by Alexandra Sokoloff

So the very good news is that the rise of e publishing has made it much easier and more viable for an author to make a real living. In fact I was on a panel last week at the RWAustralia convention during which the very well-prepared moderator rattled off some e pub statistics, and apparently traditionally published authors who e publish are currently making TWICE the money at e publishing than they did in traditional publishing.  My own experience says that estimate is low. Very low.

The downside is that actually making that living is a 24/7 commitment.

Not that this is a new wrinkle, mind you. My Australian vacation (um, make that WORK vacation!) is the first time off I’ve had from writing in years, and I was still on the computer every day doing various and sundry promotion.  I’ve always been pretty 24/7 about promotion.

But now, with my e books, I don’t even have the ILLUSION (and yes, it was mostly an illusion) that any publisher is doing the work for me. It’s all me.

So the question is, what to do that actually works? 

Hah.  As if anyone knows!

But here are a couple of promotional ventures I’m involved in right now that are typical author promotions.

1.  The Killer Thrillers! author collective.

2. The Labor of Love event promotion this Labor Day weekend

Killer Thrillers!

One of the huge problems of e publishing from a quality perspective is that in this brave new world of self publishing, “gatekeepers” have essentially been eliminated.  Agents and publishers are no longer filtering books before they’re put before the public. While there’s an argument that that’s a good thing, I know from my years as a reader for film production companies how very much absolute dreck is screened out by early readers:  agents, editorial assistants, editors – and when I say dreck I mean scripts and books that should never have been read by another soul besides the purported author.

I’m all for readers being allowed to discover books on their own, and it is true that the actual purchase or publication of a script or book is subject to personal taste, the specific needs of a publishing house or line, and the vagaries of the market.  But those screeners also kept some seriously awful material from ever seeing the light of day.

So now that anyone who can figure out the e publishing platform can upload virtually anything to Kindle, Pubit, Kobo and Smashwords, where’s the quality control?  You can argue that the readers are their own quality control now, but seriously – the vast number of books – and especially free books – on offer has made sorting through the dreck that’s out there (and oh yes, the dreck is out there) a time-consuming proposition for a reader.

Personally, I WANT some screening.  But where is that going to come from?

While literary agencies are a logical entity for promotion of quality authors and books, they seem so far reluctant to set themselves up as publishers or storefronts for their clients.  And since agencies are not performing this function, I have thought for some time that authors should be banding together to support and promote their own books, and there are more and more of these author collectives springing up (not surprisingly the majority are romance authors).  I’ve been asked to join various author collectives but have so far been wary about committing because I haven’t heard of or more importantly read most of the authors involved.  I can’t in good conscience post about other authors’ books on Facebook and Twitter and on this blog and my own when I haven’t actually read the goods. I think we all have a responsibility not to waste other people’s time by randomly promoting mediocre books and leaving readers to find for themselves that those books were better avoided.

So so far my only choices have been to form a collective of authors I admire myself, or wait for someone like-minded to do it. And luckily for me, thriller author Karen Dionne has done exactly that. Karen is a bestselling author and organizer extraordinaire: the founder of the writers forum Backspace and the Backspace Writers Conference.  For Killer Thrillers she’s put together a group of thriller authors I would have approached myself: some friends and blogmates you’ll recognize from Murderati:  Rob Gregory Browne, Brett Battles and Zoe Sharp, and other authors I know and love like David Morrell, Blake Crouch, CJ Lyons, Keith Raffel – all authors I have read and can recommend without reservation.

All Killer Thrillers authors are bestselling, award-winning and/or internationally published; almost all are traditionally published as well as e published.  Those qualifications do not guarantee that a particular reader will love all or any of the books offered, but they do say that a significant number of readers have found the books worth reading. And most of the authors involved know each other from Bouchercon and Thrillerfest, MWA and ITW and Sisters in crime, and can promote each other without the slightest hesitation.

In essence authors are banding together to establish their own publishing imprints, just as publishers do. We are creating an umbrella organization that guarantees a certain genre and a certain quality of work. How effective these collectives are going to be in the Wild West of e publishing is an open question, but Killer Thrillers is a brand I can put my energy into building with real enthusiasm. I hope you’ll check out the site and the books today, and if you see anything you like, tell your friends.

