…Looky what the UPS man dragged in this afternoon.
I really should have tried to hock a couple of copies off on the guy. Have you seen how much those delivery dudes make? It’s far more than some lowly photojournalist at a tiny Mississippi newspaper, believe you me. I mean, he probably would have at least bought a few pity copies…I can look pretty pathetic.
I’m a terrible salesman.
It’s strange to me that people have an aversion to self-publishing — not to actually doing it, but in the process as a whole, including the content it produces.
Earlier today, I was reading an article on io9 about a recent spat between the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Random House Publishing. In the comments section, a self-described “aspiring writer” brought up self-publishing and asked a few questions:
How do we the readers know that a self-published novel is any good? How rigorous an editing process does a self-published book get and how does the author assure he/she is putting out publisher-level work and not just work they think is good? Not to say publishers don’t put out some junk, but they at least give a work the veneer of vetting. Also, once you have a work self-published, how do you get people to pay attention to it?
As far as I can tell from some general internet traipsing, this commentator’s questions are not unique. There are a lot of readers out there who seem to think they need some sort of filter for writing. As someone who just recently self-published a novel (I’m obligated to leave this here) and just an avid reader in general, I find this kind of thinking bizarre. “Stinkin’ thinkin’,” you might say…you know, if you’re the kind of person who says things like that.
Although I’m not an expert in any way, shape or form, I will say the process of self-publishing is extremely liberating and just a bit terrifying. Knowing that absolutely everything is under your control is definitely power trip, although it comes with a lot of caveats. How the book reads, what it looks like, how it’s marketed and whether or not it’s professionally edited are all decisions you have to make as the author and self-publisher. If you’re planning on making a living writing and self-publishing your work, it’s certainly do-able; there have plenty of folks out there who have paid their dues and done just that. But it takes a lot of hard work and investment of both time and money.
The great thing about self-publishing is if you just want to write and share your work with others, hopefully making a little extra money in the process, you can do that too. That’s wonderful.
But with so many self-published works coming down the pipeline, how will a reader ever know what’s good and what’s garbage? Good question. The answer is pretty simple, though: By forming his or her own opinion. Amazon and B&N both provide lengthy samples of the novels they sell. If there’s a self-published book that looks interesting, I read the sample; if I like what I’ve read, I buy the book to support the author. It’s just the same as any other novel on the store shelf. Like you said, publishers are just as likely to publish junk…albeit junk they think other people will buy. I’m looking at you, Twilight saga. Oh shit, it sees me staring! Look away, look away, look away!
I think the most exciting thing about the new wave of self-publishing is the lowered barrier for entry. People knock it because it means anyone can publish just about anything, but there’s all kinds of cool, weird stuff out there that simply wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise because it doesn’t fit into a traditional publisher’s narrow view of what’s marketable. And I’m in now way knocking big publishing houses wanting to make money, but there’s also nothing wrong with having options beyond what they choose to offer.
My novel is not some brilliant piece of work that no one would publish because it’s just too deep or some bullshit like that. No, no…believe me, it’s not. I just wanted to write a novel about some emotionally-troubled giant monsters and their dealings with emotionally-troubled small town people without worrying about whether or not a traditional publisher would find it interesting. I wrote it for myself. But, if someone picks up a copy and enjoys it — regardless of how it was published — then I’ve succeeded as a writer.
Here’s the cool thing: These days, anybody else can do the same.
That’s right, you can be just like me. Isn’t that a thrilling proposition?
Hello?
Anybody?
Oh, whoever shall tell me which books among these I want to read?
Now that the paperback version of Strange Beasts in a Small Town is wrapped up and ready to go, it’s time to get started on my next project in earnest. To tell the truth, I’m kind of dreading it.
Confession time: I’m a super lazy writer. Most of the time, I love the feeling of having written far more than the process of actually writing. You know what I’m talking about, right? The feeling of having accomplished something? That warm glow that makes you feel like a total badass because you managed to squirt out 500 words of pure drivel? That feeling? I love that. I would marry that feeling if I weren’t already married to a real life human being. Also, I’m not sure you can marry something intangible. I need to look into that. Don’t tell Mandy.
