Twitter Friends vs Fans
by Stella Atrium
__________________

Before iTunes, Smashwords and 99¢ eBooks on Kindle, the rule of thumb for a performer who wanted to attract the attention of industry big wigs was to show that he had 1000 loyal fans. We are in the Wild West stage of selling books just now where anything goes and the lowest bidder wins the most traffic.  But traffic and fans aren't the same creature.

A fan tells friends about his favorite performer (like a review), plays the tunes at parties (like a book chat group), and wears a t-shirt with the band logo (like buying a paperback). A fan RETURNS for more products from the same performer and puts down her money at retail prices.

I don't understand free ebooks on Kindle or Smashwords.  The writer spends all her life writing this book at the sacrifice of so many other activities and time with loved ones. Why devalue the product?

I'm not convinced Twitter traffic translates to sales, either. I see writers promoting each other, or cross-promoting with reviewers and handlers.  The writer is like a candidate surrounded by members of the press and cannot reach past the loud-talking reporters to find a voter willing to shake hands.

Maybe the audience we are seeking aren't even among our followers on Twitter.

Years ago I fooled around in non-profit theater in Chicago where attendance was one-quarter house on a good night and theater groups lived for reviews in The Reader and grants from Thorten Foundation. The truth was that no matter how well produced the performance for acting, directing, or set direction — the audience for live theater was sparse, even at low ticket prices. A producer in this arena could not expect to see returns on her investment.

The plethora of giveaways on sites trying to build loyalty (for the site, not for the writer) is similar to non-profit theater in Chicago. Except for a couple break-out sites that facilitate the reading community like GoodReads and LibraryThing, the audience just isn't there.

How does the self-publisher gain those "1000 loyal fans" for convincing evidence that her writing rises above the pack and is worthy to become a book-of-the-month choice for reading clubs?

Reputation is everything. There are several levels of reputation, though. Listed are 10 types to avoid.

    1.    The Situation — Anyone can show his navel and get others to look.  Be sure there's integrity and a reason the fan should return.
    2.    Always free — If it's free, that means you couldn't get anybody to buy it. Have a little dignity.
    3.    Trading favors — My back doesn't needs scratching. Because you asked, I know you haven't found true fans yet.
    4.    Inflated claims — "If you liked Jurassic Park, you're gonna love my self-published book." I always turn away when the writer claims to be like some other writer.
    5.    Five-star fan reviews on Amazon — Really? Were they posted by your mother?
    6.    Twitter Blanket — the same note every two minutes announcing the launch of your book. Your followers already read the announcement. Nobody else sees it. Who are you talking to?
    7.    Begs for reviews or retweets — Be patient, a quality reviewer will find a quality book soon enough. Building brand loyalty only happens over time.
    8.    Writer blog tour — Sponsored by another writer in a chat room where only writers sign in.
    9.    Salacious claims to increase traffic — Fool me once and "unfollow" is my next gesture.
    10.    Purchasing followers — Get real!

The Lovely Bones: a Study in Writerly POV
by Stella Atrium
______________


The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was published in 2002 and a Peter Jackson movie followed, so I’m not giving away secrets when I reveal that the narrator is a dead girl. This review includes specific plot details, though, so **spoiler alert**.

The story is about how family members work through grief, and a little about cosmic justice. If the reader recently lost a loved one, reading the novel may be heartrending.

Sebold managed multiple perspectives in each scene since the narrator spies from heaven and tells the story through the eyes of a suburban schoolgirl. The creative use of verb tense and simple sentence structure reinforces the deep but flat POV. Aspiring writers can take a lesson here about how to integrate “double voiced” sentences (see: Mikhail Bakhtin).

After she is murdered, Susie exists in “my own heaven” and frequently views family members, school chums, and the man who murdered her. For the first hundred pages, Sebold restricts the narration to the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who discovers secrets her parents hold dear and also how the world works. For example, she follows the rabbit that carries poison in the garden back to the burrow where the whole family dies.
Susie can spy on individual members of the family and school friends. Later she seems to view the whole town during a specific event (the escape of her murderer) for what each person is doing at that moment.

There are several stories (made into movies) about a return from heaven. http://www.moviecus.com/movie_search/heaven/relevance/1

Who can forget Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait? or A Pure Formality with Gérard Depardieu and Roman Polanski?

