First a rant, then the actual links...
Book Funnel
This morning's e-mail prompts a sharp rap on the knuckles to Book Funnel for the way they've been marketing new writers.
The promise: "Follow this mathematically charted model of what's worked for a few Amazon writers in the past, and you, whoever you are, any young person who was bored enough during the COVID panic to write a batch of novels that fit the recommended word count, will be as successful as a few Amazon writers (who got there first) have been. And Book Funnel will help--relentlessly promoting all of you Book Funnel writers through a 'newsletter' system that uses you to market one another..."
The reality: A few people did happen to have, at the time when the people who wanted to read rather than write through the COVID panic were spending their money, a half-dozen manuscripts of different lengths that could be marketed as a series or collection, struck it lucky. Then the rest of these writers were dumped into a worked-out field. Most of them were young and had not been sitting on a box of fairly well finished, polished, maybe even previously published, manuscripts for good genre fiction for thirty years. They had to write that half-dozen related novels and novellas and novelettes in just a few years. Some of them even ran out of ideas and turned to their computers for automated help. And nobody can keep up a really good "newsletter" with a new book promotion every single day. That's what this web site has tried to do with the Link Logs, and as the Link Logs have shown, there's just not going to be a predetermined number of words, links, or new book recommendations every day.
So Book Funnel tries to fill in the gap. "We'll send out daily newsletters in your name, and fill in new book promotions, if you just sign our automated e-mails!" And inevitably that means that the daily newsletters are spam. Readers write back to writers, "Oh, how nice, you discovered this other writer that I discovered first! Isn't per book delicious!" and the writers find themselves typing "LOL! That's nice, if you liked that book I seemed to be recommending this morning. I've never actually read it." And inevitably the day comes when what Book Funnel makes these writers appear to be promoting is something written by ChatGPT. At which point some readers, justifiably annoyed, flag the writers as spam.
Here's the deal, Book Funnel. Some people who are very good writers, who have "retired" from the jobs where they got the material they wrote about (because even they were not born with those books inside them), and who are still full of energy and at the top of their game, and who have supportive families and superlative communication skills and extraordinary HSP eyes, and who happen to enjoy computers and blogging/newslettering, have done that mix of full-length books, short books, shorter stories or articles, and an excellent, interactive, daily blog or newsletter. Not many people. It's taken a really rare combination of talent and timing.
There will never be another Piers Anthony.
There will never be another Suzette Haden Elgin.
There will never be another Scott Adams.
Other people can do something similar to what they've done, but not just any other people. It's not the only way to be a writer or a blogger. It's not necessary. Which is fortunate, because the ability to follow their writing/blogging model is not common. It's certainly not to be expected from young writers (like most of the Book Funnel crew) who are still learning what God put them in this world to write, nor from slowly "emerging" writers (like me) who have learned their material and are still writing their books.
When Piers Anthony or Suzette Haden Elgin or Scott Adams was buckling down on a new book, they pre-posted a lot of material that looked suspiciously like their first few short stories and articles, on their blogs, and let their blog-gifted friends keep up the interaction at their web sites. When younger or newer writers are buckling down on a book, our blogs just flounder. Or else, like Matt Drudge, we write just one book and decide book writing's not for us, then after a few years decide that since blogging does not directly pay it's not for us either, and go back to teaching or selling insurance or whatever. Or, like Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, we've always been leaders of "writing teams" and we let the teams do the blog, from which we fade out fast. Or, like MOTUS, we can afford to spend years hosting a great (never monetized!) blog, building friendships with people who can run the blog for us when our age starts to show--and never do write a book. Or, like me...I wrote a full-length book in the first few months of the COVID panic, started showing it to publishers, then realized that everybody and their goldfish was trying to peddle a book right now and the Amazon marketing strategy was likely to work better for me if I waited a few years and wrote a few more books before I started flogging my books around on Amazon--and, I can't really say fortunately but it did relieve the pressure, my mother went ahead and died so I didn't have the "must have a printed book my mother can take to the beach and show off" motivation nagging at me. Very very rarely does everything in the Amazon e-book marketing model come together all at once. And that's okay. Other schedules of producing short pieces, short and long books, and blogs/newsletters or other Internet social life, don't make as much money for Amazon as fast, but they probably make more money for more of the writers who do produce books, and they may well make better books.
