Tag Archives: authors

Authors, are you doing the wrong thing when it comes to Twitter sales?

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EDIT: As many people pointed out, this TOTALLY ALSO applies to Goodreads. See comments for details.

About a week ago, I was live-tweeting my new cable internet installation. I know, it doesn’t sound like much to live-tweet, but the dude installing my cable was unusually cool. I found out that he was super-afraid of spiders, but lest you think him unmanly, I would like to follow that with the fact that he’s a cage fighter. He reminded me of Andy Dwyer from Parks and Recreation, but smarter.

See? Super smart.

See? Super smart.

While I was live-tweeting about having cable internet installed, I had this conversation with DirecTV:

Here’s why this interaction ticked me off instead of enticing me toward buying their service:

  • Fake empathy. “Sounds frustrating, can I sell you something now plz?” Bzzzzzzt, wrong. It’s unfortunate, because the empathy play could have been very successful in a situation like this, but Lloyd, uh, pulled his trigger a little early, if you gets my meaning. By launching right into the pitch, he made himself seem vulture-like.
  • Lack of doing his homework. Any successful salesperson knows that people don’t give two shits about what you’re trying to sell them. They only care about things they want and things they need. Your job, then, as a salesperson, is to determine what they need and tell them why your product is the best thing to fulfill that need. Thirty seconds looking through my Twitter feed would have told Lloyd that I don’t actually need DirecTV because I was already having new service installed as we were tweeting. That’s like a car salesman trying to show you a car as you’re driving off in a car you just bought.
  • I didn’t even want TV, so even if I didn’t have another provider installing cable right then, I still don’t have any use for DirecTV.

What is it the kids say these days? SMH?

And here’s the kicker: should I ever be considering getting a service comparable to DirecTV, this little incident is going to ping in my brain. Even if it’s just a tiny negative, it’s still a negative; their competitors might not have any negatives, which would make this stand out stronger. This is the only interaction I’ve ever had with them, so most of what they are as a company to me is represented by an employee who takes the lazy route when doing online sales. Are their techs also lazy? Their customer service? This was not a good first impression.

There are probably blogs and magazines out there that suggest using a Twitter search to find potential customers so that you can solicit them. That’s what DirecTV seems to have done–set up a search for Time Warner Cable, look for complaints, and step in all smooth-like (snort): “Hey, girl. Heard you’re having a bad time with TWC. Come on over, I got what you need.” It’s actually quite a bit like a sleazy pick-up line, if you think about it. Knowing nothing about me, they tried to talk me into bed . . . figuratively speaking. I mean, I guess if sleazy PUA is the vibe you’re going for when you’re doing Twitter sales, this tactic would be the best thing for you–if not, then probably avoid it, and maybe avoid those blogs and sites if they’re not telling you how to use those searches effectively.

I get this from authors more frequently than I ought to, only far less targeted. (“She likes books and she has a few followers! Maybe she will read MY BOOK” seems to be about the extent of research done for Twitter pitches, as evidenced by the fact that I frequently receive pitches for erotica, romance, and bad urban fantasy.) Frankly, this is even worse; in the flirtation-as-sales-tactics analogy, at least DirecTV was going after a type. These authors, on the other hand, are hitting on anything with a pulse.

Don’t be that person. Don’t be a bad pick-up artist when you’re trying to sell your book.

DirecTV wasn’t getting a new customer that day no matter what sales tactic they tried; I wasn’t in the market for TV service, period. A little romance, though, might have opened the door to them at a later date. The conversation could have gone more like this:

DTV: “We’re sorry you had bad service from your cable provider. What happened?”

Me (eager to commiserate, as many jaded customers are): “They kept raising my rates! I’m paying almost $20 more per month than I was when I started! Ugh!”

DTV: “Oh no, that’s terrible. What kind of service did you have with them?”

Me: “Cable internet.”

DTV (being a television company and not an internet company, eep!): “I heard Internet Company X has outstanding service if you’re looking for a new provider. I hope you’d consider us if you ever need TV!”

Me: “Thanks for the helpful tip! If I ever need TV, I will look you guys up.”

If Lloyd had used this approach with me, it would have hit so many better notes. He would have seemed genuinely interested in discovering my needs as a customer, and he would have seemed helpful, despite the fact that he couldn’t directly sell me what I was in the market to buy. That shows real customer-needs focus, something I would remember if I did need TV.

For an author, this is a little trickier, I grant you. It’s far more difficult to work a pitch for your book into a conversation. However, there are some tips you can use here:

  • Be reader-oriented, not selling-your-book oriented. If someone puts out a call for book suggestions, for example, don’t recommend your book just because you want people to read it. (This happens SO OFTEN, I cannot even tell you. It’s always a womp-womp moment. Awkward.) You’re probably a reader, too, so talk to them as a reader, not as a salesperson.  If you can recommend a book they truly end up liking, you’ve just built up a nice little deposit of customer romance.
  • Do your homework on reading tastes if you’re going to tweet-solicit a blogger. Make sure you’re not trying to sell TV to a person shopping for internet.
  • Make genuine connections instead of using someone’s situation/complaint/request for books as an excuse to toss in a sales pitch. Not only does this de-smarm what might have been a bad pick-up-line situation, but it makes sure that you get valuable data that you can actually use to determine if the person will be a potential customer. Also, you might make a new friend! Friends are awesome!
If you don't totally have this song in your head now, we can't be friends.

If you don’t totally have this song in your head now, we can’t be friends. Okay, okay, we can be friends. I still love you.

Nothing but good things can come from this kind of sales approach. At worst, you haven’t pissed off any reasonable person. (If they’re unreasonable, just remember–we know who the unreasonable people are in our lives. We know who gets pissed when they haven’t even really been wronged. One of my family members used to do this in restaurants–go off on the servers for bullshit, non-issue “problems.” I always felt terrible for the servers and sometimes left them extra tips when the family member refused to do so.) At best, you get a new fan and maybe even a friend, a person who will talk you up, suggest you to friends, extol your best qualities and even defend you if some loony crank decides that you’ve done something to wrong them. Someone who will say, when your name comes up in conversation, “Oh, I know that person. She’s really cool, we talk on Twitter. I like her a lot.” I dunno about you, but that’s the kind of endorsement I’d want.

Have you had a bad tweet solicitation? Or a really good one? Share your Twitter sales stories in the comments below!

Reading Rage: Don’t Make Me Get Out My Red Pen

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Dear Self-Published Authors,

Can we chat for a sec?  Here, pull up a chair and let me get you some tea.  Tea is good for these types of discussions, right?  I think so.

Listen.  I think we need to have this talk because, quite frankly, many of you are doing this wrong.

No, I’m not talking about how you market yourself and your books (although Susie kind of has you covered in that department), I’m talking about the actual most important part of your book.  Your book.  Your writing.

Here’s the thing, self-pubs – by failing to properly proofread/edit/RE-READ your book, you’re not only failing your readers, you’re failing yourself as well.

I totally get that not everyone out there paid all the attention in English Class.  I understand that you may not have had your very own copy of your Grammar Primer that you carried around with you everywhere because you just LOVED LANGUAGE SO MUCH.  Really – I get it, swearsies.

My precioussssssssssss

I’d be willing to bet that you KNOW someone like that, though. I’d put good money on the fact that if you spend any amount of time on the internet AT ALL, you are acquainted with at least a handful of people that are complete and total grammar nerds.

“Oh, but most people don’t notice those things and if they do, they’re TAKING IT TOO SERIOUSLY!”

Okay, fine.  Maybe not everyone will notice.  Maybe.  But enough people will.  And those people that notice will likely either review your book, or just give up on you altogether.  Because an author that doesn’t care enough about the experience his/her readers have, just doesn’t give a damn at all.

Someone calls typos to your attention?  You are self-published, you can have that shit fixed and updated within an hour – for ebooks, anyway. To say that you “don’t have time” and that you’re “too busy” but you’ll “get around to it” is not only lazy, but disrespectful.

You don’t leave the house half dressed or looking like a cheap schlub, so why do you want to send your book out into the world that way?

“ZOMG, THE EDITORS WANT TO KILL MY BABY!”

Stop that shit.  Seriously, you stop that right now.  A good editor (even a halfway decent editor) doesn’t want to kill your baby, they want to help it be the best it can possibly be.  Why don’t you?  (And can we stop referring to books as babies?  That’s just gross.) You may think you know what’s best for your book, but if your work is full of homonyms and slipped tenses and just straight up WRONG WORDS, you shouldn’t be hitting that publish button.

 ”I’m an INDIE!  Indies don’t need to have their work polished!  It ruins that whole INDIE VIBE!”

This totally works. It’s polished AND from (an) Indie. Technically.

Okay, now you’re just asking for a punch in the junk.  Again, putting out something that hasn’t been read, re-read, stuck in a drawer (literal or figurative, name your hard drive “drawer” or something, I don’t care) for at least a month, then read again, rewritten and gone through several rounds of edits should NOT BE SOLD.  I don’t care if you think you got exactly what you wanted on the first go ’round.  Chances are really good that you didn’t.  Or that there are areas that need to be clarified/expanded on/removed altogether.  Giving yourself this distance from your work will make it better in the long run.  Please trust me on this.

An example:

I used to follow the blog of a woman I had much in common with musically.  We listened to a lot of the same music and even liked a lot of the same books.  She was funny, and even though I thought her posts needed to be proofread sometimes, I still enjoyed much of what she had to say.