Of course, I’ve yet to invent a device that provides the feeling of accomplishment without all the icky work that goes along with it. It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible to create a gizmo like that; it’s just, I’d have to get off my lazy butt and put some effort into it. As we’ve already established, that ain’t gonna happen. Nope.
Speaking of 500 words…that’s my daily goal. It’s not much, but I don’t really have high expectations for myself. I’ve been hurt too many times in the past.
My admission comes with a bit of an excuse: Since writing is my job, (for those who don’t know, I’m the staff writer for a small community newspaper in Mississippi) I’m kind of reluctant to do more of it in my spare time. I mean, I’m not exactly writing stuff I enjoy all day long (for example, today I wrote a story about a man being arrested for shooting a bald eagle; tomorrow, I’m scheduled to interview the owner of an auto parts store. This isn’t exactly stretching my creative muscles.), but there are times that the thought of writing when I don’t have to makes me all grumbly. No thank you.
Of course, if I don’t write, I feel worse. Like a really lazy shit. That’s no good, either.
Of course of course, the smart ass among you might point out that I’m writing right now, just wasting everybody’s time with a bunch of nonsense. To you, I stick out my tongue. Don’t point that kind of stuff out to me. I’m volatile.
Anyway, when I am writing something, I’m juggling two different projects. One’s a novel — an expansion of the idea behind a short story I wrote called “My Second Roommate,” which is about a college student who rooms with 80s slasher film villain Michael Myers. You can read that here, if’n you want. The new, longer version will, of course, substitute the famous character for something a bit more original (but still derivative. Is it a bad idea to call my own work derivative? Oh well.), but carry the same themes. In my mind, it’s called “Rufus Was My Second Roommate,” but that may change. My mind’s really fickle.
The other project is something a bit different. I’m working on gathering a bunch of my rhymey poems into a collection of sorts, plus adding some all new “epic” poems. Tentative name for the collection: “The Toaster Thief and Other Stories that Rhyme.” I can’t promise they’ll all be good, but I can promise they’ll all rhyme. It’s right there in the title. Being good, on the other hand, is not in the title.
All I can say is, “We’ll see.”
Oh, look — 593 words. Done.
Here’s an amazing thing about writing: No matter how many times you proof something you’ve written — read over it again and again and again checking for any small grammatical snafus or typos or plain ole misspellings — there are always mistakes hiding in there, lurking between words, waiting for your eyes to pass so they can hop back onto the page. It’s infuriating.
So, I recently received my proof copy of the paperback version of Strange Beasts in a Small Town, which gave me the “pleasure” of reading the darn thing for the sixth time. Guess what: TYPOS! So awesome it makes me want to vomit. I’ve fixed all the ones I could find, plus pulled a George Lucas and made some small cuts and changes to stuff I decided I didn’t like anymore (mostly cuts; the novel can be pretty long-winded.)
For those who have already purchased an ebook copy, I’ve updated the ebook copies at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you haven’t had time to read it yet, be sure to redownload the book for the latest version (Version 8.0, by my count). Or, if you have read it but found the mistakes almost unbearable so you immediately deleted it from your reading device in total disgust, feel free to re-add it to your collection. It’s much more presentable now. It won’t embarrass you in front of your friends.
For those who haven’t purchased a copy, I don’t blame you. Still, this is the time to go for it…well, until I am forced to re-read it again for one reason or another and make more changes. Then, that’ll be the time to go for it.
Oh, and the paperback version’s coming very, very soon folks. Thanks to all the help from my family, it looks fantastic. The words inside may be shitty, but at least it’ll look good sitting on a shelf. And that’s what really matters, right? Appearances.
Seriously, thanks for all the support, everybody. You guys have made writing a novel about emotionally unstable giant monsters and emotionally unstable small town residents feel like the best thing I’ve ever done. You rock.
Good thing my thumb was last to fall into this pit of molten metal.
