right now my books can exist at, especially not mine as I’m a bit niche and still largely in my own pond. I strive to lift awareness of not just my work but works like mine, the whole LGBT romance pool, but even that is not the main purpose of why I’m here. I like to thank bloggers with ad purchases and guest posts and ARCs. I’ve made a forum for fans to chat, and if you link/@ reply me on social media and I’m able to see it, I’ll do my best to reply or at least like your post. I don’t buy reviews. I don’t ask people to buy books on a certain day at a certain hour at a certain place to game the system. I don’t send mass invites to “events” on Goodreads or Facebook. I don’t add people to newsletters who haven’t asked to be, and in fact I try to parcel out sub-newsletters for the truly die-hard to get ALL THE DEETS and those who just want release dates to not be spammed. I don’t cold-email other authors and ask them for pimpage or, even crazier, give them book recs. I don’t copy other people’s work because I can’t think of my own stories or hump sideways on someone else’s work because I’d sure like to scrape off some of their overflow. I don’t run around to ten million social media sites making sure I comment on every blog post, every review, every single mention of my work. I don’t join every new social media site and work up a huge presence there. I don’t stick my nose into reader conversations unless invited, and even if invited, sometimes I might decline. Because I’m a writer. I write books. I try to write a lot of books. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I do.

You would think, you really would, that such a declaration would be rather like stating the obvious. Except every goddamn day that passes, I feel more and more like the last unicorn, and even though I can’t find anyone actually turning the screws, I feel more and more pressure every day to market, promote, to be a flaming brand across the literary horizon. It’s killing me, and I think it’s eating a lot of our souls.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s site.

 

Psychology in Fiction Q&A: Splitting and Alter Egos

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This post by Carolyn Kaufman originally appeared on her Archetype Writing site in July of 2010.

QUESTION: My MC (Andrew) exhibits many symptoms of borderline personality disorder, including splitting. With the splitting, he basically thinks of himself as a “good” Andrew and a “bad” Andrew. In his thoughts, the good part of him (whom he calls Leif) talks with the bad part. At first, it’s just jumbled thought, sometimes doesn’t make sense, and as it progresses, it develops two distinct voices. He thinks the bad Andrew is just worthless and a street whore (he’s a prostitute) and the good Andrew is who he is trying to change into, to fix his life. I don’t think this is split personality or multiple personalities because they are aware of each other, and it really is like two aspects of the same thing. Does this make sense, psychologically? Is it still borderline, or is this something else?

– – – – – –

ANSWER: It sounds like you’ve got the gist of splitting, which is pretty commendable, since it’s a tough concept. Typically, though, adult splitting is seen as a kind of defense mechanism, so people aren’t really aware that they’re doing it.

Let me explain splitting a little more, just so that makes sense, and then we’ll talk about what might work well for your story.

According to object relations theorists like Melanie Klein, newborns essentially believe that the world is part of the same entity as them. In other words, they can’t differentiate between themselves and the world. Later, they differentiate between “me” and the world, but Mommy (or Daddy, or whoever the primary caregiver is) is seen as part of “me.” Still later, the child begins to understand that “me” and Mommy are different, but they have trouble seeing “good Mommy” (who acquiesces to them and fulfills their needs) and “bad Mommy” who says “no” or is otherwise frustrating or disappointing as the same person. This is splitting, and it’s natural around 3-4 months of age. As we get older (i.e. around 6 months of age), we learn to see “good Mommy” and “bad Mommy” as part of the same person. That’s why we can love and hate someone at the same time.

 

Click here to read the full post on Archetype Writing.

 

Author Earnings: The Report

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on Author Earnings with a publication date of 2/12/14. It contains some pretty shocking and encouraging book sales data, at least where indie authors and small publishers are concerned.

It’s no great secret that the world of publishing is changing. What is a secret is how much. Is it changing a lot? Has most of the change already happened? What does the future look like?

The problem with these questions is that we don’t have the data that might give us reliable answers. Distributors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t share their e-book sales figures. At most, they comment on the extreme outliers, which is about as useful as sharing yesterday’s lottery numbers [link]. A few individual authors have made their sales data public, but not enough to paint an accurate picture. We’re left with a game of connect-the-dots where only the prime numbers are revealed. What data we do have often comes in the form of surveys, many of which rely on extremely limited sampling methodologies and also questionable analyses [link].