Then came the day that she announced she’d written and self-published a book of short stories.

“Whaaaa?  She never mentioned that she’d been writing!” I said to myself.

Why had she never mentioned that she’d been writing?  Because she had LITERALLY JUST STARTED.  She wrote and published this book in less than two weeks.  TWO WEEKS!  I’m sorry, but that’s just unacceptable.  Two weeks is not enough time to perform rewrites or give oneself any sort of distance at all.  You can’t be impartial if only two weeks have passed.

It’s lazy, and it’s rude.  Yes, rude.  You expect people to PAY for something that you can’t be bothered with?  No, I’m sorry.

I still followed her, though.

Until 3 weeks later, when she announced that she’d published both another book of short stories AND a novel.  Both of which had been written in that same three week period.

Sorry, lady.  I’m done.  I don’t have time to read the blog of someone who shows zero respect toward potential readers (and CONSUMERS).

It’s that attitude right there that puts so many readers off of self-published work.  That “I wrote it, what else do you want from me?” stance is HURTING so many of you.

We read to escape.  We read to learn things.  We read for enjoyment.  We do NOT read to mentally correct your writing.

I mean, unless you’re paying us to do so, amirite?  Why should we pay YOU for something that you haven’t dressed up in its Sunday Best?

This showed up under a search for Dressed Up Books. Might die laughing.

We shouldn’t.  And we won’t.  Or, at the very least I won’t – and not to sound like a posturing asshole, but I’m the kind of person you want reading your books.  If I like something, I make sure the WHOLE WORLD knows.  I shout it from the figurative rooftops.  I tell everyone I know why they NEED TO read this book (I know, I know, I totally fail sneaky-fuckerism, but my method works for me).  And isn’t that what you want?  For people to be…y’know, reading your work?

TL;DR

I love self-published authors, as long as they go about self-publishing the right way.  If you’ve published something yourself I WANT you to succeed.  I want as many people to read your book as possible.  Unfortunately, many of you are shooting yourselves in your collective feet by approaching the process so cavalierly.  There’s a reason books can sometimes take years to come out in the world of the Big Guys.  There’s a reason editors have jobs.  There’s a reason people look down on a lot of you.  Do us all a favour and proofread the hell out of your book to make sure it’s as strong as possible before sending it out.  And if someone brings an error to your attention, thank them and take care of it straight away.  People will respect and appreciate that.  It shows that you CARE ABOUT your readers.

What do you guys think?  Am I too picky, or do more self-published authors need to get out their own red pens?  How much of a factor is this for you when deciding what to read?  Let me know in the comments!

 

So, you want to charge more than 99 cents for your ebooks? Here’s how!

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99centdreams

So, I was reading this article that someone linked on Twitter about what the 99 cent eBook price-point “means” or whatever to the future of self-publishing. If you know me at all, you know that I was eye-rolling pretty hard over some of the stuff in the article. Even the title itself is telling–indie authors question the price. Duh, of course they do. Everyone wants to get maximum payday from their work, amiright? But indie authors–you guys aren’t the ones buying the product. Do you see where it might get a little sticky if you start price-questioning?

Here’s the good news! You do have control over what people pay for your product, although it’s not in the way you might think.

One tactic I see overused (overused in that, it should never ever be used, ever) in trying to get readers to pay a “fair” price for self-published books is to tell us how hard indie authors work to put out a product, and that we should pay more because they spent a year writing it, made a monetary investment, poured their soul into it, etc. That their work is “worth” more because of that. Authors? The longer you continue to feel this way, the longer you will not get paid what you think you should be earning for your books. You might be protesting at me already for saying that, but I intend to show you why what I’m telling you is true.

The first thing you should never, ever forget: readers are not generous patrons of the arts, they are customers.

Writing books is a creative endeavor. Selling books is business. If you want to wear both hats, you need to know when to take one off and put the other on. When you’re marketing, you need to put on your business hat. If you forget this step, you’ll only stumble into earning a living writing by being lucky–do you want to leave it to luck?

One lady in the comments of the article I linked went off about how readers “should appreciate” how much time and effort went into writing a book. She made a point that we wouldn’t expect free lattes at Starbucks, why should we expect free content? Two things came to mind right off the bat: one is that, publishing is a multi-billion dollar business. We clearly do not “expect” free content, as those billions have to be coming from somewhere every year. The second thing that made me cringe when I read that is that, if Starbucks had taken her attitude of demanding that people “appreciate” their product and pay the price that they demand, they would have been long out of business by now.

Imagine when Starbucks was new, and you were used to getting coffee for less than a buck. You walk in and yow! A coffee with foamy milk was almost three dollars. Imagine if you’d asked the barista, “Hey, why is the coffee so much more here when I can get it for fifty cents down the street?” and the barista answered back, “Hey, man, I got up at four o’clock this morning to grind beans and brew coffee. I have to foam the milk every time someone orders one of these things. It’s worth that much because I have to put a ton of work into making that foamy coffee for you!” You might have been impressed with the amount of work that goes into it, but having never tried the coffee and not knowing anything about it, your real question wouldn’t really be answered–and that question is, “Why should I be paying more for something that I can get cheaper elsewhere?” The attitude probably would have turned you off completely to boot.

And remember, your customers have a lot of options because you have a lot of competition.

You, as an indie author, have an enormous amount of competition. In 2003, there were 300,000 books published. In 2011, there were three million books published. In 2012, that number could end up being as high as fifteen million, according to the number of ISBNs issued just this year. This is called market saturation, and it’s the real reason that you have a hard time making money off of your books. It’s not because your “entitled” customers want free content or don’t understand your blood-sweat-and-tears contribution to your work. There’s simply a glut of self-published fiction. Most of us do well to read fifty to a hundred books in a year, much less three million or more.

What that means for indie authors is that, if you randomly decide to charge more for a book just because you think it’s worth more, there are hundreds of thousands of competitors willing to step right in and take your sale. In the free market, competition is a major factor in determining what you can charge for a good or service. If you opened up a retail store and decided to charge twice what your competition charges just because you “feel” your goods are worth more, your store would go out of business. It’s the same idea with your books. You cannot charge based solely on what you think your book is worth and expect to do well. You cannot tell your customers that they “should” appreciate your work and pay based on that. They will go somewhere else.

How Starbucks got people to pay more for coffee.

Starbucks did not get to be where it is by just demanding that customers appreciate the quality of their product. Howard Schultz had a vision, and he knew it would be difficult to pull off in America because of the price point at which he would have to sell to be profitable and grow. He put a number of policies into practice that would help him achieve his vision:

  • top-notch customer service that was unlike anything most people had seen before
  • product consistency and insane(ly good) devotion to quality
  • great in-store ambiance
  • customer education about the product, such as where the beans come from and why they cost more (“arabica beans” wasn’t a major selling point outside of specialty markets before Starbucks made it a thing and told people why it’s better; now it’s everywhere)
  • sampling so that customers could try the product firsthand and know that it wasn’t the same Maxwell House that the diner served down the street (this is a HUGE one. It’s the quickest and best way to convince people of quality.)
  • specific customer service policies that would encourage brand loyalty and make both customers and employees feel like part of the “family” (remembering names, drinks, calling employees “partners” and allowing them to share the company with stock options, giving employees the tools to bond with customers to keep them coming back)
  • being innovative in corporate responsibility, such as giving even 20 hour per week employees health insurance and getting involved with various community and national volunteering or humanitarian projects, so that people would get warm fuzzies when they thought of Starbucks
  • encouraging customers to participate, taking ownership of their experience with customized beverages

All of these policies added value to Starbucks in the customers’ eyes so that the customers would feel A-OK about paying more for coffee. Starbucks didn’t just demand that the customers appreciate their product, they demonstrated why their product and company was superior and deserving of customer dollars. It’s the business version of “show, don’t tell.”

Self-published authors can do this, too. You can. But you have to start with the idea that you’re not entitled to a single sale just because you wrote a book. I’m sorry; I know that’s harsh, but it’s absolutely true. Once you get rid of the notion that you are entitled to make a living being a writer just because you wrote a book and published it online, you can start building your audience and reputation from the ground up.

Show us why your book is worth more than the thousands of other books that we could be buying.

Did you notice in the Starbucks list, I left off “buy great beans”? That was a given. Starbucks would have failed if they had crappy, second-rate coffee. (I know, some people hate the taste of their coffee–but they do use quality beans. It’s a matter of palate rather than quality.)

Writing a book that people want to read, that is a given. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be self-publishing.

You have to do more to stand out in a crowd of, literally, millions.

Adding value to your work goes beyond just writing a good book. It even goes beyond getting your book professionally edited and getting a professional cover design–right now, the lack of those things are huge issues in the self-publishing world, but you need to treat your book like these services are mandatory, or you will be behind the curve when innovations spring up to help separate the first draft manuscripts from the polished books. (They’re coming. They’re already in the works, even–I personally know people who are tackling this issue.) Once that happens, you will still need to separate yourself from the people that didn’t get left behind. You also still need to compete with traditionally-published books, which will nearly always be shined up good before they’re launched.

[Yes, I used "good" on purpose there. I'm from Kentucky, it's part of my DNA.]

Anything that makes your book different from other good books, or that makes it stand out, or that makes you stand out, tell us about it. If you can’t think of anything, that might be the underlying problem in not being able to get more for your ebooks. We pay more for branded items than off-brand items, so brand yourself and let us know who you are and what you do.

