Confessions of an Unsuccessful Author

I am bitter. Yes. I admit it. But the truth is I just can't compete.

Nice Day; Kinda Chilly

Illustration Attribution:    www.scenicreflections.com

BOOKS

The local library probably has more actual "books" inside their doors than the last "bookstore" you were in.   Still, most of them are now lending e-books and actual e-reading devices,  and I am sure they are not lying awake all night worrying if they are doing the right thing.  Which thing? Take your pick.  This is going to be kind of like those books you buy in the gas station when you are on a long road trip and they fill in the blanks in the story and then you are supposed to laugh or marvel.

Anyway, it is moot.  Libraries run on tax dollars, right?  Not counting the tote bags they sell and the money that they get from over due fines, and from the used book sale and that box in the corner of the hall full of unclassifiables that are twenty five cents a piece.  Oh, no.  Wait.  Now those are free.  They have the unclassifiables shelved and priced now.

(Aside)  I used to take a book I owned and had finished reading and put it on that shelf.  Hardcovers 50 cents, paperback, 25 cents.  One day I got "caught".  You have to put it in a special slot so it can be catalogued.  A person does this, a library employee, paid with your tax money.  Not a volunteer.  I asked her why they decided to do it that money wasting way and were they afraid someone would not put down the quarter or the two quarters that they were charging for books people left off for free? I guess our town is so safe and secure that they do not have a training program at the library for new hires on how to deal with the local anarchist.  I just set my book on the shelf while making a noise that I hope sounded like a wry chuckle and not a threat and left.  She can stick it in the slot herself.

Anyway, I just read another article about how Penguin is determined to crush the world of publishing and reading under their heel, or maybe that is the wrong metaphor.  Maybe Penguin is actually trying to bring the world of publishing to its knees.  Heels, knees, what ever. Now they will not give the author of the book a copy of his own book pre-release, unless he pays  $300. Why did he NOT upload his MS to Adobe Books before he sent it to them? Well, someone said then he is not seeing any of the final edits. Lora Leigh sells like hotcakes, and you would go through two red pencils sitting and editing any of her books just for fun. The same rule applies to the cover art, or the facsimile of the actual cover, or something.  And everyone is ringing in, which is I guess what I am doing here, and wringing their hands about rights and DRM and piracy.

I am small potatoes.  I do no promo and I drop off the map in two or three months.  But I did enough business back in the day when I cared about being a writer to win a spot in someone's algorithm so if someone buys even one of my titles, my rating jumps way up.  Of course that probably doesn't mean anything to most of you since you don't know anything about purchasing one of my titles since you have no experience at that sort of thing. (Yeah. Bitchy.) During one promotion when I was able to offer Sacred Sin for free, I had over 6,000 downloads.  The day after the freebie was over I had eight cash sales (no returns) and shortly thereafter, in one day, which I remember clearly, cuz it never happened again, I had thirty two cash sales of different titles. I have had (few) cash sales in Germany, France, and Italy and I do pretty good in New Zealand for some reason. I am building up to this.  As an Indie I may have had equal or less success than most, but most of the stats I have read state that I have sold more than the average Joe E-pubber.  Well, actually it said I made more money than Joe.  And this is my point.  I am on Pirate sites. Some let you download a PDF for free.  I saw one the other day that was charging more for my Anymore than I do.  I don't see a cent of that money.  I actually find it flattering.  They go on about DRM which has been a non-issue for at least four years.  You can find how to break DRM in dozens of places on the net.  They talk about having a real publisher, a real agent, a real book.  I net more on a single copy of my book than almost anyone who goes through the traditional method.  Unless it keeps selling for years, like Harry Potter but not like Shades of Gray which is already dropping out of sight.

I cannot understand the furor they are trying to create.  It is like they are screaming from the bottom of a well and there is a hurricane roaring right over head of that well.  I know they have to try.  I know there are firm believers, but how many JKRowlings come along?  Not enough to make more than one publishing house happy. That David Foster Wallace was goopy and he is gone.  Did you read him?  Did you try?  I tried.  I think I checked out a Franzen but returned it unread.  I read this book that knocked my socks off about this guy that was having weird dreams and deja vus and then a missile crashed into his office building and I never saw a review of it and I cannot remember the title much less the author's name.

Maybe I will never publish another book.  Maybe I am a flop.  Maybe I am jealous.  But that is all about me trying to be an author.  Me being a reader, I have the creds.  And I know these people are barking up the wrong tree.  (That happened just before they fell in that well. )

Did you see that movie Happy Feet? They inserted a huge electronic tracking module into the body of this famous dancing penguin and he was happy. There is surely a metaphor in there somewhere.

