So, I got another scam email, this time offering me a wonderful opportunity to speak to a large and interested book club about one of my titles, and so reach a large pool of interested readers. How the group name appeared in my inbox seemed odd, as did the return email address, so I was a little suspicious even before I opened the email.
What I noted:1) The name of the sender (individual) didn’t make sense, 2) the website was very generic, 3) and didn’t match the social media of a real group with the same name, 4) the same email with a different sender name had gone to someone who investigated it and found out that authors are asked to pay to help cover costs, et cetera. What also tipped me off was that the book mentioned is the last in a series that I’m pretty much finished with, and the questions to be discussed are answered in the bibliography of the book. All the gushing praise came from Amazon reviews. Nice try, but go away.
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I got the first edits back on a novel. The good news is that the readers saw the same problem I thought I saw. Why didn’t I fix it, then send it out? Because I wasn’t certain that my hunch was correct. My gut has played tricks with me before when it comes to things like this. The pacing in the story had accelerated in that part of the book, and I was not certain if that was why something seemed “off,” or if it really did need to be reworked. I have one vote for reworked, so we’ll see what other readers flag. The lesson, if there is one, is that sometimes your gut is correct, and sometimes it is not.
Some of the Mad Genii talk about a rule of three. When one reader or reviewer flags something that’s not just a tyoop or word error, you can ignore it (maybe.) When two people call attention to it, it might be something to check. When three of more readers or reviewers say, “There’s a problem here,” it needs to be addressed, or explained more clearly, or foreshadowed better, or otherwise tended to. This depends on who the readers are, and out of how many. If one reviewer out of 60 grumbles about the lack of foreshadowing, then it is not a real problem. If three of five say, “When X didn’t happen, but Y did, and out of the blue, I felt cheated,” then something needs to get fixed.
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Me: I need a story idea.
Muse: Here! [tosses a bucket of random blocks at my head]
Me: Thaanks. NOT.
So now I’ve got a fight in a cafeteria, a book blogger mage with a dragon-ish that likes cheap cat food, a hydrothaumatologist with a pig problem, when a lousy book becomes inspiration, a not-a-hex sign that works too well, and maybe something else. A raccoon Familiar? Oh gads, no, please, no, go away, la la la. Oh, and readers who want the lousy novel turned into a quasi-parody real novel. Aiiiieeeeeee!
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I will be at LibertyCon if all goes well. [leans over, touches real wood]
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The Celtic novel might go into wide release. I’m still debating because (in part) the cost of a ISBN numbers for it (print and ebook). I need to do more research into how well non-romance historic fantasy sells. Too, it is not all that long, and the cost of print may exceed people’s willingness to buy hard copy. If it had a romance, or were romance, then going wide would be a no brainer given the demand for fantasy romances of all kinds right now. Per a contact at a local book store, romantasy is THE hot genre, especially dark fantasy romance.
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Along those lines, does anyone else get a little uncomfortable reading some of the plots and stories in the romantasy and dark fantasy romances that are big right now? The relationships seem less than healthy at best. It is probably a carry over from what happened with paranormal romance, which dove into areas that give me the willies (and developed some eye-rollingly silly tropes along the way). Part of it may be the combination of the covers and the back matter, which emphasize the dark part of the romance. I did have to giggle at the—ready for this?—reverse harem foreign dragon shifter very spicy* romance series though. How many tropes can the author fit into one story? Challenge accepted!
*5,000,000 Scoville units spicy, Ghost Pepper on habanero with a side of jalapeño juice spicy.
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Hodge Podge”
I look forward to seeing you and everybody else at LibertyCon. I head off tomorrow on my long strange trek because I’m hitting SoonerCon in Oklahoma first, then on to LibertyCon.
“*5,000,000 Scoville units spicy, Ghost Pepper on habanero with a side of jalapeño juice spicy.”
I guess if it reached “Andre’s curry spicy” it would have to be sold in a brown wrapper….
The darker romance genres run on a mix of forbidden fruit (I’ve said elsewhere that straight men and women both love bad boys, men just love them platonically and want to be them) and younger women having no idea what sane masculinity looks like.
Bad boys just make my predator alarms go off, even in books. Something about painful personal experience and all that. Clearly I’m an exception to the sales rules. 🙂
I’m with you. I still remember the “romance” novel I read where the “hero” planted bugs all over the heroine’s apartment, spied on her in the shower, and when she found one of the bugs and tried to call the police, hacked her phone so that he was the only “policeman” she could talk to. That was a hard DNF when I realized he was indistinguishable from a horror movie villain.
One YouTuber—I can’t remember his name, so forgive me for not citing properly—called these alleged love interests, “Guys who get the girl when they ought to get the chair.*”
*=The chair is overkill in most cases. 30 years in the state pen, with parole a possibility after 15, would serve for the majority of them.
Yeah, I’m with you and Zsuzsa. I’ve joked before that I imprinted too hard on Captain Nemo and Sherlock Holmes to have much use for the unsubtle thugs that pass for male leads in alot of modern romance.
Well, there does have to be some kind of obstacle to the passion, or it’s not a love story, it’s two characters falling in love while they are resolving another conflict that drives a non-love story.
The big-push ones– going off of “I see them in grocery stores”– seem to be waving red flags for attention and screaming “red flags are my favorite color!”
(For those who haven’t run into the slang yet– a “red flag” is a possibly problematic behavior; worse than a yellow flag, but if you have enough time and resources you can investigate if it’s a run-away-screaming-aaaaaah-Sephroth! into the night, or not.)
I like complex relationships where there’s attention-grabbing possible problems, especially if they dig in to real life cultural issues and they’re kind of divided on who’s doing “the done thing” which is clearly A Bad Idea by the end. Thing is, you have to actually show if that get attention thing is a red flag and warning, or a bright colored flower.
Is this getting your attention because it’s dangerous and toxic, or because it’s important and powerful?
I suppose I must be old. I can remember a romantic fantasy comic written in the late 80’s set in a sort-of Renaissance/per-Revolutuionary France where the hero, who is basically an Errol Flynn swashbuckling thief type, slips into a lovely lady’s room (he didn’t know it was her bedroom, let alone that she was in it) and is found by her. One kiss and an implied night of passion later and it’s true love. Back then most people just told me that it was a “Harlequin romance moment” and that was it.
Years later that scene had some people complaining about how creepy it all was, yet later in that very issue the heroine’s mistress, the Empress, has the hero dragged off to be tossed into her bath for some attempted lovemaking. He is “rescued” by a friend, even when he doesn’t want to be – but nobody who complained about the prior scene ever said anything about that!
Was this a French or Belgian comic by any chance? Sounds like their schtick.
No, this was an American independent comic with anthropomorphic characters, released in 1988 on the tail end of the B&W comics boom.
Okay, that explains it.
What’s really fun to juggle is when some people criticize it and others single it out as good.