Remember that overnight success doesn’t happen.

You know The Bloggess, right? Blogger, author, “overnight success” (that took a decade)? Her book has been really successful, and she earned every bit of it by working her tail off, putting out free content, for years. That’s really the hard truth about becoming a writer and being successful enough to pay your bills: you’re going to give a lot up for free, or cheap, until you earn out your payday. When you self-publish, you’re skipping a huge advantage that traditional publishing has: a built-in audience. Distribution. Reader trust. You’re starting at, or close to, zero. Just like any other business, you’ll have to operate in the red for awhile until you build up your reputation and customer base. This isn’t anything surprising or abnormal–unfortunately, almost nobody gets to skip to the head of the line.

Case Study, or, how you can apply this in the real world.

Someone that sj and I both love is @ChuckWendig. He’s an author who has built himself an audience that most self-published authors dream of building. He has published fiction (some of it is through Angry Robot, not sure about all of it) and self-publishes books about writing. He also blogs at Terrible Minds.

Wendig may or may not have launched Terrible Minds with an eye toward adding value to himself as an author (I’m not a Wendig Expert), but that’s exactly what seems to have happened. By writing well about something that he’s passionate about, he draws in a lot of traffic; by writing well and putting it out there for anybody to read, he can more easily make conversions when it comes to sales because we already have proof that he can write. When you can become a fan of someone for free, you’re a lot more likely to open up your wallet when they put something out for sale. (In the Starbucks model, this is “sampling” and “customer education.”)

Wendig is also amazing at social media. He puts out great tweets that are share-able, which gets him more exposure; he also talks to people who talk to him, in a nice way that doesn’t make them angry. I’ve even had conversations with him where we disagree about stuff, and he was still super nice about it. He respects his readers and doesn’t expect things from them, or go off on rants about how shitty it is that they will only pay x amount for his books. This adds value to his brand, because a person is more likely to pay someone that they like for content. (In the Starbucks model, this is “customer service” and also general brand identity.)

Wendig also regularly engages his audience. He runs writing contests on his blog (in the Starbucks model, this would be under taking ownership/customizing one’s experience there) and asks for feedback. His audience is not just full of people that followed him through a promotion who tune him out when he puts out content; they’re participating. They’re turned on, so to speak. This undoubtedly helps his sales.

If you looked up Chuck Wendig on Amazon, you might notice that some of his non-fiction books sell for $2.99. If you look more closely, you’ll also see that these books are full of content that he has posted previously, for free, on his blog. Let me say that again: people are paying for content that they could read for free on his blog. He organized it by topic and made it available for e-readers, which is always good for convenience, but they didn’t need to buy them. They wanted to own the content because they friggin’ love his content.

Chuck Wendig didn’t write a book, kick back, and then put it out there and wonder why people weren’t buying it. He hustled his ass off to build an audience (whether he did it to build an audience or whether he hustled his ass off and the audience came, it amounts to the same); that audience, in turn, values Wendig enough to pay for content even when they can get it for free. And they value him enough to share him around to their friends and create new fans. He didn’t demand that they recognize his value, he demonstrated it over and over.

If you want to charge more than $.99 in a market where you have to compete with millions of other people, you need to figure out how to do that. Don’t tell us that you have value, go out and show us you have value.

Are you a self-published author? Have you found any self-published authors because they created an online presence? Do you have any tips for other authors that have worked for you? Do you like cake? Drop it all in the comments below!

 

 

Why Aspiring Authors Shouldn’t Major in English

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Do you want to be a writer when you grow up?  I know I do.  When I was in high school trying to decide on a college and a major, English seemed like the perfect subject to study.  After all, English is the language I would be writing in, right?  Looking back, I think I made a huge mistake.

Perks of Being an English Major

This is exactly how my life went . . . oh, wait . . .

The major problem with majoring in English was that, although I gained some marketable skills from it, it did very little to prepare me for being a writer.  Here are some of the reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea for writers to major in English:

  • You already know English.  If you can read this, chances are you already have native or near-native proficiency in English.  Why would you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a program where you’re just going to learn more about a language you already know?  Most programs don’t even spend much time on grammar or linguistics, so you’re not really gaining any arcane English knowledge that you couldn’t have picked up while you were in high school.
  • Writing classes are required for every major.  For most four-year degrees, regardless of what you major in, you will be required to take a course in English composition.  My upper-level English composition class had students from every major in it.  Even at the most basic level of English 101, you will learn how to write an essay and you will learn correct grammar.  Best of all, one of your required textbooks will be a grammar reference.  Make sure you hold onto it; I still have mine.
  • You’re just going to read a lot of literature.  If you want to be a writer, but you don’t already read as much as you possibly can, I want you to hit yourself.  No, really.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait . . . Okay, as I was saying, if you want to be a writer, you probably already read all the time.  Something has to inspire your desire to create worlds, right?  The things you read will have a major impact on your writing style and the kinds of stories you will create.  For me, I enjoyed reading great English literature from a variety of time periods, but as a writer, I find that those were not the kinds of stories that inspired me.  I drew most of my inspiration from my leisure reading of speculative fiction–not from reading the classics.

    How to Read a Book

    Fortunately, there’s a whole book on the subject.

  • Studying other subjects gives you a different perspective to write from.  I really enjoy reading a book with realistic details about careers, hobbies, and interests outside of my own scope.  It provides a kind of escape from my own mundane life.  I don’t know much about business, law, or science, but I think books that revolve around these topics are fascinating.  Michael Crichton is a good example of a writer whose expertise in scientific fields translated into fascinating science fiction stories involving everything from biotech to mutant gorillas.  All I’m saying is you don’t want to be the kid who writes about writers writing.  Only Stephen King can get away with that; he breaks all the rules.
  • English programs don’t teach job skills or business sense.  Let’s be honest: most writers are going to need a second job while they’re writing that bestseller.  On a resume, you look about as smart as the French exchange student who got good grades in French.  What’s more, in order to succeed as a writer, you’ll need to know how to be an effective communicator and an effective promoter.  You would think that writing letters or e-mails and writing fiction go hand-in-hand, but they don’t.

I don’t necessarily want to discourage aspiring writers from majoring in English.  Plenty of successful writers have been English majors.  However, it’s important to realize that an English degree will leave gaps in your education and skill set.  If I had to do it over, I would have picked a journalism or business major instead, and I would have also joined up with the school newspaper and a few other clubs that interested me.  Get out and try some things that are outside of your comfort zone, because fiction writing is about characters overcoming conflict, and you won’t know about conflict until you’ve faced a challenge.

Maybe you’re planning to major in English anyway, or maybe you’ve already got an English degree.  What was your experience with an education in English?  Leave a comment!

Stephen King Week: The ballad of Richard Bachman, alter ego of Stephen King.

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When a Washington DC bookstore employee blew the lid off of King’s secret pseudonym, Richard Bachman, I was still in diapers. As a result, I didn’t even find out about Richard Bachman until ’round about 1996, with the release of The Regulators, which was a mirrored/companion novel to Desperation. (More on that when sj throws down a Death Match between ‘em.) Hardback books were just a touch out of my reach, given that my allowance was about $10 a week (and did I spend that allowance on books every week? bet-yer-ass), so I stared at them in fascination for months until they came out in paperback and I could finally read them.

I found the concept of Bachman terribly interesting. One writer, two voices–King, who goes for more of the straight, often a little campy horror (say sorry), versus Bachman, a voice that’s dark and cynical, more about the terrors of the mind than about possessed cars, psychic powers, or killer clowns. Years after Bachman had been outed, King resurrected him for the project; for me, The Regulators was a gateway into his earlier works, and even though the pair of books isn’t my favorite of the King library, the early Bachman books remain some of my favorite work by him to date.

From my copy of The Bachman Books. Which I had to order used, since it is out of print. And it’s old. I love it so much, though, I’m willing to get over my squigginess of old books to read it.

Richard Bachman came into being in 1977, after King’s early success with Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining. Not only were his novels doing well, but Carrie had already been adapted into a film by Brian de Palma. King seemed to be feeling the pressure of celebrity; in the first foreword of the collected Bachman books, titled “Why I was Bachman”, King says, “I think I [wrote as Bachman] to turn down the heat.” King had reached a wall in the publishing game: because of his success, publishers were reluctant to saturate the Stephen King market, in order to keep sales figures high. The problem? Stephen King is a writing junkie. He can’t put down the pen. In an interview with the man who uncovered his secret, King admitted that he often wouldn’t just be one novel ahead of the game, but sometimes three or four. Another problem? The early Bachman books differed from King’s other work in style. Two of them were a bit sci-fi/dystopian, but they didn’t fit the supernatural horror gig that King had carved out for himself. Not wanting to lead his readership astray but wanting to put the novels out there, King decided to publish them under a pseudonym.

In “Why I was Bachman,” King also wrote that he wanted the challenge of writing under a different name. He purposely stacked the deck against the Bachman novels, asking that they be released as paperbacks with little fanfare; this way, if the novels found any success, it would be on the merits of the writing rather than by virtue of being published by the Stephen King, horror darling of America. I find it bizarre that a publisher would agree to this–after all, King was already a huge name, and he was basically asking them to sink his novels before they had a chance to be popular, thus cutting deeply into their profits–but Bachman editor Elaine Koster not only agreed to keep his secret, she worked hard to make sure that speculation didn’t become fact. After almost eight years and four novels (Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man), Bachman had begun, ever so slowly, to build his own following.