I may be the only one in the entire world excited about this, but to your right is the back cover illustration for the paperback copy of Strange Beasts in a Small Town. Clicky on the pic to see it all great big and legible and stuff.
The image, which shows the novel’s climactic battle between the kaiju King Vislor and Rubbish, was created by my father, Louis Armour, and is based on the U.S. poster for Godzilla vs. Mothra, retitled Godzilla vs. The Thing on this side of the Pacific. You can see that poster below and to the left. Wave hello when you get there.
Although my love for that particular Godzilla flick is as pure as the title character’s love of a freshly crushed Japanese man, I’ll be the first to admit the poster is a slight misrepresentation of the final product. Rather than 90 minutes of abject terror, most viewers are likely to experience 90 minutes of businessmen trying to swindle people intermittently peppered with Godzilla duking it out with a couple of silly string-spitting worms and, inevitably, a giant moth. You remember Mothra, right? The giant moth? The one that doesn’t have spiky Lovecraftian tentacles? The one that never “destroys the armies of the world?” The one that hangs out with a couple of naysaying do-gooder pixies who like to spontaneously burst into song? That Mothra?
Like I said, the poster exaggerates a bit. A big bit. Really, a huge fucking bit. You can’t see the top of the thing, it’s so huge. Tokyo-crushing huge. One might claim it’s an outright lie, in fact…a first in advertising.
While working on the back cover illustration, my father talked a bit about seeing the original poster as a child. He said he was actually afraid of seeing the movie, it was so terrifying. All that “CENSORED: WATCH THIS AND YOU WILL DIE” stuff really worked on him. I’m not sure if I can ever personally claim to have had any sort of similar experience with a movie advertisement. I’m kind of jealous.
Wait, scratch that. Back in my high school days, when I was working at a local movie theater, we received a really nice display for a little movie called Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. The display was incredible — a huge tri-folding thing littered with bits of creepy information about Maryland’s fictional Blair Witch, complete with old-timey photographs and sound bites summoned by the press of a button. I remember reading all of that stuff and listening to those weird audio clips and becoming totally chilled, right there in the brightly-lit lobby of the theater. I couldn’t wait.
That movie was a total piece of shit, by the way. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen.
That said, the back cover of my book isn’t misleading in the least. All of the stuff either illustrated or mentioned there is 100 percent guaranteed to between the covers at some point. I promise. No, really.
I can’t really guarantee my book’s not a total piece of shit, though. The makers of Blair Witch 2 probably though they were making gold, too.
Special thanks to the special guy or gal who purchased a copy of Strange Beasts in a Small Town yesterday. You are clearly a good person and I genuinely hope you enjoy the book. Thanks again…
…That is…Well…That is unless you aren’t clearly a good person and are, instead, some kind of psychopathic kitten-murderer or malevolent granny-kidnapper or something else of that ilk. If that’s the case…well…if that’s the case, I hope you DON’T enjoy the book. Customer service be damned. In fact, I hope the book somehow leads to your destruction. That’s right. And it’s perfectly capable of doing such, believe me. I proofread that thing four times and it damn near made me melt into a puddle of fleshy goo. So I know it can do it.
…I mean, come on. They’re kittens. How could you?
…monster.
Go ahead and imagine this photograph in negative color. I know…right. Naw, it’s cool; go right ahead and cry. It’s sad.
Strange Beasts just received its first ever rating on Goodreads: 3 Stars! That’s the kind of “I sort of like it” mediocrity to which I aspire.
In all honesty, it’s really awesome to see some simple feedback, even if it’s just a rating without comments. It gets me pumped up about writing stuff. And writing’s my job, which means I’m never…ever…pumped up about it. That’s just not the American way.
By the way, said Goodreads user rated Strange Beasts higher than Catcher in the Rye (which he gave 1 star) and The Grapes of Wrath (2 stars). So, based on that info, I feel fairly comfortable in making the following gross exaggeration:
Goodreads user(s) found Adam Armour’s Strange Beasts in a Small Town to be equal to the masterpiece works of JD Salinger and John Steinbeck combined! Pick up your copy today!
