Best TV ever
Mario here:


What I'm reading: Alchemystic by Anton Strout.











One star reviews, what to do about them? Over at the League of Reluctant Adults, we take our most blistering one-stars and secretly repost them on our list group, where we gleefully jeer the reviewer. Our comments range from ridiculing the reviewer's poor English skills to speculating on their sexual proclivities and moral failings. But what about responding to the reviews on Amazon? I've read two different philosophies. Elle Lothlorien says to reply to the reviewers directly as a form of customer service. Another successful writer, Collen Collins, takes the opposite approach. She explains that you don't even click on a one-star review because Amazon tracks every click (who doesn't on the Internet?) and the more clicks a review gets, the higher its profile in the search algorithms. She goes on to explain how to "undo" a click.

At the last MileHiCon, CJ Henderson complained that modern television was a waste of time. Melinda Snodgrass jumped back at him; her rebuttal was that television programing has never been better. I have to agree with her. Today's shows benefit from bigger budgets, improved technology, and a lack of editorial restraints that hobbled earlier programming. Who wouldn't want to see an episode of the The Dick Van Dyke Show where the writers could've cut loose like Seinfeld or The Big Bang Theory?

Like many of you, I've gotten hooked on the great serial dramas offered by cable. What we fiction writers can learn from these shows is that they are all essentially soap operas. We are drawn into the lives of the heroes and villains and we tune back every week to catch up on the foibles of our favorites.

The Sopranos is over and done with. We hold our breaths for the absolute final season of Breaking Bad. In the meantime, what show should I sink my chops into? Despite the recommendations, I couldn't latch onto Battlestar Galactica or Dexter. The Walking Dead...meh. Mad Men lost me. I enjoy historical pot-boilers but was disappointed by Magic City. The premise is great: vice and corruption in Miami during the Rat Pack years. Visually, the show has a beautiful Mid-Century aesthetic and it hits the right historical notes. However, the gangster tropes repeat every mobster movie that I've seen. Boardwalk Empire is another series that I'm tepid about. Again, the set design and costumes...amazing! The historical backdrop...ching! ching! ching! But the character focus is too scatter shot, the plot complications too Byzantine (to the point I feel the need to take notes), and the narrative lacks much urgency.



So what's at the top of my Netflix queue? Hell on Wheels. It's an engrossing and unflinching look at life during post-Civil War America. We know the railroad was built across this country but do we realize that every foot of rail line was originally laid by hand? It's obvious if you think about it, but you have to see these teams of men hacking at the ground with pickaxes and sledge hammers to appreciate the effort. Every character brings a rich backstory: poor-mouth Irish immigrants, freed slaves smoldering at the humiliations they're forced to endure, former rebel soldiers traumatized by defeat, Native Americans about to get buried by ruthless "progress," camp prostitutes who clutch at dignity. What draws me into the show are the textured moral ambiguities in a lawless land. The show rubs our face in the ugliness and brutality of life on the frontier: a black man gets lynched; the Cheyenne braves are anything but noble; the hero of the show, Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), plays the most flawed bad ass ever. My complaints about the series are the lack of regular frontier women other than Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott)--not every woman out west was a whore. And I can't believe that men back them could be so cruel to one another. The men in this Hell don't form friendships but alliances.

Labels: Anson Mount, Breaking Bad, Elle Lothlorien, Hell On Wheels, Melinda Snodgrass

  ¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 7:04 PM  9 comments

  What do they know? Mario here:

If you're a writer you get swamped with gotta-do's from every direction. The two big ones are the need for social marketing--blogging, twitter, Facebook, etc.,--and branding.

Every time I hear the word branding, my neck gets tense and I want to ram into something. I don't know of any novelist who said, "Okay world, this is my brand. Now I'm going to write a story using that brand." A lot of writers don't even know exactly what they're writing until midway through the first draft. They might know in broad terms such as: "I'm writing a mystery. With vampires. And zombies. Plus a warlock love interest. Or a mystery thriller with dirty cops." So we writers think of the kind of stories we want to write, not a brand. Press us for a branding angle, it'll probably be: To not suck.

We'd like to say, "My brand is to write international bestsellers that earn so much money I can afford to live like a depraved Roman emperor. And support worthwhile charities." But no one would take us seriously.

It's different for nonfiction. That narrative is built around a platform. "I'm writing about surviving incest. Or the history of coffee. Or how to make a fortune through the Law of Attraction (i.e., the Power of Wishful Thinking.)"

So when publishers or agents ask a novelist, "What's your brand?" to me it means they're grasping at the ether trying to quantify something that you can't quantify: Art.

The truth is, success in publishing is a crap shoot, complicated by what works for one writer doesn't work for another. There's all this talk of social media, branding, building a platform, yada yada. What's missing from the discussion is this crucial element: You gotta write a book people want to read.