Then came Thinner.

Thinner ruined the game for Richard Bachman. Unlike Bachman’s earlier work, this book smacked of Stephen King: in Thinner, a gypsy puts a curse on a man, causing him to waste away rapidly, regardless of how much he eats. The addition of the supernatural element didn’t mesh with the earlier Bachman work. Thinner was released in hardcover and sold pretty well compared to the paperbacks that had been published under the Bachman name. Despite a few innocently hilarious comments–King recalled that one person remarked, “This is what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write”–readers everywhere were beginning to smell a rat.

One reader in particular, the aforementioned bookstore employee Steve Brown, decided to head down to the Library of Congress and snoop around into the back story of this “Richard Bachman.” He almost didn’t find his evidence, but after strong-arming sweet-talking the clerk into manually looking up the copyright information for Rage, which wasn’t in the computer system at the time, Brown hit paydirt. Rage was copyrighted to Stephen King of Bangor, Maine. Brown contacted King with his evidence, wanting to write an article about it but promising to keep it under his hat if that’s what King preferred.

By that time, though, the secret was no longer really a secret. King received requests daily from various news outlets wanting to know if he was Bachman; the local paper in Bangor wrote an article linking King and Bachman. King finally decided to come out with it, even though he was pretty pissed off that his cover was blown. He’d had an idea for another novel to publish under the Bachman name, you see–a book called Misery that he thought could take “Dicky” to bestseller status.

The author photo for The Regulators. Previously, he had used someone else’s photo–and the guy’s friends and family kept telling him, “Did you know there’s some novelist who looks like you?”

King said that Bachman died from “cancer of the pseudonym.” In his first Stephen King intro to The Bachman Books, King seems pretty damn bitter about the whole thing–”good thing I didn’t kill someone, huh?” he asks several times. He refers to his “Stephen King” publishers–at the time, that was Doubleday–as “a frigid wifey who only wants to put out once or twice a year, encouraging her endlessly horny hubby to find a call girl.” Ouch. Still, he seemed in better spirits when he wrote the second introduction for the reprint, this time titled “The Importance of Being Bachman.” Perhaps figuring out how to resurrect the fallen nom de plume lifted his mood. Since The Regulators, King has also published Blaze under the Bachman name. King claims that Blaze was first written in 1973 and updated before it was published in 2007; I’m told by trusted sources (sj) that it has more of a Bachman “feel” to it than Thinner or The Regulators. There may yet be more Bachman manuscripts to be “uncovered” by his fictitious widow, Claudia Inez Bachman, whose name you might recognize from The Dark Tower series: she makes a tiny cameo as the author of Charlie the Choo-Choo.

(Aside: In the foreward to Blaze, King says that Richard Bachman once published a short story under a pseudonym. Can pseudonyms have pseudonyms? This might be too meta for me.)

I’m sad that The Bachman Books are now out of print as a collection, likely forever. King took them out of print himself; while I don’t blame him, it still pains me. You can still buy three of the four books separately, but it’s not quite the same (and also pretty damn expensive for them being sort of short). The only book that wasn’t subsequently re-published, Rage, tells the story of a disturbed high school boy who shoots two teachers and holds his class hostage–or, possibly, they hold him hostage. It has since been linked to some of the school shootings that have occurred over the past couple of decades; at least three shooters have been found with copies of Rage in their possession. King said, enough is enough–which is a damn shame for us non-insane people. Rage has resonance; it’s my favorite of the Bachman novels. (If you can read it without getting the urge to shoot up your school or place of business, I highly recommend getting hands on a used copy.)

“There isn’t any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and darkness. There’s only barren instant replay that shows nothing new.” – one of my favorite quotes from Rage

So, that’s the deal with that Bachman guy. He was, but not quite always was, Stephen King all along.

Sources:

Lilja’s Library (1, 2, 3)

“Why I was Bachman,” The Bachman Books 1985

“Stephen King, Shining Through”, Steve Brown, The Washington Post

“Stephen King, Exposed as Richard Bachman”, Sharp Pencils

Stephen King Week: Tony’s Man Crush on Stephen King

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My mom used to read Stephen King’s horror stories, and I already knew who he was by the time I was learning to read sentences like, “The boys run.  The girls see the boys.”  I remember one evening when my dad was working second shift and my mom called me into the living room to watch The Creep Show with her on HBO.  When “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” came on, she told me, “Look, Tony.  That’s Stephen King.”  I thought that he looked kinda funny.

A few years later, I had not only learned how to read, but I loved reading.  What’s more, my third grade teacher was giving our class regular creative writing assignments.  I enjoyed these assignments so much that I started writing my own stories.

On one particular evening, my dad called me into the dining room and had me sit at the table, my mom seated at his left.  He held up several pages of sloppy third-grader handwriting torn from a yellow legal pad.  “What is this all about?” he asked.  I had left the story on the table, and he and Mom had read it.  This particular masterpiece was my first attempt at writing horror.  It was about a deformed monster who lived in the woods and killed people with a knife that some hunter had forgotten.  I was picturing my dad’s military issue bolt knife when I wrote it.

Bolt Knife

My dad’s knife is unavailable for photography, but this is pretty much what it looks like.

I endured Dad’s lecture about how sick and wrong it was to write stories about violence and murder, and then after he left me ashamed and crying, my mom said to me, “You write like Stephen King.”  I didn’t realize it until much later, but she had said it with pride and meant it as a compliment.

Years later, that I actually began reading my first Stephen King book.  It was The Shining, a birthday gift from my best friend Eric.  From the beginning of the book I was fascinated by the way small details made the characters so believable.   It felt like King understood the things about people that we prefer to keep hidden.  I never got to finish the book, though.  My dad came into my room and confiscated it, handing me a Bible in its place.

My next attempt was ‘Salem’s Lot, which I had the good sense to read in secret.  It is, to this day, the only story I’ve ever read about vampires that actually scared me.  As with just about every Stephen King story I’ve ever read, I was drawn in by the characters and the way he wrote.  Everything seemed real and believable, even though I know vampires aren’t real.  (They’re not, are they?)

After that, I read as much King as I could.  I got his short story collections, The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, and several others. I regret that it took me a while to start The Dark Tower books.  Friends had been telling me for years, “You’ve got to read this.  You’ve got to read this.”  Dusty Old West stories had never interested me, so I was surprised when the series changed my life forever, ruining all other books for me.

But it’s more than just Stephen King’s books that I admire.  I just finished rereading On Writing.  If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may remember me telling my story of how I stopped writing (and started again).  One of the things that got me writing again was reading On Writing.

The book is as much an autobiography (though he denies it in one of the forewords) as it is a manual for writing.  The first part talks about how King began, going from his first stories as a child all the way up to establishing his career as a writer, and then he ends shortly after he talks about breaking his ties with substance abuse.  The part about him quitting drinking was a bit of a surprise to me.  I had just figured that all artists (writers included) were tortured addicts who needed the sauce to fuel their creativity.  It turns out that Stephen King quit all of it, and it doesn’t seem to have affected his creativity.

There are plenty of fascinating anecdotes and useful tips that can guide an aspiring writer throughout the later chapters of On Writing.  Up until this most recent read of it, I had forgotten how many lessons I had taken from the book before.  King covers everything from when and where to write, how story ideas come to him, editing, and even how to break into the business. (This latter part predates the rise of social media, but the principles are still the same.)  One of the best bits of advice (in my opinion) is on editing: get rid of unnecessary words, and try to cut your first draft down by 10%.  Also, another great bit of advice is read a lot and write a lot.  I repeat that advice to any poor sucker who thinks I know anything about writing, and now I remember where I got it.

In the last part of On Writing, King talks about his brush with death when he was struck by a van.  He also wrote the van incident into a scene in the last book of The Dark Tower.

“I’d hit that.” – Blue Dodge Caravan

Oh, right. Did I mention, he made himself a character in one of his own books . . . and it wasn’t terrible.  Actually, it was genius!  When I saw that he put himself into Song of Susannah, and again in The Dark Tower, I thought, “This is going to be ridiculous.  Authors shouldn’t write about themselves as characters!”  But when I saw how he pulled it off, I was impressed.  In both books, King makes fun of himself, depicting himself as a bumbling, cowardly fool.  As the author, he shows no ego about being the creator of his fictional universe; he is merely the one who discovered a story that was already there.  In On Writing he makes it clear that that’s how he feels about all of his stories.

There’s a lot about Stephen King for a person–especially a writer–to look up to.  Whether it’s his talent and success as an author, or his strength to take back his life from booze and drugs, or simply that he survived getting hit by a van and then came back to write more amazing stories–Stephen King is pretty much my writer hero, and I want to be him when I grow up.

Reading Rage Tuesday: Authors, you don’t need to yell “Fore!” to foreshadow.

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Poor golf ball

The caption on Flickr for this image is “John Laing does murder to a golf ball.” JUST LIKE AUTHORS DO MURDER TO FORESHADOWING.

I touched on the topic of today’s Reading Rage a bit when I reviewed The Absolutist by John Boyne. And when I reviewed 11/22/63 by Stephen King. And (in a flattering way) when I reviewed Boleto by Alison Hagy. I realized after last week’s review of The Absolutist that clumsy foreshadowing seems to be a major pet peeve of mine.