Especially when the writers are so young that the reason why they can't keep up with Amazon's model is that they're still giving birth to their babies. For mercy's sake. It may not be what most of the people who've finished a novel in high school or college want to hear, but the general consensus of humankind throughout the ages is that most people, even if male, first learn from the experience of rearing their children and then write good books. That a brilliant book is occasionally written by a young person, but even if the young person is Shakespeare, the person's best books come from a fullness of life experience that blazing young talent does not have. Yet. A writer's reputation can rest on a blaze of early talent like Wuthering Heights or the poems of John Keats, if that's all there is time for in a terribly short life, but building a real literary corpus can be said to start at age forty. Or fifty.
I just read an e-mail about a young woman's struggle with the temptation to give up all literary ambition altogether, because a new baby was calling her away from the pressure to crank out more of her exceptionally insightful, genre-transcending romances and Book Funnel wasn't waiting for baby to grow up. Meanwhile readers were recognizing that Book Funnel had been using her private e-mail account, while she was giving birth mind you, to crank out spam...It doesn't turn me against Book Funnel altogether, but it does make me reach for a metaphorical ruler to whack Book Funnel's marketing team's grubby little hands.
Shame on you little eager beavers. If you don't know anything about the way writers and books develop, learn from someone who does. That particular girl wrote better than average romances because she was already putting her limited life experience into them. Let her get some more life experience. She has more, and better, books in her than a marketing model can dream of. They will be shaped by the experience of rearing and educating that child.
So she's not a blogger. She does not have to be a blogger. Most of the great writers of this world were not bloggers. Many of them weren't even good letter writers, and of those who were good letter writers, like C.S. Lewis, many saw correspondence as a chore they wished they didn't have to do!
Most readers don't read, especially not on computer screens, at the furious pace of a marketing model based on a few exceptional writer-bloggers' success,...any more than most writers write at that pace. When a daily blog or newsletter is not personal and interactive, it does the writer's image more harm than good. You should have known better than to try to push that.
The traditional rule was one good full-length book per year (or one great one every two to five years), a couple of short pieces per year, a probably too hasty book tour per year, and hope that the writer would at least answer letters while having a life during the rest of the year. It probably worked better for more people than the e-marketing model does. Arguably teaching a class every day was reasonably analogous to a daily blog or newsletter, but (a) many writers had retired from teaching), and (b) teaching a class paid, if not well, a great deal better than writing a blog or newsletter ever has done. Bloggers and newsletter-ers have to earn a living while grinding out our daily unpaid posts. Not all of them can be quirky retirees who own a house in the woods and eat the weeds out of the garden in between crops.
And the great newsletters, like Elgin's pre-blog newsletters, or John Holt's or George Peters', came out every month, or two months, or three months, not every dang day. People just don't have all that much news. Link Logs where I faithfully pasted in a link to everything worth reading that came in the e-mail became repetitious: why would people read my blog if it was serving as an index to someone else's blog when they could read that person's blog for themselves? So the Link Logs are sparser than they used to be; I still recommend the same blogs but I'm no longer willing to link to the same sites every day, and that inevitably means fewer links. Some young novelist, who can't sit around reading e-mail at per readers all day because person has to teach a class and then come home and cook and clean and spend time with young children...Seriously, Book Funnel. What went wrong? What were you not thinking?
The basic idea of having writers agree to mail out newsletters that support and recommend one another's books was excellent...if Book Funnel had accurately estimated the amount of news and new book endorsements that can reasonably be expected of writers, and the number of new writers readers want to follow and the amount of time those readers have to spend on their newsletters or blogs. You don't want a daily word count for newsletters, Book Funnel. Daily blog posts are for people who've retired from daily full-time jobs, who've already written lots of short exercises and journal entries and poems and such that can serve as advertising for polished articles or books we might want to write; young working parents are doing very well if they can manage either a short blog post, maybe just a link or a photo or a quote, or a few pages toward a book, every day, and should not be asked to try to do both.