There's the argument that with a social media machine in place, a platform built with substantial numbers of followers, branding proclaimed in neon colors, that you'll be a no-fail.

Bullshit. Take for example the two gods of branding: Coca-Cola and the auto industry.

Who knows better about branding than Coca-Cola? Coca-Cola and Coke are two of the world's most recognized brands. With their branding and hype machine in place, anything Coca-Cola does is a sure-fire success, right?

Not so fast. Remember the New Coke? How much money did Coca-Cola pump into that marketing campaign? And what happened? One of the biggest fiascoes in marketing history. Don Draper, where were you?

That was followed a few years later by the OK soft drink. "Everything is going to be okay." Again, Coca-Cola spent millions studying the market and millions more hyping the product (Though it seems no one thought much of the taste--you'd think a no-brainer aspect of a refreshment beverage.) In the end, the OK jet crashed into the ocean. Interestingly, OK was sheperded by the same guy who ran the New Coke marketing campaign.

Let's go poke a stick at the auto industry. There was the Pontiac Aztek. The new Ford Thunderbird. The Lincoln Blackwood. The Chevy SSR. The entire Saturn and Pontiac product lines. All gone poof despite the marketing mojo behind them.

Which gets to my point. Whatever you produce must be something an audience wants. Absent from any lecture to a writer concerning social media, establishing a platform, building a "brand," is the need to write a book people want to read. That's the hard part--the art of story-telling and writing. And for that, there are no rules.

I like to use the example of my writer pal Elle Lothorien. Now she's all over the WWW, most recently noted as one of the top 25 most-successful self-published ebook authors. But in the beginning, she self-published her romantic comedy, The Frog Prince, as an ebook on Amazon. As a newbie, she had zilch for marketing and no clue about book cover "rules." Traditional publishers know full well that a potential reader judges a book by its cover. Look what Frank Frazetta's covers did for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian. The rule is that romantic comedy must be pink. Pink. Pink and more pink. Lothlorien's was green. But that worked in her favor. When readers searched Amazon for romantic comedies, her little green frog swam to the surface of a sea of pink. But what sold and resold The Frog Prince was the quality of the story.

I have plenty of writer friends who've climbed the bestsellers lists without a massive publicity machine stoking the media. They did the usual: a website, blogs, blog tours, interviews, mailings, conferences, twitter, Facebook--and earned some success. And not one of them claimed to have had a brand.

On the other hand, I have other writer friends who have done the same thing--and written some amazing books--and continue to flounder in obscurity.

Even a great platform and a known brand doesn't guarantee long-term success. Just ask Bristol Palin.

Moving on. There's no doubt about this platform. Fun and fantasy:

Next weekend, the Biting-Edge team will be in Colorado Springs for GalaxyFest 2012. Special guest star: Denise Crosby--you probably remember her as Tasha Yar! Fully functional, we're sure.

Labels: branding, Elle Lothlorien, GalaxyFest, not suck

  ¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 3:40 PM  8 comments

  Thy shall not suck

Mario here:

Now that we're done with NaNoWriMo for 2011, the next question is: what to do with your literary masterpiece?

Simple answer: Get it published.

Uff! As daunting as writing a book can be, we've all learned that getting published is the next roll of barbed wire to crawl through. There's the ordeal of query letters and rejections, false starts with a bad agent, dashed hopes with a pussy-footing editor and publishing house...and the waiting, the waiting...for months...years maybe for something positive to happen.

Once you've done the run-around with the big New York publishing houses, you might look to a mid-sized press, and then smaller presses. Going for prestige, as it were.

And there's the siren call of self-publishing. At least you have a book in print. If that's all you want, then go for it. But if you want to reach the masses and perhaps make a little money, then self-publication presents huge challenges of its own. One of which is distribution for the mountain of books in your garage. A lot of those trials are spewed in this rant posted to another blog regarding self-publication:

I work as an event coordinator/marketer for an independent bookstore that has been inundated in recent years with self-published authors looking for shelf space and store events for their books. We get – and I am not exaggerating – between 400 and 500 requests a year from self-published authors asking us to stock and promote their book. On a slow week, we get 5-10 requests; on a busy week we’ll get 20.

If you ask most indie bookstore event coordinators about self-published authors, you will probably see some combination of eye-rolling, teeth grinding, or derisive laughter. Self-published authors are the bane of our existence. There are so, SO many would-be self-published authors that would do well to read this piece, and read it thoroughly. And then second-guess their decision to self-publish. But I know they won’t.

Why do I loathe (most) self-published authors? Here’s why. And I’m saying all this so maybe – MAYBE – there’s a self-published author out there who will read this and then understand what they are up against when it comes to marketing their self-published book through their friendly neighborhood indie bookstore.