Too much hyperbole? Nah. Not enough hyperbole, I say.
Don’t be sad, John. I’m sure you’ll make it big someday.
One of the joys of self-publishing…and I’m using the word “joys” in that sort of ironic, flanked by curly-marks kind of way…is that you and only you are solely all by yourself responsible for every aspect of your book. That means words, pictures, page size, layout, marketing and suicide when the thing inevitably doesn’t sell and you realize your whole life has been a lie (I haven’t completed this last part yet). It’s a simultaneously invigorating, overwhelming, frustrating and possibly…hopefully…rewarding process — if not financially, at least spiritually. As I understand it, accomplishing stuff is good for the soul.
You…at least in my experience…learn a lot of new stuff when self-publishing. For example, because I’m a super-obsessive kind of guy, I wanted to ensure the presentation of Strange Beasts in a Small Town was exactly what I wanted it to be. Seemingly unimportant details (for example, I wanted each section title to have it’s own page) meant everything to me. When crafting an ebook — which can be read on any number of different machines — this meant working with HTML, and I didn’t know squat about working with HTML. Still don’t, really, but I’m better off than I was when I began.
So, after a few weeks of trial and error and cursing aloud, I mostly have the novel looking like I want it to look — at least, that’s true if you purchase it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you snag a copy on Smashwords (which I just uploaded this week), Lord only knows what you’re getting. I promise the words will be there, but in what shape or form I cannot say.
I don’t want to dump on Smashwords because I haven’t really played around with it yet, but the process of formatting and uploading a book to that site is wholly frustrating. First, instead of using one of the nice, pretty .epub or .mobi files I’ve already designed and sort-of perfected, Smashwords wants me to upload a Microsoft Word file, which will then be converted en masse to several different formats. The site does this by using a program appropriately designated “The Meatgrinder.” That’s right…the people who created the program used to convert your work is named after its ability to garble up everything you’ve done and spit out a big, bleeding mess. Also, it makes hamburgers.
Using a .doc file would be fine and dandy if I could layout my ebook in Word and then have it translated semi-accurately into a billion different formats. But “The Meatgrinder” has trouble interpreting half of what you input. It doesn’t recognize most of the basic formatting doohickeys Word uses, including seemingly simple things like page breaks. Supposedly, you can trick it by modifying a bunch of different paragraph styles, but — like weight loss shakes and dating websites — individual results may vary. Maybe your book will look like you expected it to; maybe you’ll end up obese and alone. It’s all up in the air.
All this whiny stuff aside, however, self-publishing is pretty neat. As a control freak, just knowing that everything is up to me is extremely liberating. Scary as shit, but liberating.
I think I love it. Or hate it. I’m really not sure.
I am a terrible salesman.
Mind you, I’m not just talking about being sort of bad at hocking stuff. No, I’m talking bad-bad. As in, talking folks already committed to buying a given thing out of their purchase. That kind of bad. I’m like the “John Carter” of salesmen — repulsing people in droves with my pathetic desperation.
Back before I dropped out of Boy Scouts, (I made it to Second Class. As the name implies, that’s not very far.) I would anticipate the annual popcorn sale with the kind of hopeless dread typically reserved for those awaiting certain death. While other kids were slinging mountains of caramel corn and cheesy kernels left and right, returning home with pockets packed with money and swimming in the proceeds like a bunch of Scrooge McDucks, I was timidly begging my parents to buy a bucket or two just so I wouldn’t look like a complete loser to all my fellow Scouts.
Truthfully, even if I did sell a bucket or two to my mother, the kids thought I was a loser anyway. Frown. Being cool is hard work.
Anyway, you can imagine how well marketing my self-published novel, Strange Beasts in a Small Town, is going.
Have I mentioned that I’ve already slapped my novel up for sale? No? I told you I’m bad at this.
I’ve read time and time again that writing is easy, selling is hard. I disagree with this statement. Writing is hard; selling is excruciating. Maybe it’s because I simply don’t enjoy having stuff marketed at me, but every time I try to push the book (Available here and here, by the way. Hint hint.), I feel like I’m begging for a sale. Please read this thing I wrote. Pretty please.
