A couple months back I had the notion to write a book. I think it's pretty good and so do a few others, but the problem is no one wants to read it.
Oh, it's not that it's written in Middle English or on a subject like "the primordial growths in newborn inhabitants of Subsaharan Africa" or anything like that. Not that either of those factors should dissuade you from reading a book, but let's face it, neither is likely to boast a million dollars in sales from Amazon.
No, Whither We Tend is a political dystopian fairytale that is likely to piss off liberals and Trump-lovers alike. Conservatives would probably also hate it, but there are like five of them left in 2021 and I have no idea how to reach them as a demographic anymore.
Why do I think they will hate it? Because they won't read it.
The minute anyone hears "political" people get all hot and bothered that their precious opinions will be questioned and that is a great reason to not invest in new ideas. Because after all, that is what a book is. A collection of new ideas.
My new ideas happen to be about the chances that America will slide into civil war in the upcoming years. As everyone knows, the Trumpists aren't going anywhere and the Libs are even more intransigent in their political leanings. When two sides refuse to budge, the invariable outcome is usually something violent.
Take for example a subductive fault line in the Earth's crust. Two tectonic plates crashing into each other, each refusing to yield. One must go above and the other below but having no brain, they push and push at each other until an earthquake erupts and a new mountain chain is born.
The mountains created and the Earthquake that creates them are on the highest order of violence and oceans are moved and civilization crushed with its occurrence. Such is the nature of Earthly motions.
Humans are made of ocean water and dust from cosmic collisions. They are animated with a touch of the Holy Spirit and motivated by the hand of God alone. Can you tell me that when they collide with unyielding force, that the Earth might not tremble and civilization not come crashing down as well?
So too fell Rome, and the Monarchs of Europe when the populous moved. The Nations of today were built from the ashes of yesterday and might not these civilizations also fall someday in similar accord?
The United States of America was itself the first to initiate the dismantling of the English Empire. Might not they also be tending towards dismantilization, when we can no longer feed our families, and plague besets our people?
Well, I wrote a book about it and I aim to write two more to complete the tale. But no one will read it, because no one can find it.
My book is one of over 500,000 new books in the market place right now. It might be a rival of a work by Hemingway or Tolstoy, but it won't be even considered because unlike them, I am in an Ocean of authors and through navigating a maelstrom of information right now.
To get it to stand out, I am told I need reviewers to bless my book online and tell people how much they enjoyed reading it for other people to find it. And to get those reviews, I need to buy them.
Money is the name of the game in book sales and they say the term for it is promotion. The more I spend on promoting my book, the more likely it is to make money.
Forget for a moment that my book is about what might actually occur to the people of America, I need to pay people to say they have read it, to get other people to read it when all I am trying to do is tell them to look for it. There something decidedly wrong about paying someone $600 to port a review to get other people to buy it. And I don't want to do it.
Instead, I would prefer I to try and harness the very forces that will be the source of America's undoing, the authors.
With 500,000 authors all trying to sell their books at the same time, what if we all worked together to read each other's books and peer review them for each other? If even a small fraction of all those authors, who know the perils of creating a novel through first-hand experience, reviewed my book then I could reach 100 or 200 reviews in short order. In return, I could provide them with my review of their book in exchange, 100 times over. If 200 authors bought my book, then I would have the money to buy the book of 200 other authors and the circle would be complete.
What I am thinking is starting a Facebook group of published authors. You publish your link of your book on the page and someone who thinks they would like to read your book responds with a link for their book. You each can ensure that your book is something you feel confident that you can fairly review and if you both agree, you swap stories, they buy your book and you buy theirs and read it and review it.
Whether they like your book or not should be irrelevant because a review is a review whether it is good or bad. But for this to work, we ought to keep it positive and if you don't like the book, you should have the honor to do no harm. Find the positives and refrain from trash talking.
Example: The book was not to my liking, but the cover and binding were professional and it looked good on my bookshelf. 2 stars
The golden rule should be the guiding principle in every reviewer's playbook, but particularly if you are a fellow published author, do unto others as you would have done to you.
As an author though, if out of 50 peer reviews all say your work is two stars, then perhaps you should take that as advice and review your manuscript and republish. The good news is you still got fifty reviews though and that will help you sell some books online, even if it is the worst of dogs in books.
The bad news is you have to head back to the drawing board and start again. But now you have read 50 other books and hopefully have learned a thing or two to make you a better writer. And who knows, in 20 years, maybe your book will be a cult classic and we were all wrong. But you have had 50 peers look at your work with compassion and the whole experience didn't cost you several thousand dollars, but instead, you broke even.
The big paid reviewers make no promise that their reviews will be any better and costs as much as $600 per review. How is that a good business model?
You will not be allowed in the group without proof of a published book. It is something that Good reads should have done already, but since they haven't I will. It's free to join and if there are others like it, share them with me and I will join them too. But since it costs nothing, here's the group if you want to join
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2483450521961934
No comments:
Post a Comment