The Lovely Bones has a strong presence in this crowd, even though the Peter Jackson movie with Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci did the novel no favors.
In her own heaven, Susie can call into existence comforting objects and the company of favorite dogs. She is guided to a tree where her heaven overlaps with the personal heavens of other murder victims, and later as spirits they ride along with the bad guy during his downward spiral.  I’m glad the dénouement didn’t offer a cliché ending, but rather a drawing away – like a boat receding from shore – so heaven is not restricted in scope.

Discovery by other characters for needed plot points is managed deftly. Susie is a passive observer, for example, when her sister Lindsey deduces by the presence of a red scarf that her mother slept with the detective assigned to Susie’s case.

As the months and years pass, Susie’s perspective matures and the insights grow world-weary. While she follows siblings and school chums into adulthood, her connections with them allow her to travel to areas she never knew in life, and see what they were and were to become in the same paragraph. This development feels rather like she has the help of the ghosts of Christmas past and future simultaneously. And much later she flies with her dead grandfather while they chase birds skimming treetops in several states.

Some of the events are sugar-sweet, and the double loss (sister and absent mother) experienced by an inarticulate younger brother is underdeveloped. The reanimation of Susie for sex with the high school sweetheart is silly. I had sex with my high school sweetheart when we were adults and it was not transformative, as she describes.

When the story ends, we have the same number of characters as in the beginning. Nobody commits to an outsider. Even when the sister and her fiancé want to refurbish a strange old house, the owner turns out to be the father of a school chum. Maybe that’s how life works in the suburbs. That feature, however, keeps the story in its own little world, tight and self-abusive.

Aspiring writers who struggle with managing a narrator’s voice or multiple views for the same scene can learn much craft from Alice Sebold.

Self-Publishers: Managing Process Frustration

So I finished a sustained writing effort and felt euphoria from working consistently with characters and scenes. (200 pages! Yeah!) I wanted to share my elation and found my artist friend to explain what I had accomplished. He said, “I’m glad you finished your piece.” And that was it.Later he caught up with me and wanted to expand his response. “It’s just that I have not read the book, and I don’t know what you mean.” I told him my theory about process frustration that all artists feel, but novelists feel in spades.

Signs of Process Frustration:

1)    Did you ever talk for hours about your characters or themes to complete strangers?
2)    After expressing you ideas about where you are in the project, did you find that you no longer have the creative energy to write?
3)    Did you ever wear out family members describing the fresh scenes so they wonder what’s in your head and why didn’t you make dinner?
4)    Did you become silent and selfish about the project or characters or themes because you believe expressing the ideas dilutes them?
5)    Conversely, did you ever lend chapters to a friend only to get the critique “It needs work?”

How to Manage Process Frustration:

1)    Recognize it for what it is. You are engaged with characters who your friends don’t know. Why mix the two?
2)    Enjoy to euphoria of completion without tying it to the work – try a walk along the beach
3)    Avoid visiting the emotive quotient on friends and family.
I had a good friend once who was a big sports fan. If his team won, we went out for a meal and batting practice. If his team lost, we left him alone in the man-cave rather than try to cheer him up.  During play-offs, Sunday nights could be grim.

As a writer, I have found that this kind of spill-over makes even less sense because your family cannot engage with your characters.
Another choice is to find friends among writers and trade stories and chapters for critique. One recommended source is the fantasy writers group on Reddit.  Some people swear by this process, but I have always found that my critiques are too detailed and poorly received. New writers, especially, are too sensitive for ideas for improvement.
So, what’s the solution? Tolerate the solitude and learn to treasure good reviews on GoodReads and LibraryThing?

I have found that discussing craftsmanship with fellow artists, some from tangent disciplines, helps with articulating method, constraints, signals for poor choices, finding satisfaction, learning from finished products, avoiding bad critiques.  The chats about craft are often conceptual rather than practical, but serve as an area where we can at least admit the pressures and face the long stretches of time spent alone.
Your turn to participate… How do you manage process frustration?

Better Than "Used to Be" for Self-Publishers

by Stella Atrium
___________________________

Last week a self-publisher complained to me that the lag-time between a GoodReads giveaway and posted fan reviews on Amazon was three weeks.  I turned away to hide my smirk.  I supposed it's true that we're so spoiled by the internet, we don't remember how it used to be. 

A decade ago I trusted a small publisher to produce a paperback fantasy novel I wrote. Turns out, he was really a printer masquerading as a publisher with no press release plan or distribution plan.  The weight fell on me to get the word out.