This lack of data has been frustrating. If writing your first novel is the hardest part of becoming an author, figuring out what to do next runs a close second. Manuscripts in hand, some writers today are deciding to forgo six-figure advances in order to self-publish [link]. Are they crazy? Or is signing away lifetime rights to a work in the digital age crazy? It’s hard to know.

Anecdotal evidence and an ever more open community of self-published authors have caused some to suggest that owning one’s rights is more lucrative in the long run than doing a deal with a major publisher. What used to be an easy decision (please, anyone, take my book!) is now one that keeps many aspiring authors awake at night. As someone who has walked away from incredible offers (after agonizing mightily about doing so), I have longed for greater transparency so that up-and-coming authors can make better-informed decisions. I imagine established writers who are considering their next projects share some of these same concerns.

Other entertainment industries tout the earnings of their practitioners. Sports stars, musicians, actors—their salaries are often discussed as a matter of course. This is less true for authors, and it creates unrealistic expectations for those who pursue writing as a career. Now with every writer needing to choose between self-publishing and submitting to traditional publishers, the decision gets even more difficult. We don’t want to screw up before we even get started.

When I faced these decisions, I had to rely on my own sales data and nothing more. Luckily, I had charted my daily sales reports as my works marched from outside the top one million right up to #1 on Amazon. Using these snapshots, I could plot the correlation between rankings and sales. It wasn’t long before dozens of self-published authors were sharing their sales rates at various positions along the lists in order to make author earnings more transparent to others [link] [link]. Gradually, it became possible to closely estimate how much an author was earning simply by looking at where their works ranked on public lists [link].

This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it’s online for anyone to see—but until now it’s been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize. This program, however, is able to do in a day what would take hundreds of volunteers with web browsers and pencils a week to accomplish. The first run grabbed data on nearly 7,000 e-books from several bestselling genre categories on Amazon. Subsequent runs have looked at data for 50,000 titles across all genres. You can ask this data some pretty amazing questions, questions I’ve been asking for well over a year [link]. And now we finally have some answers.

 

Click here to read the full, lengthy report (including many informative graphs) on Author Earnings. This report should be required reading for anyone who is, or hopes to become, a published author.

 

It's All Just Dumb Luck

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This post by Mitch Joel originally appeared on his Six Pixels of Separation blog on 2/5/14.

It’s a story that I will never forget. Back in 2008, I was prepping the release of my first business book (Six Pixels of Separation). I was very excited because the book was going to be the lead business title for Grand Central Publishing – which is a part of the largest book publishing company in the world (Hachette Book Group) – and the senior-most executive at the publishing house wanted to meet with me. I was excited. I was nervous. If you could close your eyes and imagine what the head editor of the largest book publisher in the world might look like, you would have the right visual of this powerful, smart and compelling individual. A beautiful corner office with a view, that is decorated with awards, celebrity author paraphernalia, photos of this individual with Presidents, royalty and more. As we sat down on the couch for a coffee, they leaned in and quietly said, “Mitch… I love your book. We all love your book. It’s a fascinating space and you have captured it perfectly. We are thrilled that we’re publishing it and look forward to its success…” and then there was a long pause. They finished the sentence with: “now, all we need is lightning in a bottle.”

 

Wait. What?

Write a book that one of the world’s most esteemed editors loves, get signed to a global deal by one of the largest book publishers in the world, get to be the lead title for their back to school season, and it’s all going to be dependent on how lucky we get?

 

Click here to read the full post on Six Pixels of Separation.

 

Cheap Words: Amazon Is Good For Customers, But Is It Good For Books?

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This article by George Packer originally appeared on The New Yorker site for its 2/17/14 print issue.

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer. After Apple launched the iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t sign up pop stars for recording contracts. A.T. & T. doesn’t build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A.). Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

Bezos originally thought of calling his company Relentless.com—that U.R.L. still takes you to Amazon’s site—before adopting the name of the world’s largest river by volume. (If Bezos were a reader of classic American fiction, he might have hit upon Octopus.com.) Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing quality, its tentacles extending in all directions, makes it unusual even in the tech industry, where rapid growth, not profitability, is the measure of success. Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore. In 1994, at the age of thirty, Bezos, a Princeton graduate, quit his job at a Manhattan hedge fund and moved to Seattle to found a company that could ride the exponential growth of the early commercial Internet. (Bezos calculated that, in 1993, usage climbed by two hundred and thirty thousand per cent.) His wife, MacKenzie, is a novelist who studied under Toni Morrison at Princeton; according to Stone, Bezos’s favorite novel is Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” which is on the suggested reading list for Amazon executives. All the other titles, including “Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story,” are business books, and even Ishiguro’s novel—about a self-erasing English butler who realizes that he has missed his chance at happiness in love—offers what Bezos calls a “regret-minimization framework”: how not to end up like the butler. Bezos is, above all things, pragmatic. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

 

Click here to read the full article on The New Yorker site.

