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alexandraerin...mainly to see if she has a tip jar on it. It sounds weird and maybe she'd be offended by the idea as so many people associate tips/donations with begging, but after hearing from a couple of people about Audible's low royalty payouts I feel like I putting some money in her hands for the books I purchased through them.
I didn't find a tip jar, but I did find one of the best blog posts I've ever read:
I Am The Market.
Excerpt:
This part comes after she'd failed to sell books by doing everything "right".
And here's the moral of the story:
My personal take on this has long been that there may be a lot of money to be made doing things conventionally, but there are a lot more people scrambling after a piece of that market. Conventional novels as a class sell really well - a given conventional novel, statistically, won't. This sort of ties into what BioWare's David Gaider recently said in response to a self-entitled troll complaining about the fact that BioWare's Dragon Age games give equal time and attention to women and gay gamers as they do straight male gamers. It wasn't the focus of his comment, but his response touches on the fact that a game like this has a tremendous appeal to some very under-served markets.
Yes, most purchasers of computer games are still straight men. And most games are aimed at them. It's a big market, but by the same token it's a crowded one. A game where you can play as a woman and not have random NPCs refer to you as male? Where you have equal romance options no matter which gender you choose or pursue? And it's all just very matter-of-fact? Hell yes that's going to draw people in. It may alienate some people in what's perceived as the "mainstream" audience, but those people are already spoiled for choice... and that fact is not only significant to the consumers, it's significant to the producers. There's less competition for "gay dollars" than straight ones.
"Be the change you want to see in the world," Gandhi said.
"Write the book you want to read," I say.
"I'm telling the story I want to tell" has long been one of my stock responses to people who wonder why I'm not doing something slightly more conventional. But really, that's just another way of saying "I'm telling the story I want to hear."
I didn't find a tip jar, but I did find one of the best blog posts I've ever read:
I Am The Market.
Excerpt:
So I did some soul-searching, and then decided to take another look at an old trunked novel. I re-read it and thought it had good bones: mortals enslaving gods, political drama, interpersonal angst. And it wasn’t badly-written — though it, too, hadn’t sold. That one hadn’t even gotten me an agent.
And I thought, screw it.
I tossed the file, opened a blank one, and started the whole thing over from scratch. This time I didn’t bother with the rules. I wrote whatever narrative style popped into my head, however crazy and disjointed it sounded. I made the protagonist a girl, since that worked better anyway. I stopped trying to tone down the romance, and I went whole hog with the most cracktastic of my ideas. (“Yeah, a black hole! I don’t care if it couldn’t happen in reality! It’s fantasy, bitchez, I can do what I want!”) I did things all the writing books say not to do — dream sequence infodumps! Constant interruptions to the narrative flow! Cute kid sidekicks! Whatever! This was going to be my book, written the way I wanted to write it.
This part comes after she'd failed to sell books by doing everything "right".
And here's the moral of the story:
And here’s the thing: if I truly believe I’m a good writer, then I need to act like one. I need to stop worrying about what “the market” wants. “The market” consists of people like me, too, after all — people who are tired of what “the market” usually produces. So by writing for myself, I write for them.
And as long as I write my best for myself, I’ll be okay.
My personal take on this has long been that there may be a lot of money to be made doing things conventionally, but there are a lot more people scrambling after a piece of that market. Conventional novels as a class sell really well - a given conventional novel, statistically, won't. This sort of ties into what BioWare's David Gaider recently said in response to a self-entitled troll complaining about the fact that BioWare's Dragon Age games give equal time and attention to women and gay gamers as they do straight male gamers. It wasn't the focus of his comment, but his response touches on the fact that a game like this has a tremendous appeal to some very under-served markets.
Yes, most purchasers of computer games are still straight men. And most games are aimed at them. It's a big market, but by the same token it's a crowded one. A game where you can play as a woman and not have random NPCs refer to you as male? Where you have equal romance options no matter which gender you choose or pursue? And it's all just very matter-of-fact? Hell yes that's going to draw people in. It may alienate some people in what's perceived as the "mainstream" audience, but those people are already spoiled for choice... and that fact is not only significant to the consumers, it's significant to the producers. There's less competition for "gay dollars" than straight ones.
"Be the change you want to see in the world," Gandhi said.
"Write the book you want to read," I say.
"I'm telling the story I want to tell" has long been one of my stock responses to people who wonder why I'm not doing something slightly more conventional. But really, that's just another way of saying "I'm telling the story I want to hear."