I did research and surfed the web for compatible sites and posted articles about writing and even a "glass bead game" that asked readers to buy the book.  This was before FaceBook in the days of listserv — remember listserv?

I attended sci-fi conventions and traveled to bookstores in the Chicagoland area and staged and attended author appearances.

I begged friends to lend support at my author appearance at the local and famous bookstore where the proprietor could boost my contacts inside the industry.  Except it rained cats-and-dogs that night and I felt sorry for the four friends who did make it to the event, late and drenched.

My efforts went nowhere.  It used to be that a self-promoter expended time and treasure and never reached the intended audience. Listed are a few memories that are burned into my mind.

1)    Introvert at Tradeshow — Did you ever see a booth at a trade show inhabited by a painfully shy writer who spoke to three people the whole day?  I have.

2)    Author Appearance with No Fans — Did you ever see an author at Borders seated alone at a table with stacks of her books and a blank expression of defeat? I have.

3)    Retail Marketing to Bookstores — One writer told me he boosted sales by driving up the California coast visiting bookstores for a personal pitch to owners to place 4 books on the shelves of each stop. An E for effort, but the price of gasoline makes this adventure prohibitive — even if the retail stores are still there.  A hit-or-miss method at best.

4)    Book Signings at Conventions — Writers hate this duty and function like turtles out of the shell. I count Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Jordan in this number. Writers often drink to get past the dread, so they function like hungover shell-less turtles at the morning signing, drinking copious amount of water.

5)    Regional Conventions — Did you ever attend a regional convention where you negotiated a giveaway of your book as part of the "fan appreciation" bag, only to discover the 80 attendees preferred stories about zombies and were really there to get laid?  I have.

6)    Listings on Industry Websites — These were accomplished using a form with no personal contact and no acceptance of connected blogs or Amazon listings.  Some of these still hover online, static and aging and misleading.

7)    Fan Websites — These genre lovers accepted articles and shameless self-promotion to boost traffic by adding your fans.  Except your fans and hers together came to five, including your mother.

8)    Getting into the Pipeline — Used to be... All promotion was accomplished with paperbacks, so each event included shipping a case of forty books to the hotel that hosted the convention, and then shipping them home again. 

9)    Managing Remainders — Did you ever work with a printer who wanted to be certain the check cleared before he shipped the books, even at 40% off?  Did this same printer dump remainders on the market so they hung around for three years at $1.89 sold by resellers on Amazon?  I have. 

10)     Tardy Reviews -- Did you ever find a complimentary review of your novel three years later by a respected reviewer on LibraryThing who must have picked up a remainder book?  Guess what...  that happened to me too!

So don't bring your complaints here that GoodReads or Twitter or LibraryThing aren't working for you.  Industry connections today are accomplished without shipping cases of books to neighboring states, and without leaving the house. 

Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.

Self-Publishers: Is Your Work Good Enough for ePub?

by Stella Atrium
4/11/12
_________________________________

I produced a couple plays in Chicago small theater and worked with great performers, directors, fight instructors, and crew who gave their hearts as well as their time to display new works in non-profit theater.

One director was experienced from her country-of-origin and talked often about how she procured costumes and set decorations and good press for a theater group there that was attached to a high school.  Of course, Chicago is a world-class market, even for non-profit -- and finding these treasures was also a bigger effort in our fragmented communities.  

Small theater is about vision, and also about compromise as the group approached opening night and made choices for what could get completed in time for that first raised curtain.  Occasionally, we had to settle for what we could accomplish rather than the original vision.

We were lucky to generate some buzz about the production, and a famous reviewer from The Chicago Tribune was scheduled to visit a performance in the first week of an eight-week run.  When this director learned that the reviewer would write about our production, she broke out in hives – literally.

Suddenly, none of the completed work was good enough.  The director started driving the production manager, the crew, the actors, and everybody for improved choices, better flow, smoother cues, enhanced lighting, additional costume choices.  Finally, I realized that she had not experienced this level of scrutiny from reviewers and was gripped with fear that the production was not good enough for the Tribune.

Time to step up to prime time.

Self-publishing is similar to this example in that, for a good part of the project, the writer can please herself and complete the amount of work needed to meet personal goals.  The writer can make a website, join Twitter and FaceBook, and create a blog submitted to Tumblr.