And readers aren't necessarily going to want to read every writer's daily post anyway. Writers who can keep up a daily blog post usually post on different topics. Some people may be congenial enough to want to read about all the stuff that interests our favorite writers--Anthony's comedy, science fiction, nonfiction, and porn; Elgin's science fiction, linguistics, art, music, regionalism, activism, and recipes; Scalzi's fiction, nonfiction, food, music, cats, and whatever else; Pbird's philosophy, religion, word studies, politics, and fiction; Elizabeth Barrette's fiction, poetry, nonfiction, spirituality, politics, gardening, and recipes; and maybe some of this site's readers really do read all the book reviews, nature posts, Petfinder posts, politics, Glyphosate Awareness, recipes, Bad Poetry, Link Logs, and even the knitting posts, for all I know, but I certainly don't expect anyone to do. I like Blogspot because it shows trailers that give readers a fair idea of what's in each post, whether we want to open and read a blog post or just think it's nice that people are still alive and blathering on about things we don't really want to read. Even when bloggers can do a daily blog or newsletter we have to expect that most of our readers are going to be weekly, or monthly, readers. Our own mothers reach a point, probably early in an online writer's career, where they can't even try to read every word we write. When newsletters stick to a theme, the more substantial the theme and newsletter are, the more likely it is to be monthly or even quarterly rather than daily. You can expect a warble about drinking enough water or doing some exercise every single day; if you're looking for the McDougalls' level of medical and nutritional and culinary research, you expect to be grateful for a monthly or bimonthly newsletter. And there are FOUR McDougalls.
Back off already, Book Funnel. For young authors of genre fiction, monthly newsletters are probably ideal. And resist the urge to allow any automated content to plug into it. A blog that posts automated content, except as an occasional joke, is a dead blog. A newsletter that dumps automated content into people's e-mail is spam. The good Book Funnel writers I've discovered here, Fern Cooper, Karen McSpade, Audrey Walker, Emily Dana Botrous, C. Gockel, et al., are too good to have readers turned against them by anyone pumping spam through their e-mail. Their careers are starting well if an unrealistic marketing model is not used to run them completely off their feet.
Well, that's enough words, before readers even come to an actual link, to make a generous Book Funnel daily newsletter. But I don't do it every day, or try to. Yesterday I rushed through what time I spent online because I had things to do in real life, and I spent most of my online time, as I often do, "backstage"; in the case of yesterday, I spent most of my online time at Library Thing. Today I had the luxury of a few hours to spend as much time engaging with as many e-mails as the e-mails seemed to justify. E-mail does not provoke that many words from me every day. Nor would anybody want to commit to reading them, even if it did.
Censorship
The smoking gun! The proof: Biden's un-American! If censorship isn't a felony, it should be! Right? Sorry, Gentle Readers. Too much election chatter.
Glyphosate Awareness
Meme from GMO Free USA. This week, the EPA is taking comments on dicamba. GMO Free USA has a sample comment you can edit; when it opens to my computer their form fills in my contact information, but if you go to https://gmofreeusa.salsalabs.org/dicambabasf/ you can find a clean form for your own use. Or go directly to epa.gov and type in a brand-new comment of your very own. This one is about dicamba. I suspect the EPA already know that some of us are all about neonics, permethrin, or glyphosate but it's nice to stick to the subject. My comment mentions that no herbicide ever has been or will be more efficient than plain old hot water...scald the unwanted plant to death, and actually encourage the valuable plants we don't want to harm.
Music
Since this web site now has a butterfly theme, why not check out Wu Fei's butterfly-inspired guzheng piece. Since the Red-Spotted Purple is a composter species I'd be inclined to explain the incident in less romantic terms, but whatever floats the composer's boat...
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