Foreshadowing is a literary device; to foreshadow means to drop hints or indistinctly suggest future plot developments. (Wikipedia tells me that this can also be referred to as “adumbrating,” which is a cool word that means foreshadowing in a vague way, or to give a sketchy outline of something.) When done correctly, foreshadowing can create a fine sense of dread, foreboding, curiosity, excitement, lust, anticipation–all things that make you want to keep flipping pages until you get the big payoff, and then maybe have a cigarette.


This not-at-all creepy video with floating heads will explain more about how foreshadowing works.

Good foreshadowing will sometimes slip right by, unnoticed. Other times, it’s front and center, like the witches in Macbeth. (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair …”) What I find that good foreshadowing never is? Predictable and obvious, and I’ve been seeing a rash of both in books I’ve read recently.

There are times when predictable is good–in science, for example. In science, if you (and those who care to fact-check you) can test a hypothesis to the point where you can actually predict behavior based on your model, it becomes a theory–in other words, it’s considered true. Predictability in science is a win! Not so much in fiction, though, which is why people take spoilers so seriously. Would reading the sixth Harry Potter book have been such an emotional roller coaster if we already knew–SPOILERS–that Dumbledore dies, that Snape was a double agent? If Dumbledore had, before setting off with Harry to find the horcrux, visited Professor McGonagall (or whoever), and if Rowling had ended the chapter with “And it would be the last time she ever saw Dumbledore alive”–would we have felt that same punch in the gut when Snape 86′d him?

No. We wouldn’t have. We need that element of surprise to create the same emotional response to a story as we get in real life, where there are no spoilers to warn us about that car accident that’s about to happen, or that run of bad luck we’re about to have. There’s a fine line between foreshadowing and spoiling, and I’ve seen quite a few authors stepping over the lines in ways that didn’t sit well with me.

But Susie, you’re saying. Foreshadowing is hard. It must be hard if I’m doing it wrong. Can you help me? Can you help me foreshadow better?

Well, I can damn sure try.

A few ways to foreshadow without incurring my wrath:

Lay off predictions and forecasting. Imagine, if you will, a scenario where your BFF is a psychic. An actual psychic, not a “Psychic Friend.” Every time you hang out with your friend the psychic, she tells you everything that’s going to happen in advance. Sometimes, this would be really handy–”Make sure you don’t go immediately when the light turns green, someone’s going to run the light”–but I think, after awhile, it would get really annoying. “Your boss is going to bring in doughnuts tomorrow. Surprise!” “Your boyfriend is sending you flowers–roses, although I can’t see if they’re pink or read. Oh, bee tee dubs, he’s proposing.” “That waiter is going to drop all the plates he’s carrying in two minutes.” I would hate having a psychic friend if they couldn’t keep their predicting to themselves–nothing would ever be a surprise anymore, and that would suck.


Pretty sure I’d rather call the Psychic Friends network. At least they aren’t actual psychics.

Of course, if you have a character who is psychic, they would be making some sort of predictions. I think the trick here is to keep the predictions vague enough that they don’t highlight your intentions in bright neon. I just watched an episode of Northern Exposure that used this kind of prediction well; in the beginning, Maggie has a dream that she’s playing Clue with Joel. He’s anxious to leave because he has a plane to catch; Maggie doesn’t want him to go. At the end, he puts on a black fedora; Maggie warns him not to, but he puts it on anyway. This dream uses hints and symbols to create a sense of doom for Joel: they’re playing Clue, which centers around a dead body; the black fedora is supposed to symbolize the death of the person who wears it in a dream. They allude to the plane trip, but because of the context of the Maggie/Joel sexual tension, her begging him to stay comes off as more seductive than warning, especially since she’s wearing a tight red dress and bright red lipstick. Maggie wakes up, disturbed but not sure what the dream means; we feel the same until she has another dream later in the episode that gives us more clues.

Speaking of symbols, these also make good foreshadowing.

Using symbols in a novel can be tricky, of course–used clumsily, they seem hokey and forced. Symbols can, however, make for excellent foreshadowing–especially since they don’t allude directly to the events to come. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald creates an unsettled mood when Gatsby meets Daisy again for the first time:

“We’ve met before,” muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

“I’m sorry about the clock,” he said.

… “It’s an old clock,” I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.

The clock, in this case, is symbolic, nestled just before talk of how much time has passed since Daisy and Gatsby have seen each other. Gatsby’s righting the clock is also symbolic–not only does he want to “right” the time that has passed in which Daisy got away from him, his careful action also contrasts with the carelessness that Nick attributes to Tom and Daisy later. The word “smashed” is used again at the end, describing the events that resulted in Gatsby’s and Myrtle’s deaths: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Symbolic foreshadowing can be oh-so-subtle but still create the proper mood or mindset for the reader. The meeting doesn’t go smoothly, and Gatsby’s story ends in tragedy.

Use a smaller event to foreshadow a larger event.

This time, I think we’ll turn to Steinbeck. In Of Mice and Men, Lennie, the mentally-handicapped man that George travels with and cares for, is given a puppy, which he proceeds to pet to death. Later, when Curley’s wife offers to let Lennie stroke her hair, our stomachs tie up in knots–we know what happens when Lennie gets to stroke soft things. Things don’t end well for Curley’s wife–who also foreshadowed Lennie’s death in her own way. She is a poisonous character, flirting with the men one moment and threatening the lynch mob in the next; when Lennie is fully taken in by her sweeter side, we know that the lynch mob can’t be far behind.

Set the mood with atmosphere and tone.

While you may not want to open a book with “It was a dark and stormy night,” using the weather, the setting, and the general tone can help foreshadow without actually giving away plot details. In Japan, seasons are often used to represent the cycle of life; a professor told my Japanese culture class (ten years ago.. eep) that autumn was symbolically used as dying. Spring would obviously be (re)birth. If I wanted to write a story about death, I might put it at the end of summer, especially if it occurred after a long illness (a.k.a, a long, hot, miserable summer without air conditioning. ZOMG see what I did there? I TRANSFERRED FEELINGS TO SET A TONE.) If you don’t want to go quite so philosophical, use a little mood-lighting, or time of day, or an appropriate setting to get your point across.

Foreshadow early.

There’s no point in introducing foreshadowing late in the game. We’re practically on top of the event by this point, so we don’t need any hints–we just need to keep going to get there.

So, readers–have you read any books with obvious foreshadowing lately? Or books with awesome foreshadowing? Does bad foreshadowing take you out of a story? Would you add anything to my foreshadowing tips? Drop those comments like they’re hot!

Reading Rage Tuesday: Sorry, crappy characters, we’re voting you off the island.

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Also? We might set your beards on fire.

Before I begin, I’d like to let you guys know that I have been named a finalist in BookRiot’s START HERE Write-In Giveaway. You can help me win! I mean, if you want. Just go to my entry page here and click the Facebook “like” button for the post. Thanks a million, friends!

One thing that can kill a book–even more than bad or no editing, a fuzzy plot, or fire–is a weak cast of characters. When written properly, a book’s characters drive it from beginning to end. The characters make readers fall in love, fall out of love, cry, get angry, or worry anxiously–all of which fuel the need to keep flipping the pages until we run out of pages entirely.

Because brilliant characters matter so much to a book’s success, it’s hardly surprising that writing characters could arguably be the toughest part of writing a novel. Anybody can whip up a sequence of events, really–and many of us probably have practice in doing just that on a daily basis. “See, the reason that your car is dented? I was driving very slowly and carefully down the street when some TOTAL MANIAC came barreling though going A HUNDRED MILES PER HOUR being chased by five cop cars. I pulled over to the side but I think one of them must have bumped the car. Why wasn’t there a car chase on the news? Um–hell, I don’t know, do I look like I edit the news? OKAY FINE, I hit a pole in the 7-Eleven parking lot.” (Some people are more successful at this than others.) Making a sequence of events come to life, though, requires characters with deep motivations and many-faceted personalities. Juggling motivation and action, along with character interaction and dialogue, can be tricky.

I know there are legions of writers out there desperate to know whether their characters pass muster, probably refreshing this page a hundred times a day to see when, oh when, I’m going to write about this. Don’t worry, though. I have a handy list of characters that, should they sneak into your latest creative work, should be immediately banished and probably also drawn and quartered, just to set an example for the others.

The protagonist without a face

Okay, so the protagonist probably has a literal face–eyes and nose and so forth, maybe even some teeth. Figuratively, though, he or she is faceless in that we don’t know anything about the character. We don’t know what the character stands for, what he or she cares about, who he or she loves; it seems, really, like the character is a crude vessel through which the plot–which is often unnecessarily complicated–unfolds. The author might graciously bestow table scraps upon us from time to time about the character’s history or thoughts, but rarely enough to make a complete meal. (This might be the number one reason that shitty novels get fed to dogs. What, you don’t do that?)

(NOTE: DO NOT FEED BOOKS TO DOGS, I WAS TOTALLY JOKING.)

Unless you’re writing a book about existential ennui, a protagonist like this is one of the worst possible things you can do to your story. As readers, we desperately need to connect with your protagonist in some way, whether we love her or hate her. If I don’t care about your main character, I can’t care about your book. It’s like trying to love a statue.

