writing – Page 3 – John D Reinhart

No Guardians at the Gate

Cops and robbers. Parents and kids. Bosses and employees. There’s an hierarchical order to things. Officers and crew. Master and Commander. Editor and writer… Wait – not so fast.

Back in the early part of this century, I was the owner of a struggling business. It was awful. If you’re not a business person, and you find yourself owning a business it. is. the. worst. Dreadful, I tell you.

Luckily, the Great Recession wiped us out! I was so thrilled!

But that’s not the point of this post.

Back in those days, the Internet was unfolding like a reverse-engineered origami swan, and it was desperate for content. Desperate!

Guys like me, without any nerve or experience, suddenly found themselves writing articles on this, on that, how to do this, how to make that, how to create… you get the idea.

And we were paid – sometimes a tenth of a penny per word – but we were paid. My weekly paychecks ranged between fourteen dollars on a good week and about 38 cents…

But that’s not the point of this post.

So, the world wide web was a wild west for wily writers. You could get published same day for just about anything.

I became the science editor for two or three sites – my favorite was a site called Triond. Oh, we got along famously. I wrote over 200 articles on the Moons of Jupiter, the Moons of Saturn, the Mo… you get the idea.

I’m sure you’ve heard the word churnalism? If you rewrite stories that have been written by someone else and add your own special spin to them, you’re not a journalist. You’re just churning up somebody else’s work – you’re a churnalist.

Ah, those were heady days, being a seriously underpaid churnalist, cranking out somebody else’s ideas and expected huge rewards. Sigh. How I miss them…

Fast forward to the Roaring Twenties, and now it’s all about books. You can publish your book for free!

I know, I’ve published two!

Smashwords, the company through which I’m publishing my books, has merged with Draft2Digital, a company that distributes your books all over the English-speaking world.

I’m enjoying the experience so far. Haven’t sold a copy, but mighty oaks come from tiny acorns.

And now D2D, as they refer to themselves, has offered to print my book.

What? Print? My name and likeness, right there on a paperback book? What? FINALLY?!?

My brilliant wife and I talked all about it, me on the oh-please-oh-please-oh-please side, she on the let’s-think-about-this side.

Publishers have editors that read books and decide what is and is not crap.

Who edited my book? What about yours?

E-books are often free, making them comfortably less than a dime a dozen. They consume digital resources, but that’s all.

Literary agents will tell you they get 10,000 queries a year. Based on what I’ve written, I know that by far the highest majority of those queries are from crap books.

Crap books.

So, D2D will print my book. They’ll print your book. They’ll print that guy’s book.

But that guy’s a crap writer (not like you and I).

So, here’s his shiny new book, right on the shelf next to ours. His opens with “This is how I spend my summers, over at uncle Bob’s house where my cousin Larry has like a big dog and this blue Toyota that doesn’t run so good. Anyway…”

Our books are good, earnest efforts with great plots and wonderful characters and creditable dialog.

But there’s nothing to separate them, no differentiator between our brilliant work and that guy’s joke of a junk book.

The buying public picks up that guy’s book, mutters in dismay, and quickly backs away from the book rack.

“Good heavens,” they gasp. “What a bunch of junk books!”

You and me, our books are great! Don’t judge us by that guy’s cover! But you know they will.

There we sit, side by each, our pearls, his swine.

My thinking is this:

In digital publishing, caveat emptor. Let the buyer read the description and download the free chapters and choose from there.

In physical publishing, that book had better be worth the ink and the paper and the resources to produce it.

Sadly, we know that that guy thinks his book is that good. But you and I know much better.

My wife is right. If there is no longer a guardian at the gate, no Random House holding sway over what gets printed, if the individual writer sets the standard for what shows up in paper, doesn’t it sort of feel like all is lost?

D2D doesn’t charge you anything to print your book. They make their money when the copies actually sell. But what happens to those copies that don’t sell?

I would imagine they go on sale, and then on super sale, and then on deep discount, and then on closeout, and then on clearance, and they finally sell for, like, a dime or something. Better that than throw them in the dumpster – at least D2D makes a little money on it.

Is that what awaits our books, yours and mine? We end up selling every printed copy for a dime each to some clearing house that shreds them up for the paper they’re printed on? All because of that guy’s crap book?

Congratulations! Your book sold 200 copies! Your share of the profits comes out to 6 dollars and 41 cents, because D2D took the first 15% of the dime and the bulk-book aggregator took the next 25%. Oh, and you won’t get a check until you sell $100 in books, but, hey, congratulations!

Call me a dreamer, a starry-eyed hopeful, but I’ll be building my audience the old-fashioned way – through digital publishing and advertising and doing nothing – until I’m discovered by an old-school publisher who has a strong editorial voice and a marketing staff that will just set the world on fire.

Wait, that guy sold 400 copies?!? Hey, wait a minute…

Skip the Workout

I rewatched Conan the Barbarian a couple of weeks ago – Thulsa Doom: “People have no sense of what they do…”

Yessir, that Conan is one tough cookie. If you haven’t seen the movie, the first one from 1982, you don’t need to. Oh, it’s good, but it’s rough, and just downright dumb in places.

Conan gains his freedom, finds his ancient sword, and then comes across a scantily clad, beautiful witch who lives in a hut between some rocks. These were ancient times, like before the Greeks, so, you know, it could totally happen.

They get briefly entangled, so to speak, and she gasps out in happy little spasms the name of the town to which he must go, and then turns into a werewolfy/wildcatty monster sort of thing that he tosses into the fire. She rolls off the other side of the fire and dashes out the door, now a bright shining energy ball that clings and clangs off of stones like something from a Miyazaki movie, dashing out of the scene with a sped-up giggling laugh like a chipmunk. Again, these were ancient times: it could happen.

But, for the rest of the film, we never hear from that character again, we never visit the town she mentions, and we’re left wondering, okay, so, like, what was with the witch? You know, beyond a cameo performance for the director’s cousin or something?

If you read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book, he goes on and on about how he did all the workouts, all of the reps, all of the leg-lifts, etc., etc. to become Mr. Universe by the time he was 20. Then he took acting classes and diction classes and dancing classes and fighting classes and ballet classes and horseback riding classes so that he could become an action-hero movie star – Conan.

After closing the book, I set about busily busting my own chops over not taking the writing courses and the English courses and the writer workshops and the, I don’t know, writer workshops… wait, I already said that one… I could have taken so that I could become the Mr. Universe of writers.

No wonder it’s tough to sell my books. I didn’t do the workouts!

But then there’s that scene in Conan with the witch, and you start to go hey, wait a second. Arnold didn’t direct or write the movie, of course, but the film grossed over $79 million – you could say it did all right – and it had that wretched, confusing, gratuitous scene in it.

So, maybe it aint the workouts.

You and I, we’re writers. We work on crafting sentences – each paragraph is our workout.

When we string all those paragraphs together into a screenplay, or into a novel, I imagine the finished piece is our Mr. or Ms. Universe kind of thing.

So, I think it’s safe to say that, by constantly writing, you and I are NOT skipping the workouts.

So, for whoever penned that witch scene, you and I are witnesses to that person’s Mr. or Ms. Universe victory (given the nature of the scene, I’m pretty sure the writer was a guy). He won the contest! And I hope he made a bundle of money – maybe sent the kids to college or something.

You and I know that if we don’t do the workouts, we cease to be writers and just sit around, taking up air.

The message to us here must be that we gotta keep doing the workouts, keep writing, and keep submitting our stuff, because you never know when you’re going to Mr. or Ms. Universe.

I mean, it worked for the witch!