Sticks & Stones

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me

Alexander William Kinglake in his Eothen, circa 1830

As an author, one is always being bombarded with ‘How to’ stuff. How to write a short story, how to write flash fiction, how to write a query letter, how to promote your book, how to string a dozen facetious words together and make a million bucks!

Seems to me that the only people making money in the literature industry isn’t the makers, its the people selling stuff TO the makers.

As an indie author – self-published, who doesn’t have spare dosh lying around, not only writes the stuff, but has to edit (before sending to an actual editor), create and make the book cover design, format each book, launch it into the market (like throwing a pea into a field of peas), market myself on social media (very poor at this), and start work on my next book.

Some folk love all that. Some folk relish the edit and the media marketing madness. Not me. I just want to be left alone to write stories and for people to enjoy them.

This has been my attempt to get you to buy my books.

Follow the link below for some loveliness. I thank you.

Get thee along to https://www.sticksandstonesbooks.com

All titles available on Amazon.

AP: Was that okay?

EVF: Seemed a bit critical of the publishing industry.

AP: You don’t think it was too needy? Too pleading?

EVF: Were you kneeling when you wrote it?

Marketing Makes Me Want to Vomit

Gak! Fr@!g! Sh*g!

That’s basically my reaction to marketing. Any kind of marketing. But especially the stuff I do am supposed to do to sell my writing.

I have been reading about branding. What is this shit? I am not a tin of peas! Branding is when you take a product there are billions of similars of and stick some sort of ‘identity’ on top. A label.

The thing is, creativity IS the thing. It shouldn’t need a label, or an author a brand. Writing is what it is. There are already genres enough to confine and constrict – yes, they can and do. People struggle to hashtag their novels or find suitable keywords to fit if their novel crosses genres. Agents reject submissions on the grounds that your sci-fi/horror/comedy/etc isn’t close enough to the last sci-fi/horror/comedy/etc success they were involved with. What’s the ‘typical’ word count for the genre you write? Go ahead and look it up – I’ll wait…

And you wrote under or over it didn’t you? You worry that you now have to chop it up or tack on something else. I’m betting you looked around a few sites till you found one that fit closer to your word count. Who the f*ck decided this? Who got to decide how short or long your book should be?

And more importantly.

Why are we listening to them?!

I have a proposition – writers of the world unite and throw away all the rules (not grammar rules, that would be wrong, and very silly). Ignore what the publishers, agents, talking heads and ‘experts’ (I feel like Doctor Evil with so many ‘air quotes’) tell you!

Write from your heart. Write whatever you want. Write any and every genre and confuse the fuck out of your current agent, if you have one.

Be free! Don’t let anyone tell you how many words you should write. Or where you should promote yourself. Or how many times a day you should post on social media.

To misquote some bloke who drank a lot – Rage, rage against the pressures of the publishing industry!