This doesn’t just apply to your main characters, either–unless you have a specific reason that a character needs to be “faceless” or mysterious, all of your characters should be round and developed, with clear motivation, even if they only have a tiny part in the book. In Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, SK creates a character of the man who, in real life, hit him with a van. (This series is so meta.) We don’t see his whole back story and we don’t spend a lot of time with him; we do find out enough about the character, though, to make his actions make perfect sense. Hell, we even find out enough about the character that we could extrapolate his behavior in other situations, if called upon to do so. He’s in the story briefly*, but his development makes him memorable and enriches the book itself.

*Of course, “briefly” in the Dark Tower series could mean several hundred pages.

The superfluous character

I’m going to use a TV example here. I know, this is about books, but the best example I can think of comes from TV. So, I guess you can imagine that it’s a series of books instead of a TV show OH WAIT IT IS A SHOW BASED ON BOOKS, so I might be covered. I haven’t read the books, so I have no idea if they’re at all similar, but yeah. Awesome. Technically still talking about books. Unf-unf-unf.

TOUCHDOWN
Also, I just figured out how to make animated gifs. I KNOW. I can make them ALL THE TIME NOW. I know you’re the most excited about this, too.

I am–or, I guess, was is the more accurate verb, since I haven’t watched it for awhile–a fan of the show Bones. It’s not my usual cup of tea, but I really liked the characters; I especially like the main character, Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, who shares a lot of my Aspie traits (despite not being an confirmed Aspie, much like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory–digressing!). A few seasons in, the show took a dark turn (as I re-read this, I realize how dumb this sounds since the whole premise of the show is solving grisly murders; I’m leaving this in so you can laugh at my idiocy) as Bones and FBI Agent Booth chase after a serial killer called Gormogon. They eventually discover that the killer has been training an apprentice who works in the lab with Dr. Brennan! GASP. The call was coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE.

Everyone was pretty upset about the apprentice subplot because it meant that the character, Zack, was leaving the show. I have to admit, I was upset about it too, just because of that kneejerk “I hate change” thing that we humans go through from time to time. In hindsight, however, I can see that they made a wise decision in removing him from the show. The problem with Zack on the show was that he was a carbon copy of Dr. Brennan, but younger and less experienced: he, too, was a coldly logical genius with social/Aspergery issues who had the exact same career focus as Dr. Brennan. He practically needed to be a serial killer’s apprentice just to do something that Dr. Brennan hadn’t already done.

When you have two characters that are almost identical, you run the risk of being repetitive, if their arcs take the same paths, or of possibly cannibalizing character growth from each other as you strive to create unique circumstances for the two of them. (Heh, heh. Incidentally, that serial killer was also a cannibal, so I guess I kind of just made a pun. You probably had to be there.) If you make sure characters have enough differences between them, you won’t end up with a couple of half-assed characters that wither from lack of development.

The stagnant character

D’you ever read a book and, by the end of it, you wonder why certain characters never just manned up and took care of their shit? Or, barring that, didn’t go into a crazy downward spiral beyond salvation? It’s a little bit like listening to a married couple having an argument that you know they have had a hundred times just in the past week, or having a friend that whines about the same problems every single time you talk. Yes, that’s right. It’s absolutely obnoxious.

If nothing is happening to your character, your character probably should be 86′d–unless that character serves as a foil for your protagonist and you’re specifically highlighting how your protagonist has decided to act vs. the consequences of inaction. You could also use a “constant” character as an anchor–a mother, for example, who’s always got Sunday dinner on when her children come home from the big bad ugly world. These characters should be used in this capacity sparingly, though. If things aren’t changing, it means that repetition is occurring, and repetition is baaad, Groundhog Day notwithstanding. We can only re-read the same scene two or three times before we get the urge to swan dive off of the nearest building.

These characters don’t necessarily have to overcome their problems, either. Things just need to change to push your story along, or, swan dives.

Angels and devils

Did you know, there aren’t really any people who are 100% evil or 100% noble? And that even the most evil people you can think of had motivations besides, “Welp, I guess I’m gonna do this terrible thing because I am a harbinger of all things unholy”? The whole Good vs. Evil thing is so played out. 

Let’s take the most evil motherfucker in recent history–Dan Brown. Wait, sorry, I meant Hitler. If one wanted to fictionalize Hitler, what’s a more compelling story–that he did all of the fucked-up things that he did because he was just “evil” and he just did things to be evil, or that he did all of the things that he did because he genuinely thought in his warped mind that it was the right thing to do and that he was a hero? I find the second (real) scenario far more chilling because it’s so damn humanizing. It’s easy enough to think of a time when you were wrong and convinced you were right . . . as soon as you do, boom–you have something in common with Hitler. Even if it’s not to scale, just being able to go there raises the hair on the backs of our necks.

Characters who are goody-two-shoes are, in my opinion, even worse. Oh, you’re gonna fight the powers of evil because it’s the right thing to do, are you? Is that your default autopilot setting? As we all learned in middle school when our teachers showed us poorly-produced videos about peer pressure, doing the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing is kind of really hard. There’s a reason that we sane people get inspired when we see someone stand up for what’s right. There’s a reason that Rosa Parks is a hero for something as seemingly simple as not giving up a bus seat. Deciding to do the right thing often comes after a long internal struggle, a war where morality, nobility, and conscience do battle with self-preservation, self-interest, and fear. That should be a major conflict for any “good” character, if not the central conflict; to leave that out would be to cheapen the whole idea of “good.”

Characters who only exist to make another character’s story arc more compelling

I know, this one is kind of advanced. Don’t be scared.

It may seem like splitting hairs, but there is a fine line between characters who only exist to further another character’s arc, and characters who only appear in a story to further another character’s arc. The difference lies in how the character is developed, rather than how much page time they receive or their purpose in a story. To illustrate the difference, I’m going to discuss everyone’s favorite trope, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Quick background if you’re not familiar: a Manic Pixie Dream Girl comes into a male protagonist’s life (or it could be a female, but it’s far more often male for this specific trope–females probably have our own trope for this) and fills it with joy and spontaneity and fun weirdness. If you saw the movies Garden State, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, or just about anything starring Zooey Deschanel, you’ve seen a MPDG. (The trope also appears in books–The Perks of Being a Wallflower, High Fidelity, and Norwegian Wood all feature MPDGs. Still on subject, woo!) One of the major dilemmas of this trope is that the MPDG often exists solely to help another character, generally a male love interest, make his sucky, doldrummy life better. To do this, she whips him into a chaotic, whimsical frenzy, usually just by being delightfully quirky.

 

The problem with this kind of character, whether it’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl or another character that exists to spur on the protagonist’s development, is that they’re boring. Yes, boring, no matter how many times you write them screaming “PENIS!” in public places. I totally get that, if you have a protagonist, every other character in the story revolves around the protagonist to an extent just by virtue of the story being presented from a certain point of view. Those characters still need their own motivations for existing, though. The MPDG, for example, hasn’t lived her whole life waiting for you, the protagonist, to come along so she could change your life; without showing or having their own raison d’etre, the character becomes a cardboard cut-out of a real person. As I said before, it can be a fine line to walk. I think the key is that, even if the supporting cast are only mentioned in the story because they have affected the protagonist’s arc, the characters don’t only exist to further another character’s arc. They need their own motivations, desires, weaknesses, and histories.

Holy shit, I went through my stories and I had to delete every single character. This sucks.

I’m sorry. I am. It really is better this way, though.

What about you guys? What kinds of characters would you add to the list? Are there any you would take off? Do you have infuriating examples of any of these characters? Did you go vote for my entry here? COMMENTS ALL THE COMMENTS

The Author’s Guide to Social Media: Does bad publicity hurt authors?

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Bad Rubbish

So, there’s been a lot of to and fro lately–well, really, not just lately but often–about authors, social media, and “bad behavior.” Before I get started, I’d like to side-step for a moment to discuss why I focus so much on author behavior and not on reviewer behavior. It’s not that I want to be part of the reviewers vs. authors conflict; I love reading, and authors write books, so there’s no underlying conflict here. My focus on author behavior stems from the fact that I don’t really care how reviewers act unless it reflects personally on me–which, since I run my own site, and try to maintain a good standard here of fairness and objectivity whenever possible, it doesn’t affect me quite so much when there’s drama centered around Goodreads or Amazon reviews. People who follow my blog, or even sample the reviews, will see that it’s not the same.

How authors act, on the other hand, does affect me–it affects my buying habits and my reviewing habits. I don’t want to review an author who has publicly made a world-class asshole of him- or herself. If I review the book positively, without addressing the author’s behavior, it could be seen as an endorsement. If I review the book negatively, even if it’s a true review, it could be seen as jumping on the bandwagon of hate-flinging, which could damage my credibility. Regardless of my intention, I can’t control what readers assume or think of me when I put content out in the world. I want, therefore, to stay away from it altogether. As a consumer, I also don’t want to financially reward someone who is being a jerk.

Yeah, reviewers are jerks sometimes, too. But that doesn’t affect me nearly as much–and there’s not much leverage over a reviewer to get them to change their minds. Reviewers generally have nothing to lose unless they have a site with a following; even if I railed about bad behavior from reviewers, why should they change their habits? Because I said so? Pleeaaaaaaaaaaase. So, that’s why I focus more on authors than reviewers when I tackle these topics.