1. Their books suck. There is no other way to say this. Bad writing, bad grammar, bad spelling, bad plot/character development, bad subject matter, etc. Don’t even get me started on do-it-yourself cover art. The book is bad. It’s bad. That’s why it couldn’t get published by a traditional publisher. But you can’t tell the self-published author of this monstrosity that their book is substandard and unsellable. Because they would act like you’ve just told them their brand-new firstborn child is ugly. Hey, I get it. You put a lot of work into this thing, and you ended up with an ugly baby. But that doesn’t change the baby’s looks, or the book’s ability to sell.

2. 90% of self-published authors are rude, pushy, completely self-absorbed, and relentless. This is my BOOK! It’s my MASTERPIECE. How dare you say it is not worthy of being stocked in your store, unless I pay for consignment?? How dare you, to not jump up and down and beg me to do an event for this book – even though I am not really from around here, I have no friends, and the book has only a very narrow niche appeal since it’s about my past life experience as a 16th century vampire with a skin condition?? Some of them don’t even bother to pitch the book themselves, but hire some poor hapless “freelance literary agent” to do it for them. Then relentlessly prod the “agent” to get them an event. THE BOOK SUCKS. IT’S NOT HAPPENING.

3. Self-published authors show a really appalling level of self-non-awareness. EVERY self-published author thinks they are the next Stephenie Meyer/James Patterson/That Guy on Amazon Who Sold a Million E-Books. EVERY self-published author thinks their memoir about going on a hiking trip to Alaska where nothing particularly dramatic happened is “special” and that “people will love it!” EVERY self-published author thinks they have written the new breakout bestseller, YA sensation, Great American Novel. I hear the same words from the same types of people over and over and over, about how their books are “different.” The books are never different. 50% of them have badly Photoshopped covers and are printed in Comic Sans.

You wrote a book. Congratulations. Let me make this clear. WRITING THE BOOK AND PAYING SOMEONE TO PRINT IT FOR YOU DOES NOT MAKE YOU SPECIAL. If the book is actually good – and in the several thousand requests I’ve processed, I’ve seen three or four that actually were – THAT makes you special. But please, PLEASE stop acting like paying AuthorHouse or Smashwords or any other vanity publisher a few thousand dollars entitles you to anything. It doesn’t. Not the adoration of untold legions of fans. Not the respect and admiration of your local indie bookseller. Not sales from your friends (who 80% of the time, from what I can see, end up with free copies rather than purchased ones). Not attention from local or national media. Self-publishing means that instead of the book manuscript being stuck in a drawer, there’s a 99% chance you’ll end up with boxes of unsold books in your garage. Fewer than 1% of self-published authors sell more than 150 copies of their book.
Please think about all this, self-publishing authors, before you give your credit card number to Smashwords.

Whew! Edan Lepucki at The Millions adds her two cents about why not to self-publish.

But the game changer is e-publishing and the growing availability of e-readers. No more stacks of books to buy. No more cranky bookstore managers to pester. While a lot of writers have flung their scribblery poo into cyberspace, e-publishing has given many worthwhile authors a second chance. The loudest screamer in this argument is of course, Joe Konrath.



But closer to home, is Lynda Hilburn's experience of buying back her book, The Vampire Shrink, and repackaging the manuscript as an ebook to restart interest in her work (which became an Amazon bestseller!), and garnered her a new publishing contract and this nifty new cover. You could say that both Konrath and Hilburn had the advantage of a known name.





But that's not always the case. For example, Elle Lothlorien, frustrated in trying to find a home for her thriller, gave up on the traditional route. She instead self-published a romantic comedy, The Frog Prince, on Amazon and made their bestseller list, elbowing aside competitors from traditional publishers. But there are others whose Internet sales can be counted in the teens.





With tens of thousands of choices, how do people chose an ebook?
Surprisingly, the decision is not too different from folks buying a traditional paper copy off the shelves.


For you as yet unpublished, item 1 you can't do much about. 2 and 5 are iffy. In all three cases, learning the fine art of Blatant Self-Promotion is key. But the cover and back cover copy are yours alone to create, or screw-up.

Remember that adage: Don't judge a book by its cover?

Well, it ain't true. First of all, a good cover catches the eye and that's a huge plus. A cover tells readers what kind of a story to expect. Romantic comedy? Hard-boiled noir? Political thriller? A bad cover, and especially with self-published work, a cover that says Photoshopped will mark your work as amateurish and in need of serious editing. In other words to the reader, pass.

Thoughts or experience with ebooks, both as a writer or reader, are welcome. Until then, keep your head down as you crawl through the barbed wire.

Labels: eBooks, Elle Lothlorien, Joe Konrath, Lynda Hilburn

  ¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 9:12 AM  15 comments