Killer Thrillers

Labor of Love 99 cent book promo

The second promo venture I want to mention today is another fast-growing approach: group sales events, in which a group of authors join forces and drop prices on their books for a limited time, then cross-promote the event. I’ve been watching other authors do this extremely effectively; the point is that all authors have built up a following of thousands on Facebook and Twitter, and by teaming up with other authors you are able to reach a whole new group of literally thousands of readers through other authors’ FB and Twitter followers and general buzz about the event.

My friend (and Aussie travel companion!) bestselling romantic comedy author Elle Lothlorian organized the Labor of Love Promo, a four-day Labor Day weekend blitz involving 17 authors from all different genres who have all dropped the price on one of their books to 99 cents for the long weekend.  We’re all blogging, Tweeting, and FBing about the event, and anyone who wants to browse the list can pick up any or all of the books for the 99 cent price for the whole weekend.

I’m offering up my parapsychology thriller The Unseen…

And here’s a link to a list of all the books available, with links through to buy.  So browse away and catch some deals!

And today, if there’s anyone NOT on vacation, I’d love to talk about book screening. 

Readers, how do you find your books these days? Have you seen other effective methods of quality control and promotion?

And writers… especially aspiring writers… are you prepared for the grueling job that promotion is?  Do you kind of see how important it is to make it fun and social and collective, so as not to go completely insane?

And I’d just love to hear what everyone is doing for the long weekend. Hope everyone has fabulous plans!

See you back here in the – yike – fall!

– Alex

By Tania Carver

I see that the film version of ON THE ROAD will soon be upon us.  I know there’s been good word of mouth about it but I’m afraid I can’t get too excited about it. Yes, I know the brilliant Sam Riley is in it and the great Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart plays a stroppy teenager again and Walter Salles has directed it but . . . here’s the admission. I’ve never liked Jack Kerouac.

Now I know saying this in public is the kind of thing that can get you drummed out of the Writers To Be Taken Seriously Gang but it’s true. I read ON THE ROAD and thought . . . meh. Is that what all the fuss was about? It was self-indulgent and lazy. And above all, fake. I didn’t believe a word of it. Here was a writer who was supposedly breaking with the traditions of literature and creating something entirely new, supposedly the literary equivalent of what Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were doing in painting at the time. But I didn’t get that. I love Pollock and Rothko but Kerouac did nothing for me. Left me cold. Rather than a new literature it read like an extended ‘What I did on my holidays’ school essay. And just as interesting.

Now I don’t say all this lightly. I was hugely disappointed when I read it, mainly because I was expecting to enjoy it so much. People I knew and admired loved it. My best mate from college was a complete Kerouac nut. He kept trying to recreate the novel’s experiences by hanging around in awful jazz clubs (which he used to drag me to) and hitchhiking to Bournemouth. It wasn’t the same somehow. But, bless him, he kept trying. So I thought I’d love it. For all the reasons everyone else did. It was new, hip, free. It was rebellious. And that was the word that got me, the one I had the problem with.  Rebellious. My first response on hearing that is always the same: If everyone is telling you something is rebellious, it’s not. I should have known. My mate from college was the son of a bank manager from Aylesbury.

Maybe one reason I didn’t like it was because I was a few years older than most people when they read it. I went to college a bit later than my peers, having taken what we now call ‘a gap year’ but what was then called ‘work’. I think it’s one of those things that you need to read when your self-defining memories are at their highest. That period from your mid-teens to early twenties where everything you read, hear, see and do is the best thing that’s happened to anyone EVER. If you miss out and read it later when you’ve been around the block a few times then it just doesn’t have the same impact on you. (For the record, my self-defining years were spent reading crime novels, comics and pulp fiction, listening to punk, post punk and indie, and of course seeing and doing the best things that have happened to anyone EVER.)