But! I started this post to talk about bad publicity. In the ongoing debates about how authors should or should not act on the internet, an argument that occasionally pops up is that there’s “no such thing” as bad publicity. Many authors who create controversy around themselves seem to think that this is the case; sometimes, the posts seem calculated to do exactly what they’ve done: make a splash, stir things up, and draw all attention to themselves. Other times, the author might try to laugh it off, claiming that they’re getting a lot of attention and it’s good for them either way. (I definitely had an author tell me this once, back before I had a blog and when the “publicity” he got from our back-and-forth amounted to about five friends of mine. He was a little bit completely out of his mind.) Many authors handling their own PR appear to be under the impression that any attention is good attention, and even negative attention will lead to an increase in sales.

Does this work? Should authors be less concerned with receiving bad publicity? Could bad publicity even be helpful to a new author who is trying to get their work out there?

In the short run, I’m sure an author who has made a stir will see a bump in traffic–maybe even a large one. People love to watch a train wreck, and in some cases, I could certainly see it leading to a boost in sales from looky-loos. I don’t view this as being a beneficial long-term option, though. The thing about watching a train wreck is that, eventually, people stop looking and go home. They forget. You become a vague name in their minds that they might remember if they see it again somewhere–if people still want to cover you after the drama surrounding you, that is. An author can only coast on publicity for a short period of time, whether it’s good or bad publicity; we consumers are getting new information every minute that crowds out the old information. We turn our attention elsewhere, often quickly.

Even Charlie Sheen, who had a very public “psychotic break” (his words, to Playboy) that resulted in him leaving his hit show, can’t ride his publicity forever. When his new show, Anger Management, debuted on FX, 5.7 million people saw the show. The next week, 3.4 million watched. Then 2.4 million; I read somewhere it finally got down to 1.25 million before leveling off a bit. People may have tuned in based on the controversy from before, but people eventually fatigue and tune out; if his ratings continue to fall, Anger Management is going to get canceled just like any other show. The publicity from before won’t prop up the show if the show itself doesn’t stand up.

“It’s so fucking stupid. I’m in a beef with a warlock society? You’re kidding me, right? How do you go from making Oliver Stone movies to being in a feud with warlocks?” Charlie Sheen, post-meltdown. Apparently, there were some negative side effects.

Any publicity you get will circle back to the product that you put out. Publicity leads the reader to you (provided it’s not the kind of publicity that makes people say, “WELL! I’m never buying that person’s books!”); your product has to take the next steps on its own. This is where it gets tricky.

Getting an audience of people who read about you, on a blog or in the news or wherever, to buy your product can be challenging even under the very best circumstances. I don’t personally do a lot of sales myself, this being a free blog and all, so I’m going to use Regretsy as an example. Regretsy had a Kickstarter project for a book of Finnish folktales (and a trip to Finland) almost a year ago. If you’re familiar with Regretsy, you know that the site has a lot of followers that frequently follow links from the blog to go clear out Etsy shops, for charity or because the shop is just damn wacky. The Regretsy audience isn’t one you’d associate with stinginess. Out of their 130,000+ followers, though, only about 1.4% took part in the Kickstarter, despite the excellent rewards that the folks at Regretsy offered them. (If you compare the number of backers to their number of Twitter followers, it bumps up to a whole 5.8%.) If I recall correctly, the project didn’t get fully funded until close to the deadline. Regretsy fans love the site, but the turnout was still low when it came to deciding to spend money–not because Regretsy did something wrong, and not because their audience doesn’t like to spend money on things, but because it’s difficult to convince people to spend money. Even if you have a huge following that loves you.

“WHAT?! We live in the consuming-est country in the history of consuming! How is it hard to get people to spend money on things?!” Our entertainment bucks don’t stretch very far these days; while we may seem like we’re spending mindlessly, buying up things like Fifty Shades like sex is going out of style, we have to make choices with our cash. If we want to buy Fifty Shades, we can’t use that same money to buy anything else. When you get beyond the infinitesimal percentage of products that get heavy media coverage, you suddenly find yourself in a zone where consumers have become a lot more skeptical about buying your product. Who are you? What is this, and why do I want it? Do I want to spend money on you? And, the all-important: is there something I want more than what you’re offering?

(I feel I should note here, Charlie Sheen had about eight million followers on Twitter before he quit recently. When he joined in the wake of his rock-star-from-mars meltdown, he set an actual Guinness Book record for reaching 1 million followers on Twitter faster than anyone ever had. By the time Anger Management hit its fourth week on the air, a maximum of 15% of those eight million were tuning in–so, it can be difficult, it seems, just to get people to spend time on you, even if all they have to do is click over to watch your show, and even if you’re super-famous like Charlie Sheen.)

Imagine how this works for indie or self-published authors trying to convince people to purchase their books–authors that don’t already have a huge platform and thousands of followers. As you start building momentum, you’re working really, really hard to catch a very small number of readers (5% per venue where your book shows up? Maybe as much as 15%?) even when blogs or reviewers say awesome things about your book. Your buzz builds slowly as readers see your name repeatedly on their favorite blogs, on their friends’ reading lists, on their friends’ social media, in the “also bought” section of online retailers, maybe in a newspaper article or two. Since building a following can take quite a bit of time–see also The Bloggess, who says it only took her ten years to become an overnight success–it seems that part of being successful would be keeping your buzz flowing in a positive direction. Giving readers any reason to turn away from your books doesn’t seem like a smart move to me, even if it boosts your visibility in the short-term.

What if, though, you do find yourself in a controversy that gets a lot of attention and leads to heavy media coverage? Wouldn’t that help more than it would hurt? Well, it could happen, but not very often–if anything, it might lead to even more people swearing not to buy your book. I’ve rarely seen “real” media covering the dramz that happen in the reading world. If you’re relatively unknown, to get the attention of the mainstream media, you have to be more than an author embroiled in some drama. This drama has to be spectacular drama, and even then, it would have go be on-going and dynamic to keep you in the public eye long enough to see sustained results. (Stop the GR Bullies has only made it onto the blogs–not the news portions–of a couple of large news outlets that I’ve seen, despite the fact that people have been losing their shit over it.)

It’s a hell of a gamble that I’d probably avoid–after all, you don’t just want to be an author for a week or two, right? You want to keep being an author, not go out in a blaze of glory, scraping up whatever cash you can from a quick burst of sales. Also, public drama means you risk scaring off the people (bloggers, reviewers, the media) who can help you build that slow burn that could sustain you over time.

For me, it boils down to this: while bad publicity may not always be a death sentence for your career, that quick burst of views probably won’t help you much in the long run. You may not even see a tremendous jump in sales in the short term, because people aren’t always quick to part with their cash even when they love you, much less if they’re skeptical about you. How your product performs depends largely on the product itself; why not, then, build your brand carefully and try to avoid bad press? This way, you don’t burn any bridges or turn any readers away from your work. Plus, it’s exhausting to get a burst of publicity, even if it’s good publicity. Dealing with any kind of backlash is even more stressful and draining–wouldn’t you rather spend that energy on making great books that people want to buy?

“WAIT! This post is part of the Author’s Guide to Social Media series. You haven’t even talked about social media!”

I know, I haven’t addressed it directly–but, let’s be real, almost every incident of non-famous author drama that has cropped up in the last, oh, practically forever (or at least, since the advent of social media), has involved social media. You don’t see blog posts like “Fisticuffs broke out at a bar last night when self-published author Dramz Attentionslut caught sight of a reviewer who had previously panned his book” or “After a heated exchange in which author Bitchy Pooperson demanded that a bookstore patron purchase her book instead of freeloading while drinking coffee, Ms. Pooperson went out into the parking lot and keyed the reader’s car” or even “Writey McAuthorpants ran crying from a movie theater yesterday when three hecklers sat behind her and threw popcorn in her hair, yelling ‘You suck at writing!’ and ‘Don’t quit your day job, bitch!’” Nay. This stuff happens on the internet; it’s great to make sure to keep your real life in check, too, but you especially have to monitor what you say in your social media. Assume that anything you put out will be interpreted in the worst possible way, and assume this will create a giant headache that you’ll wish never happened.

Assume you will go from making Oliver Stone movies to being in a feud with warlocks. It’s a downgrade.

What do you guys think? Am I crazy like a fox, or crazy like I’m on a drug called Charlie Sheen? Sound off in the comments.

P.S. I did an informal Twitter poll: “On a scale of 1–’Who?’– to 10 — ‘Stalker fanperson’ — how much attention do you devote to Charlie Sheen these days?” So far, I haven’t gotten a response above 3. If people can tune out Charlie Sheen, they can tune out anybody.

Reading Rage Tuesday: Goodreads “bullies” and why authors need to stop the crusade.

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bullying

Update #2: One of the targets of the GR Bullies site pointed out, rightfully I think, on Twitter that the backlash from this particular site isn’t focused so much on bad reviews but on the reviewers pointing out bad author behaviors. Per @_Ridley_, “This is not about reviews. The four of us are being punished for publicizing bad author behavior.” Although I did focus on authors responding to reviews, it must be pointed out that other behaviors–like gaming the system by having friends review and like positive reviews to promote your books, spamming and promoting in inappropriate places, and other things that interfere with an honest review community–reflect just as badly on authors; for someone to point out this behavior is a natural consequence of engaging in said behavior.

For someone to tell others not to support an author’s products as a result of the author’s behavior may not sit well with an author, but it’s what we naturally do as consumers. We as consumers don’t like to support products that don’t align with what we think is right, and we have the right to make the incidents known to other consumers so that they can make informed decisions. Thanks to Ridley for clarifying for me what the issues are surrounding the site.