Image attribution:  Life-Is-But-A-Stage.blogspot.com

Everything Makes Me Cry

Just now I feel like I must be doing something right.  At least about one thing.  I think it would be better if I KNEW I was doing something right, but I take a lot of convincing.  But this is good enough to actually outweigh my worries for the moment.

It doesn't matter it seems.  I think I cry more tears over the good stuff.  

Stealing

There was another big plagiarism brouhaha recently but it was all blog wise, so maybe some of you, the uninitiated, missed out on it. It was very blatant and the person tried to apologize in a bunch of euphemistic terms in such a way that she was not accepting blame.  Finally, weeks later I think it was, she threw in the towel and said, "Yeah.  I'm a thief."

I went through this when one of my grandaughters was in high school and she had to do a biographical poster for math class.  You didn't ask me, but it seems obvious we are in trouble here from the get go.  What kid that  can read doesn't do cut and paste for this type of project?  Well the teacher's biggest complaint was she did not source one of the photos which was scanned from a book.  I went to every body that had anything to do with it with the most amazing letter that I came across recently and still wonder at.  Its verbosity, its cunning use of language, its explicitness.  It left no room for argument, and it made such a huge impression on me that I never bothered to find out if he decided to cut Cas a little slack on the grade.  Similar incident when Fran was in high school, but different.  She got twenty percent for the research, twenty percent for the outline, twenty percent for the index cards, twenty percent for the rough draft and twenty percent for the final doc.  (Is that 100 yet?)  So she never handed in the final doc so the teacher gave her a zero.  It was agreed that the system of grading was indeed flawed but it was also agreed that Fran did indeed earn eighty percent of the grade.  That one I know was changed.  Didn't matter in the long run as is true of most of the causes around which I choose to rally.  She got a scholarship to Loyola based on her GED scores.

Anyway. . .

The thing is, and this is at least the third time this has happened,  I drop the husk on the floor when I leave which is all that is left of the seed of the idea that blossomed into some marvelous piece of editorial genius, and someone finds it and runs with it.  Only they don't even run in the right direction.  It isn't just stealing, well, let's be kind and let them call it inspiration, it is rubbing my nose in it.  Cuz I can say it better and it was my seed so get the hell off the farm. It's like that meme on Pinterest where they show you how to make the inside out cupcakes and then you post your photo of the outcome which is a hilarious mess and the caption reads, "Nailed it."  I swear, if I had any way of knowing if that person derived any satisfaction from finishing their pointless paragraphs, I would be even more pissed off.  Every time I see a movie or read a book and say, "Oh, I used that in my book"(months before) I want to weep except I am so far past being emotionally involved in this little hobby/career foible I call my writing.  And there is a screen play and some dick actress doing a shitty job of saying what my Jenny said or my Deanie said.  And they are sitting in the basement counting their nickles.  Oh irony of ironies.  

Well, I guess it is time for me to fall back on "I had my day in the sun" and just remove myself from the issues.  But no.  I am too nosy, too curious, too conceited to let it drop.  I shall drag it kicking and screaming with me to the grave.  Except, I forgot, I'm not going to do the grave thing.

BRAVE

So glad a curly haired Celtic redhead is the new heroine  since all mine are. Wonderful film by the way. 

I Call Bull Shit

Making over a turn of phrase that, when analysed, is in fact  contradiction at best and a mixed metaphor at the least and saying it is such good poetic language.  Fuck that.  I may write like a third grader, but I am not pretentious about it at all.  And a couple of grown ups have said I don't write like a third grader.  I think this bull shit phrase turning is not the same as telling a story.  And that is what I do.  I tell stories about people.  Things happen, but I don't tell stories about things that happen.  I tell stories about the people the things happen to.  Because that is the way life  struck me.  I am a person that things happened to,and they keep on happening. Like rain from hell.   And that is what I am made of, the way I handled the things that happened and what those things did to me.  The person. If you never before in your life saw me, and you struck up a conversation with me, you would take me at face value.  You wouldn't know how I retaliate, how I hurt, how I inflict pain, how I have handled pain.  So if I told you the things that happened to me, you would have to relate that to the person you are talking to.  And I would have to tell you a story. And  I would fucking weep.

Mixed feelings

This is the plan. I am going to rotate the four books through Select and rewrite each one, heavily editing the sex out of the first, at several people's suggestions, and doing new covers at least for the third. I feel like I am done being a writer. I wanted to do the four and they are done. And they pretty much are tanking. I average a sale a day. I realize that is sixty times better than no sales for months at a time, but the word of mouth thing is not working for me. I blame my personality and lifestyle for that.