The writer can solicit reviews from friends and from companies that sell services, and post the kind words mined from a few paragraphs posted by a reader who only has her own reading arch to draw on for comparison.  This work – and it’s real work – takes dedication and vision and commitment to selling the value of the story.

Except at some point a world-class reviewer will notice your story.  At some point a fellow writer who has reputation and sales will look at your story.  A writer who you have read and admire will follow you on Twitter.  Eventually, an agent or publisher who is trolling Twitter and GoodReads for the next break-out novel will stumble across your book cover.

Will you make the grade? Or are you trying to publish your dreams more than publish a real-world classic.

•    Is your story more than 90 pages? Was the story copy-edited more than once?

•    Is the cover derivative from similar stories so they all look alike?

•    Is the grammar correct? Does the reader engage within the first 4 pages?

•    Is the blurb truthful and informative? Do the promo paragraphs respect the genre?

•    Is the primary character fully drawn? Are side characters interesting and various?

•    Does the plot teach the reader something about herself while moving along at a good clip?

•    Is the story satisfying for growth in all character? Where is the surprise?

These concerns cannot be changed after the reviewer has found fault or expressed a wish that the story was better presented. The writer cannot argue with the reviewer and claim his view ignores all your good work.

What writers among you have taken a story off the market and reworked it after the reviewers wrote unkind comments that more work is needed?

Is your story only good enough for epub, or is your story ready to endure the scrutiny that you think you seek? Some opportunities happen only once.  Some creative work exists in solid form (museum quality) and is no longer available for re-edit.

Is the story ready for prime time?

Girl Heroes in Current Fantasy Novels: A Lament

by Stella Atrium
______________________


Back to my first complaint.  I was making a case that women characters are cheated in sci-fi / fantasy stories.  A reader countered my assertions that several writers present the young lead hero as a girl.  So I decided to look into this trend that is a common trope for the 2001 -2011 decade.

I read The Bone Doll’s Twin (the trilogy) by Lynn Flewelling where a boy/girl named Tobin starts out as a boy due to magic, because the girl heir would have been killed.  She fights the last battle, though, in full armor on horseback wielding a sword AS A GIRL.  The ambiguity of gender confusion was interesting, but the forest witch was a more fascinating character.  This book, at least, presents the troubles of other women who want to join the fight, or who serve fighters.

I read the Poison Study series by Maria V. Snyder where a girl named Yelena is trained by a mean minister named Valek who later admits to sexual interest and becomes her savior when her foolhardy trust in his lessons get her in trouble.  They succeed together, but he has all the real power.  There’s another female character in this story named Star, but she serves only as counterpoint.

I read The Book of Deacon, which is the first in a series by Joseph R. Lallo.  This female lead character, a too-naïve girl named Myranda, is always alone and persecuted until she reaches hidden island where everybody has magic; a cloying feast of description and little plot.  She also bonds with a mean, mysterious character older than her and with sexual interest.  She sheds all the security and friends in this paradise to follow him into trouble.  Do you see a pattern yet?  

I read The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold and enjoyed every paragraph.  This female character has a brother who should be heir, and a teacher who is more than he seems.  However, she has a mother and grandmother, a BFF and ladies-in-waiting.  Within the feudal society where the bad guys have no redeeming qualities, she makes decisions to side-steps the fate that only a woman would face – marriage to the wrong man as a pawn in court politics. The solutions were too easy, but the character of Cazaril was a delight in his fatalism.  A fun romp into formula writing.

I’m currently reading Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson because of the buzz on GoodReads about the next upcoming book in the series – and something about a video game based on the series.  Here the primary character is a guy named Kelsier with specific powers based on real physics. I can see the appeal to sci-fi readers who are mostly guys.  The female lead, since his wife is long-dead, is a street waif named Vin who…  wait for it…  has special powers she knows nothing about because she was orphaned from her noble family.

Another big surprise…  in Mistborn there are NO OTHER WOMEN.  Oh, yeah, there’s a cook who cuts Vin’s hair so she looks more like a girl. Where are her sisters, aunts, cousins, BFFs, younger girls she persecutes?

Guys…  Women live in a world of women.  Women solve problems differently than how men solve problems.  Women don’t act on inflamed anger or rush into danger like Keifer Sutherland in 24 – so not believable (even for a guy).

Where are the stories where women solve the kinds of problems that women have using the kinds of resources that women can gather?  Unwanted births, little access to wealth, no voice in the public square, the demand to follow custom, submission in a confrontational situation, secret revenge, and more.  Stop putting a sword in their hands and look around.