Writer Hopscotch

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This post by Karin Cox originally appeared on Indie Chicks Café on 10/18/13. In it, she addresses the controversy surrounding Kobo’s decision to pull all indie titles submitted via Draft to Digital last fall.

It’s one step forward, and a jump to the left for self-publishing.

Two years ago, I decided to take my writing life in my hands and self-publish. At the time, I worked in the trade publishing industry and I saw the free-fall trade publishers were going into (either that or burying their heads in the sand) when it came to digitising titles. I also know how difficult and slow a process it was seeking out an agent and a contract and going through the mill. Frankly, I didn’t have the patience, and I saw the success others who had self-published were achieving.

Back then, in 2011, there was no Bookbub, Draft to Digitial, or Kobo writing life, and most international authors, like myself, were disadvantaged—receiving payment by cheque (or carrier pigeon) and unable to upload to some platforms. Since then, I’ve paddled through rivers of advice, both good and bad, trying to keep my self-publishing canoe afloat. Sometimes, I have found myself up the proverbial creek without a paddle. But one thing I have found is that, like most businesses, self-publishing is never static. It is very often a strange dance, or a game of hopscotch, leaping here and there in an effort to jump on the latest craze or publicity opportunity, or to avoid the pitfalls placed in your way.

Some of the advice I have received is purely commercial:

”Write in popular genres so you can make money and afford to write other books (like literary fiction or fantasy).”

“Upload directly so you get a better cut of the money.”

Some is more inspirational:

“Write what you love and the success will follow.”

“Don’t forget to live.”

And some is technical or logical: “Use smarturl and affiliate links to promote your books.”

“Ask for reviews in the back of your books”

“Change categories often using a list of popular keywords at http://www.keywordtooldominator.com/k/amazon-keyword-tool/”

“Price pulse to get on bestseller category lists.”

However, no matter whether you follow the advice or not, as a self-publisher you’re still at the mercy of the system, as many publishers of erotica and romance, and just novels in general, found out over on Kobo this week. In a knee-jerk reaction to some extremely questionable content published by a few unscrupulous authors, Kobo pulled all self-published titles that had been uploaded through the aggregator Draft to Digital—a simple-to-use and more efficient site for uploading as a one-stop shop to Apple, B&N and Kobo.

 

Click here to read the full post on Indie Chicks Café.

 

When Famous Author Promos Backfire

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This post by L.J. Sellers and Peg Brantley originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 2/7/14.

L.J.: You mentioned in our last conversation how much you liked Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller series, and it reminded me that I’d recently encountered something surprising with that series. A promotional website posted a link on my Facebook page to the author’s short story, The Switchblade. (Which was odd and made me wonder if his publisher had hired them.)

More important, I went to Amazon to check out the short story and discovered that it has almost all one-star reviews. I was stunned! I read several, and they all have the same complaints: The story doesn’t have a real conclusion, and the ebook serves mostly as a promotion for Connelly’s next book, The Gods of Guilt. Both the short story and the novel are selling well, so was it effective? And even so, was it worth alienating some readers?

 

Peg: My guess would be no, soooo not worth it. I have become a huge fan of Michael Connelly and have to wonder what his publisher was thinking. By the way, while I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews on sites like DorothyL and For Mystery Addicts about The Gods of Guilt, but I enjoyed it.

But Connelly isn’t the only author who might be suffering repercussions from this new marketing tactic. I recently downloaded what I thought was a short story by Dean Koontz, another of my favorites. I was completely turned off when at some point (it was moving rather slowly for a short story) I figured out it was simply a marketing promotion for his next book. I never finished it. And it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

 

L.J.: Readers hate that! Which makes me wonder whether the author knew what his publisher planned and if he had any say in the matter. I like to think that he didn’t and that he’s not happy about the situation. I know that publishers sometimes encourage (pressure?) authors to write short stories as between-book promos. And sometimes they want their authors to participate in new programs and formats.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.