———-

Bullying. It’s a subject that’s been coming up often in the review community lately. Some claim that reviewers who write mean book reviews are bullies. I don’t follow any of this Goodreads drama closely, but I sometimes hear tales of authors who just wanted to make “one little comment” (whether this was a reasonable comment or not surely differs from case to case) and are set upon by bands of marauding reviewers, having abuse spewed at them left and right for “daring” to reply to a bad or nasty review. Then, in the other camp, the reviewers claim that authors shouldn’t be responding at all to their negative reviews, that it hurts the review community and makes people afraid to post honest reviews. Some reviewers say that this practice silences reviewers, thus making the authors bullies. (I agree more or less with the latter assessment–more later.)

The situation has come to a head recently on a site that someone created called Stop the GR [Goodreads] Bullies. On this site, people who swear that they aren’t authors (yeah right) took up the mantle of trying to stamp out “review bullying.” Their methods are weak but unsettling for reviewers everywhere: the person or persons behind the site dug into the social media of reviewers that they consider the worst “bullies,” posting tidbits like real names and spouse’s names, cities where the reviewers live, and even going so far as to track them down on Yelp! to find the real-life places where the reviewers hang out–possibly to incite harassment against the reviewers? I can’t think of any other reason why anybody would need to know where the reviewer likes to get a pizza in order to “stop the bullying.”

Update: In regards to their “weak methods,” which I thought were a bit silly on the part of the site owner (not that the Goodreads users targeted were silly), I was mistaken and I apologize to the people who were targeted for underestimating the situation. One of the reviewers targeted spoke out about her experience, which included a nasty phone call. Apparently, the information-mining and threatening behavior went further than indicated on the website.

Here’s a sample screenshot (click to embiggen) in which I’ve blurred out the identifying information–I know that you can go to the site and see it easily, but I blurred it in case the site gets taken down in the future:

I, and reviewers everywhere, have found this upsetting. The “detective work” done by the operators of the site isn’t exactly stellar: some last names, none of which were particularly hidden; no home addresses (thank stars); and, in the case of the screencap above, a couple of places where the reviewer checked in to eat dinner. These aren’t staggering revelations that are going to cause massive problems for most of these reviewers . . . unless, of course, you throw in a big ol’ dose of crazy, which is why this site goes from laughable to queasy-making. I, myself, am an active Yelper; I keep my personal and private social media somewhat separate, but it wouldn’t take Einstein to find my Yelp! account. Could I, in the future, anger an author so much that they would take a page from the Stop GR Bullies playbook and come after me at my neighborhood coffee shop or the produce aisle of my preferred grocery store? When you get crazy involved, there’s no telling what someone will do. I think it takes a pretty hefty dose of not-being-aware-of-your-own-crazy to make the unironic statement that someone else is a stalker after you’ve just cyberstalked the entirety of their social media.

Authors: if you do, or have in the past, come out in support against Goodreads “bullies,” you need to come full stop and throw that shit in reverse right now, especially in light of this “action” against reviewers. If you don’t believe me, read on.

Authors shouldn’t, under most circumstances, give in to the desire to respond directly to what they feel are “attacks,” even if they go after the author personally. I know, I know–it’s not fair, why should they get to say whatever they want and authors can’t say anything. Authors should be able to defend themselves, right? Freedom of speech and all that. What if the bad review hurts their sales, etc. Authors, just for a moment, I want you to take off your author hat and put on your consumer hat.

Got it on? All snug? Okay, let’s explore this for a minute.

I’m going to use an example from Yelp!, from a business in my hometown. I blurred out the identifying information, once again because the owner or reviewer might decide to change their response in the future. The review:

Click to embiggen.

So, this review isn’t terrible. It doesn’t compare to some of the nasty book reviews I’ve seen. It could, however, definitely dissuade a few people from trying their products, even though the business has otherwise great reviews. Here’s his response to the above review:

Click to embiggen.

While his response isn’t terribly nasty, despite being a bit passive-aggressive, do you see how condescending it sounds to answer a negative review of your work–even if you think you’re in the right? And do you notice where he made a mistake, assuming she waited four months to eat a brownie at all because she mentions a four-month timeline twice? (She clearly ate some of the brownies when she got them, then stuck them in the fridge and didn’t touch them again for four months–the earlier four months reference meant four months after she learned the product existed.)  He basically says that her opinion of his business is wrong, chides her for doing it wrong and then for writing her honest review even after they gave her a refund (which, he shouldn’t hang the refund over her head as a tool to keep her from writing a review), and turns the reply into a pro-his-business advertisement at the bottom . . . which gives no credit to the average consumer for having even a modicum of intelligence.

In my opinion, he comes off like a giant douche; in his mind, he probably thinks that he sounds extremely professional and that this reply was a good damage control move. His reply to the review shows that he doesn’t respect the right of consumers to voice their negative opinions about his product, even if the opinions are erroneous; by “correcting” her, he makes it clear that he thinks her opinion is invalid, which is a no-no if you run a business. He also proves that he doesn’t respect the basic intelligence of consumers to figure out that all products, even great ones that have dozens of 5-star reviews, will get bad reviews by people who don’t understand the product or don’t find it to their personal taste, and that we can generally figure it out. Like I said, he comes off like a douche, which really makes me want to shop there. (Not.)

What does this have to do with Goodreads reviews?

Readers. Are. Consumers.

As an author, you’re not just an artist. Your book is not just an expressive work. The minute you decide you sell your book to the public, you’re also a business person; that book is now a product. Despite talk of “fairness” between reviewer and author, the fact that authors are selling a product they want people to buy puts reviewers and authors immediately on unequal ground. Authors, even if they don’t do it primarily for the money, have a profit motive and reviewers don’t. Of course authors want only positive reviews out there. Authors want to sell books. So, authors, when you try to argue against a review–even if you feel it is “abusive”–the potential consumers of your books see this in a wholly different light than you sticking up for yourself. They see it as authors trying to artificially inflate the reputation of their book by silencing, persuading, or discrediting reviewers who give them bad reviews. Nobody likes to feel like they’re being tricked.

As an author, you don’t want to be seen as the kind of person who would silence reviewers for your own gain; yet, by insisting that reviews should be “fair” or that reviewers are “bullying,” you are expressing a desire to exert some sort of control over what reviewers say about your books. It doesn’t work that way. We want all of the reviews to stand because we want to be able to make our own choices. We want to be able to decide if we think a reviewer is full of shit. Defending your book against bad reviews makes readers suspicious about what you’re trying to hide from us.

Another reason not to organize against “bullying” reviewers? Goodreads has an abuse policy! Here’s their abuse policy:

If you notice abusive content on the site, you can usually click a small “flag abuse” link to alert the Goodreads community managers. Here are the guidelines we use to decide whether or not to delete content that’s been flagged as abusive:

We do not delete:

  • Content for bad language alone.
  • A review because it has a negative opinion of the book.
  • Spoilers (we may flag reviews as spoilers if we can tell, though)

We do delete:

  • Extremely offensive content, such as pro-Nazi, pornography, child abuse, etc.
  • Reviews or posts that are extremely off-topic and irrelevant.
  • Reviews or posts that contain a slanderous personal attack on another member. Content that is argumentative is fine, so the post must be extreme in its malicious attack on another member.
  • The account of any member who is a scammer or an outright spammer. We make sure to check if they use the site first.

Note that these are only guidelines, not rules. If you accidentally flag something as abuse and it clearly wasn’t abusive, don’t worry, we can tell!

–accessed on Goodreads.com on 7/17/12

So, you don’t even have to take it up with reviewers personally if someone writes an “abusive” review. If a review is truly abusive? Flag it. Goodreads will handle it like a boss. If they don’t handle it? It means that they don’t consider it abusive, and at that point, drop it. Bitch about it privately to friends, write about it in your diary, but for the love of Pete, drop it. Goodreads is not your site. You don’t get to control what is considered abusive or not there; further, I imagine that Goodreads has hired professionals to ensure that they have an abuse policy that fits with what should be done in a review community, if only to avoid lawsuits. If the reviews were going to cause actionable harm against you, you can bet that Goodreads would remove it because they don’t want to get sued.

Notice that the policy says that reviewers who use “bad language” won’t get automatically deleted. Reviewers are free to curse and swear and be (almost) as foul as they want when reviewing. It’s just the way of things. You can’t control it. For more information on why these reviews really aren’t abusive bullying, see the awesome post over at Dead White Guys.

In summation: Because authors have a profit motive, any attempt to fight against negative reviews–even if they “know” they’re in the right–is likely to backfire. Consumers want to decide on their own what reviews are valid and will probably look at any interference with suspicion. Your customers–aka, readers–are smart enough to figure out if any review, good or bad, has merit or not. Goodreads doesn’t consider reviews that contain bad language or that are argumentative to be “abusive;” the reviews are on their site, so authors would do well to abide by their rules. Also, authors look like a bunch of whinypants when they complain about bullies on Goodreads–not to mention, being even tangentially in agreement with the Stop GR Bullies site is creepy. Learn how to take it on the chin, authors. You’re really, really, really not doing yourselves any favors.

Am I right? Am I wrong? Does the Stop GR Bullies website give you the heebie-jeebies? Do you think that reviews need decorum police (beyond extreme cases)? If you could only take one book with you on a trip to a distant planet, which one would you take? Drop it all in the comments below!