So with this in mind and thinking it was just me I decided to read some more beat literature. The next one I tried was William Burroughs’ THE NAKED LUNCH. Jesus Christ. Now, I’d seen Cronenberg’s film of the same name and loved it. But then I am something of a Cronenberg nut. So I was expecting something similar. I didn’t get it. As my wife often says, there’s nothing more boring than listening to someone else recount their dreams. (Especially mine, she always adds.) And I believe there’s nothing more boring than listening to a junkie ramble on. Put those two together and you have a junkie rambling on boringly about his dreams. Or THE NAKED LUNCH, as it became known. Burroughs once said that the chapters of the novel were only published in the order they were in was pure chance. Some critics hailed this remark as evidence of his brilliance. Not me.

Thinking that it was just prose I had a problem with I turned to poetry. Ginsberg’s HOWL, to be exact. Fine. I quite liked that.  Good work. So I read some more of his stuff. And I soon realised why HOWL is the only one people mention.

So that was me done with the Beats. But I didn’t stop thinking about them. Why were they so enduring? Why did people still read them? Because they liked them, I suppose. Not everyone has the same tastes as me. (Which is a shame because I’d sell more books that way.) And that’s fine. But I think it’s something else. I think they’re still read for more than just the writing. I believe the beats give the impression to a lot of people that that’s what writing is like, or what it should be like. What a writer’s life is like. Going on a quest, experiencing everything the world has to offer, good and bad, then processing that and putting it down. They venerated the craft of writing itself. It’s the act of sitting at a typewriter wearing cool glasses and a plaid shirt drinking bourbon and coffee with an ashtray of overflowing French cigarette butts beside you and some moody cool jazz playing in the background. And then going out getting drunk and stoned with massively attractive and interesting people. That’s what writing’s all about. That’s what life’s all about. And that, judging from the trailer, is what the movie version of ON THE ROAD is about.

Well, it’s not. Sorry and all that, but it’s not. (Well, maybe the bit about getting drunk and stoned with massively attractive and interesting people. As anyone who’s been in the bar at Bouchercon or Harrogate will testify.  No?  Oh well . . .) It may be what sells, the illusion of the writing life, but it’s not the reality of it. Nowhere near. If it was presented as that, that wouldn’t sell at all.

For instance, here I am writing this not on a typewriter but a computer. I have to because it’s a blog post and I have to send it down the internet. There’s no bottle of bourbon on the desk beside me, just a glass of water. That’s because if I started drinking while I was writing I would never get finished. Alcohol doesn’t fuel creativity. It saps it. It’s fine after you’ve worked but not during. Likewise there’s no overflowing ashtray. That’s because I don’t smoke, French cigarettes or otherwise. And there’s no moody jazz playing in the background. Possibly because I can’t write if there’s music playing but mainly because I can’t stand jazz. (I think all those years of being dragged round duff jazz clubs at college did that for me.) So no. None of that. I’m just sitting at my desk, writing. It’s hellishly unexciting to watch.

There’s also another couple of things that make me wary of the whole idea of veneration that the cult of Kerouac encourages. The first one is the fact that we celebrate a writer who died young. As if he had such a talent that it burnt him out to use it. No. He was an alcoholic and died of an internal haemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. Burroughs and Ginsberg didn’t die young. They stayed around to watch their excesses diminish their work. The other problem I have with him – and all the beats but not exclusively just them – is the fact that they’re still seen as rebels. Reading their work is an act of rebellion. Erm, it’s not. They’re part of the literary canon. They have mainstream Hollywood films made about them. They have civic memorials to them. They’re published as classic literature. They’re all of those things. But not rebels. They may be marketed as rebels, but but only in a canonically sanctioned way.

Having said that, if young people want to read those books and think they’re being rebellious then that’s fine. No argument with that. As long as they’re reading. And I don’t know, maybe they do feel rebellious when they read them. Maybe some sixteen year old kid picks up ON THE ROAD and sees a whole new literature before him. A new world and a new way of writing about the world. And living in the world. Maybe he doesn’t want to read what some miserable old bloke who’s the same age as Kerouac was when he died has to say about it. Maybe he thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever read. And it may be. Because he’s also listening to the best music anyone’s ever heard ever. And seeing and doing the best things that have happened to anyone EVER.

And if that’s the case, great.  Because to be honest, I’m more than just a little jealous.