How do women succeed in adversity?  Here’s a hint…  They work WITH other women.

Aaahhh, I feel better now.  Got that off my chest.

Self-Publishers: Beware the Dreaded Comfort Zone
by Stella Atrium
______________________

I sometimes talk with an artist friend who has a studio in the same building as my writing studio.  He shows his works at the storefront gallery below us.  The gallery owner expends considerable effort in the Chicago market to draw an audience into his openings, and the paintings sell well.

Except now the painter wants to market his works to regional galleries and has picked a few favorites to approach.  His paintings have all sold, though, so he needs a not-for-sale cache to request an opening at other galleries.  He also needs a press kit and ready responses to interview questions.

“I first began painting because…  The biggest surprise in my career so far was…  My favorite color is green, thank you for asking, but I’m in my blue period now…”

I asked yesterday how the plan for the gallery tour was coming along.  His greatest fear is that the paintings will sell out at the first gallery and the tour will have to be canceled.

Oh, the trials of success.  

He gave me a soulful look and said, “I wish I hadn’t started with the gallery tour idea. The expense of travel. The need to sell myself into each market.  The constant glad-handling and repeated questions.  I’m dreading the whole adventure.”

It’s terrible that he’s so successful.  Just terrible!

Paintings are like fashion in a way.  Once Michelle Obama wears an outfit to a public event, she cannot be seen in that dress again.  Self-published books, however, are more like a stand-up routine at a comedy club.  Since the jokes work only on the people in the room, they can be re-used with a new audience.

An agent once told me that the market for books is limitless, once you tap into a national press release vein for marketing.  Unfortunately for self-publishers, that avenue is NOT Twitter.

I love Twitter and spend hours with writer friends there.  We retweet obsessively and provide space on each other’s websites for interviews.  We “Like” each other on FaceBook fan pages and post weekly digests of activity for our favorite writer-tweeps.  We give klout and gold and karma and hugs.

But we don’t read each other’s books, and we certainly don’t BUY them.  Twitter is not a current that leads to national reputation and SALES.  Twitter is a comfort zone where we count the number of retweets as success without a thought that they are only a return gesture for my retweet of his tweet about his book.  None of this activity has reached a reader who BUYS BOOKS.

Are you a writer on Twitter?  Do you have a blog or website where only fellow writers visit?  Do you count yourself as successful and ignore the sales numbers on the 1099-misc?

What is your next adventure to burst out of the comfort zone and market to regional bookstores and online READER sites?

Have you enabled RSS feed on the blog? Have your added "Like" buttons to the website that link to a fan FaceBook page?  Have you submitted topical articles to Tumblr or Helium?

Leave some suggestions here for that first step off the cliff.

Also visit me at http://www.librarything.com/er/giveaway/list#12178818
For a GIVEAWAY of 20 copies of fantasy novel SufferStone through March 26.

Why I Embrace Self-Publishing

By Stella Atrium
_________________________

I saw a solicitation for a tenured position at my alma mater for which I will apply.  Professors seldom leave this department, and competition for vacancies is fierce. I experienced sudden anxiety as though my whole future depended on submitting a stellar letter with quality documentation.  I recognized that tense feeling as the same I felt when approaching agents and publishers.

And then I had an epiphany, not unusual for a spring day in windy Chicago.

As a self-publisher, those feeling of anxiety are mostly absent. In fact, I just completed a round of letters sent with review copies that were requested in response to a press release that I wrote.  I jotted off the letters citing connections with the group through a PR service (cost: $175), and good reports about my fantasy novel launched in January 2012.  While I completed the “shipping and handling” exercise, I considered getting an assistant for this busy work. That’s how low the work was on my scale of importance.

I have skills for promoting, and for creative writing. So why was I so anxious about traditional publishers and the agents who lunch with them?

I was victim to no fewer than three (count them 3) printers who called themselves publishers, including the infamous Publish America.  I never received positive results from any of their promised marketing efforts.  Nada, zip, zero.

Here’s an analogy. I was raised in the country, and each spring we had to clean the slough of debris.  We opened a trap that served as a bottleneck and flushed fresh water through along with the sticks and leaves and earthworms. Soon the fresh water ran clear.