Yesterday, I decided to hit up a popular daikaiju blog for a review because, from my limited understanding of marketing, promotion is a good thing. I think. I emailed the site’s administrator with a detailed explanation of the novel’s story, a couple of free copies in different ebook formats and paragraph after paragraph devoted to equal amounts asking and excusing said administrator from reading the thing. I can’t help it, I feel weird asking somebody to give up their time for something that means a lot to me, but nothing to anyone else in the entire world. I know those who aren’t interested will simply say, “no,” but I feel like I’m inconveniencing them by even suggesting that they maybe please consider possibly giving it a look-see, please.
Ugh. Writing that just made me want to punch myself in the nards and shove my head into a toilet. What a wuss.
Maybe I’ll get better at this as I go along, but it’s not really that important if I don’t. Honestly, I didn’t write a giant monster/small southern town mashup novel to rake in the bucks. I’m proud of the novel and think the concept’s awesome, but also realize that I may just be the only idiot in the world with that point of view.
That said, I would love for people to read and, hopefully, enjoy it. That would be pretty nice.
If you’re interested at all in checking the book out, I commend your bravery and promise I’ll love you until the end of time…unless you’re creepy. I can’t be lovin’ on no creepsters, now. The novel is available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $2.99, the meager proceeds from which will likely go to help build my board game collection or possibly going out to eat with my lovely wife.
Now, if you’re genuinely interested in giving the novel a read but don’t have $3 to spend, I understand. I’m a cheapo, too. Shoot me an email at adam2armour@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy in your prefered format.
Shit. There I go talking myself out of a sale again. I told you I was bad at this.
Work on both the electronic and tree-corpse versions of Strange Beasts in a Small Town is going well and I’m still on track to release both at some indeterminate time in either the near or distant future. Yup.
I’m still farting around with the little description that will be featured on the book’s “buy me” pages and will, in theory, brainwash people into tossing some money my way in exchange for whatever it is I’ve written. I’ve batted back and forth several relatively straightforward versions of the same thing before finally deciding to scrap what I’d written and try something that’s a bit more like the novel tonally. Here’s what I’ve got so far; try to envision it hovering between a photo of the book’s cover and a bunch of negative reviews.
This is a story about big monsters, small people, and vice versa.
There’s a giant monster living on the outskirts of the small town of Verbena Fields, Alabama, and the residents there are, naturally, a bit concerned. So, they turn to ex-monster hunter and professional curmudgeon Agnes Stegall for a bit of assistance in ridding them of the creature. But Agnes isn’t exactly a people-type person, so she says “no,” except with a bit of profanity attached.
But her refusal has some unintended consequences: Driven by fear, the townsfolk summon King Vislor — a powerful, albeit neurotic monster hound with an obsessive reverence for humankind — to watch over them. When the beast comes to town, he brings with him thousands of humanlike creatures carved from his own body — animate puppets whose thoughts mirror those of their infatuated master. Although Agnes knows good and well that calling upon one giant monster to get rid of another is a bit like cleaning up a mess by throwing more mess atop it, what she doesn’t realize are the dangerous lengths King Vislor and his creations are willing to undertake to keep the people of Verbena Fields safe. Soon, Agnes is caught up in a fight against a growing list of threats plaguing the small town — military occupation, unfettered rumors, a misanthropic rifle-wielding hermit with a grudge — while simultaneously trying to battle some terrifying monsters looming in the dark, unfrequented corners of her own mind.
Like any tale worth telling, Strange Beasts in a Small Town has a little bit of humor, a little bit of sorrow, some things worth pondering, a touch of cursing, an overbearing mother, fisticuffs between a redneck and a golem, several collapsing buildings and whole lot of giant monsters beating the stew out of each other.
What do you say? Would you drop $3 on this? (Or, $15 if you, like me, still enjoy the things you purchase to be tangible?) Please, drop me a line and tell my what you think.
I'm Trying to Write. 