But I'd like to say a few things about the "business" end of this business. I get lots of email and even phone calls that they want to tell me about this publishing deal and that. Okay. Leave me alone. I'm published. Unless you have some promo ideas, I have nothing to say to you and I don't want to listen to you. Word of mouth is the ONLY thing missing from my equation and you cannot sell me a program for that. Don't ask me to send you copies of my work. It is all out there in many different forms or places. If you can't do anything else, you can name search for me. As far as I know there is one other Virginia Llorca and she is a 23 year old girl in North Carolina.

Thanks to everyone who read my stories and double triple thanks to those who said nice things about them, and think about the Karma, especially you family members who pretend it doesn't exist or it's a whim. Read any Lora Leigh and then get back to me about MY work.

The only thing that is bothering me now is that I am toying with ideas. It is just because I am bored and am so very unused to dealing with a sense of relief. I'm trying to talk myself out of it.

Today's CTA: Do you get angry with yourself when you break promises to yourself or do you just shake it off? What do you learn from the experience? Share.

Last Call

ANYMORE is free until midnight tonight
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007O47VIE


Here is the new cover I will put up tomorrow.

Despite all the confusion and misspelling in the links I have about 600 downloads so far and reached 42 in freebie "best seller" in Contemporary Fiction

Saturday, March 25, 2012

This is not a chart of my mood swings. If it were there would be more peaks and valleys. It is a graph of my blog hits for the week. It is nuts.

I posted about my two freebies and had the dates wrong for ANYMORE and the link wrong for THE MAZE. I post in a German forum, an Italian forum, a French forum, and I think I hit up the Spanish forum this time, so I made the mistakes international in scope.

Today was my daughter's thirtieth birthday and everyone had such a good time. It was so nice. Her little girl took some of her first steps and I got to see it. We blew bubbles in the driveway and even my dad said it was a great party. No small praise from such as he.

And now I am #92 on the Amazon best seller list of 100 for my genre. This is even with the mistakes I made. It is basically meaningless in the long run, kind of equates in my mind to having someone tell me my hair looks nice but what a great day. And while we were gone, Henry did not pee the carpet.

Louie said that Lisa called this morning and asked if the women from the courts had called to tell us we have been awarded custody of Billy. There is a terrible misunderstanding here somewhere, but still I feared coming home and finding him standing on the porch with a bag of clothes. This is a huge tragedy, but I might as well try to win the election as figure this one out. What that girl has done to people's lives is beyond horrible and when I think of the darling baby she was and how happy I was to hold her and take her for walks and watch her take a step, it is fucking heart breaking. And the one thing about getting this old is I know I cannot do a thing about it and I won't even try and I won't bother feeling guilt about it. I do feel anger toward the people that have made such a muck up of his life and thwarted all the good I did for him. But I look at Jupiter and Saturn and say "What's up with that?" and think this was a beautiful day.

Once upon a time, a girl. . .

Sometimes you see something at just the right time.

Inexplicable.

Philippa Gregory says she has to fall in love with her characters. The book about Margaret Beaufort was not easy to read. She pissed you off most of the time. But she willed stuff to happen and at, what I consider, great personal sacrifice. "What I did for love" etc. She could love and did love but had this other agenda. Couldn't do it. I'd carry the growler to the bar to get a refill for grampa. So she admitted she found it hard to love her and you knew it when you read the book THE RED QUEEN. It was one of her least enjoyable works.

So this last book I wrote, I couldn't fall in love. There really was not a character for that. But now I am finished and I am in love with them and don't want to put it up, want to keep living their lives for them, controlling the weather and what color to paint the porch.

Amazon goofed up the listing and the royalties and Smashwords has yet to cough up a cent. And the promoting is so whorish. Either you like it or you don't but why the fuck don't they even want to look? I spend hours every day just reading blurbs cuz I am so afraid I am going to miss something. And my Kindle has at least twenty books I am dying to get to. So I sit and play Spider Solitaire on the iPhone. I am so sick of it. I don't think I am going to do it anymore. I just read this John Steinbeck quote where he says you have to not stop and think and plan otherwise you lose your association with the words that are making these people live and that is in direct opposition to all this MFA stuff and outlining and little index cards with plot points. And how I write. Just sit down and wish the fucking crippled fingers would not keep hitting the wrong keys I want to go so fast.

And I am half in tears over it. Like they said my baby was funny looking and kind of dumb, and that is when I get these ridiculous blog spikes and I do not even know where they came from. Some one read a post from about six years ago. It tells you that, so I looked at it and I was talking to Louie about it being when Lisa had that little house and Billy lived with her and it was like a lull in our lives. So strange. Why did someone go and read that out of a clear blue sky? And what could it mean to them? What do anyone else's words mean to someone else? I don't know, but sometimes I am crying over it and laughing and hoping for a certain thing to happen to imaginary people. Cuz I couldn't make it happen for my real people. I guess.