Maybe the same is true with self-publishing.  Sure, some writers should take more classes, and some self-promoters should take a breath.  But the new shape of the publishing industry sorts the quality (and ambitious) writers from the sticks and earthworms.  Soon enough books from the fresh writer who lived with frustration all this time will flow freely to readers, so that great characters and original work find an audience.

I will continue with a small publisher because the quality of the product is better than I can weave together on the laptop. I will avoid Smashwords and offering books for free because I believe reviewers who work with magazines find that level of publishing repugnant.

But here’s the question…  If I can make a website and blog, connect with writers and readers on Twitter, GoodReads and LibraryThing, and grab press release leads for $175, then why were writers willing to pay $4500+ to agents (or marketing executives) for less response?

All those self-important agents and publishers and advisors and naysayers can go fly a kite on this windy spring day. 

Fresh promotions start today!

Guest interview on website of International Best Selling Author Stacy Eaton.  


Guest blog post with fellow writer Emerald Barnes.

Upcoming interview with Hawaiian mystery writer Gail Baugniet.

Sign up for Giveaway of 20 copies 

 SufferStone: Book 1 of the Dolvia Saga

starts 3/5 through 3/26

Better Than "Used to Be" for Self-Publishers

by Stella Atrium
___________________________

Last week a self-publisher complained to me that the lag-time between a GoodReads giveaway and posted fan reviews on Amazon was three weeks.  I turned away to hide my smirk.  I supposed it's true that we're so spoiled by the internet, we don't remember how it used to be. 

A decade ago I trusted a small publisher to produce a paperback fantasy novel I wrote. Turns out, he was really a printer masquerading as a publisher with no press release plan or distribution plan.  The weight fell on me to get the word out.

I did research and surfed the web for compatible sites and posted articles about writing and even a "glass bead game" that asked readers to buy the book.  This was before FaceBook in the days of listserv — remember listserv?

I attended sci-fi conventions and traveled to bookstores in the Chicagoland area and staged and attended author appearances.

I begged friends to lend support at my author appearance at the local and famous bookstore where the proprietor could boost my contacts inside the industry.  Except it rained cats-and-dogs that night and I felt sorry for the four friends who did make it to the event, late and drenched.

My efforts went nowhere.  It used to be that a self-promoter expended time and treasure and never reached the intended audience. Listed are a few memories that are burned into my mind.

1)    Introvert at Tradeshow — Did you ever see a booth at a trade show inhabited by a painfully shy writer who spoke to three people the whole day?  I have.

2)    Author Appearance with No Fans — Did you ever see an author at Borders seated alone at a table with stacks of her books and a blank expression of defeat? I have.

3)    Retail Marketing to Bookstores — One writer told me he boosted sales by driving up the California coast visiting bookstores for a personal pitch to owners to place 4 books on the shelves of each stop. An E for effort, but the price of gasoline makes this adventure prohibitive — even if the retail stores are still there.  A hit-or-miss method at best.

4)    Book Signings at Conventions — Writers hate this duty and function like turtles out of the shell. I count Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Jordan in this number. Writers often drink to get past the dread, so they function like hungover shell-less turtles at the morning signing, drinking copious amount of water.

5)    Regional Conventions — Did you ever attend a regional convention where you negotiated a giveaway of your book as part of the "fan appreciation" bag, only to discover the 80 attendees preferred stories about zombies and were really there to get laid?  I have.

6)    Listings on Industry Websites — These were accomplished using a form with no personal contact and no acceptance of connected blogs or Amazon listings.  Some of these still hover online, static and aging and misleading.

7)    Fan Websites — These genre lovers accepted articles and shameless self-promotion to boost traffic by adding your fans.  Except your fans and hers together came to five, including your mother.

8)    Getting into the Pipeline — Used to be... All promotion was accomplished with paperbacks, so each event included shipping a case of forty books to the hotel that hosted the convention, and then shipping them home again. 

9)    Managing Remainders — Did you ever work with a printer who wanted to be certain the check cleared before he shipped the books, even at 40% off?  Did this same printer dump remainders on the market so they hung around for three years at $1.89 sold by resellers on Amazon?  I have. 

10)     Tardy Reviews -- Did you ever find a complimentary review of your novel three years later by a respected reviewer on LibraryThing who must have picked up a remainder book?  Guess what...  that happened to me too!

So don't bring your complaints here that GoodReads or Twitter or LibraryThing aren't working for you.  Industry connections today are accomplished without shipping cases of books to neighboring states, and without leaving the house. 

Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.