Tomorrow: back to the big white Welbies, for sure.

Today's CTA: Do you put stuff in your fiction that you really wish did happen to you? Or do you want it nothing like your real life?


Image Attribution:  thecollaboratory.wikidot.com

It Happened Again

When you do this indie publishing thing, you(I)  hear from so many people that are so opposed to it.   I, personally, am all over the map about is this whoring?  Is this frustration?  Is this vanity?  Is this a need to enlighten?  Is this a waste of my time and other's time and space?  When the gauge by which you judge yourself is so palpable and undeniable as actual dollars or actual printed words, it is so easy to let yourself be wracked by self doubt.  I think this is normal.  I don't think I am particularly more or less filled with self doubt than any other Joe Shmoe.  And I already discussed being a Joe Shmoe and being accepting of that. And I totally feel that putting your words and thoughts out in the public eye indicates that there is a lot more going on than self doubt.  And then you get a random review from a random stranger and you are jubilant.  Not so much an ego thing, that they Like you, like Sally Field, but that the words they chose indicate they get what you are saying.  This holds far more meaning for me than having someone say  "Your style is so fun or amazing, or ridiculous, or convoluted, or strange, or  stupid, or hideous."

But then you are kind of noticing a person, and identifying with their doubts and their struggles and you go so far as to compliment them and try to encourage them and buoy them up a bit and thank them for sharing with you, and then you read something, and it is like Holy Shit.  This sucks.  This makes no sense.  I can't follow this.  My sophomore English teacher gave me more props than this will ever get.  This is fucking hopeless.  What do you do?  I know what I do, what I will do, what is the only comfortable path for me.  I am going to fade out of the scenario.  And I'm gonna wonder.  Self doubt?  Apparently I have none.  Apparently there is just a certain blindness people have.  Apparently people that love me want me to just stay in my cloud of self-delusionment for fear  of hurting me (which never seemed to bother them before) or robbing me, in my final moments, of my last thread of hope.. . Or apparently I can write.

And, you know what?  I will never have an answer for that. 

Ennui

(No, seriously.  What is with google?  The whole frigging thing just disappears?)

I do not understand how universities and colleges can create Marketing curricula.  It all seems entirely random to me.  I post just to be posting what seems kind of a run on of blather, and it receives WAAY more hits than the one's I deliberately plan and promote.  Why?

I am so sick of uploading or downloading pictures and  manuscripts and style guides, I just want to never do it again and think I never should have started this because it is like dope.  "Today I'll only take two of those and one of those.  Whoops!  They are all gone. Where did they go?  I wish I never started with them"  And looking at stats and comments is EXACTLY like counting how many xanax I have left.  At least to me.  Maybe you are healthy or something.

And checking to see if the late night or early morning flashes of literary brilliance have made it from the little orange Mickey Mouse notebook into the proper manuscript.  The last MS I uploaded was so full of errors.  Thank the powers that be that I am now a freaking expert on how to edit, search and replace and upload new versions in matters of minutes.  (Put it on your Kindle and make the notes there.)  And at least and at last, it is up, and actually sold already, but I haven't put it on Smashwords because for some ungodly reason the guide stored as individual little jpegs and it would take hours to find anything so I have to remember how I did that before so I could just keep it minimized on the desktop while I work. And I am absolutely thinking what a waste of these last few precious minutes I have on Earth and why am I not waxing floors or doing something someone might actually appreciate (what exactly would that be?) when I look and see there is a huge bump in sales.  Why?

I am absolutely at the place where I am calling the characters by the wrong name.  Or, honestly, forgetting what name I gave a character. I swore I would stop at four.  I couldn't imagine getting any more ideas to run with since I don't know where the ideas ever came from in the first place, although I am pretty sure it is because of the change in meds. But, lo and behold, or not, as you choose, there I am at two in the morning doing three or four thousand words on Jenny's first marriage. Why?

Did you ever google yourself?  Do you think that is a sick thing to do?  There are 63,000 entries under Virginia Llorca.  There is a twenty one year old girl in North Carolina named Virginia Llorca.  How the fuck could that happen?  I have stressed promoting that as my brand name cuz I thought it was so one of a kind-ish.  She's probably getting all my royalty checks.  Where else would they ALL be? 

I swear to God and the gods, if I see one mention of the word ennui in anyone's blog this week, they are gonna get it.