jharrisonwrites

Odds are, it’s on Amazon.com. Amazon is no longer the elephant in the room, but that’s only because they’ve grown too big to fit into the room. Amazon controls over 80% of E-book sales, 65% of online print book sales, and 83% of the U.S. e-reader market. They sell 306 million print books and 120 million e-books per year.

And that’s just new books. They also sell around 615 million used books per year, which is almost all of that market.

You can see their dominance when you consider what it means to be an Amazon bestseller versus being a bestseller somewhere else. I’ve seen estimates that a book reaching #100 in sales rank in the Amazon store sells around 1,500 copies per week. A book reaching the same sales rank at Barnes & Noble would see just a few hundred copies per week. That’s why Indie authors like me can’t afford to ignore Amazon, even if we’re sometimes tempted to. For book buyers, Amazon’s combination of convenient shopping, algorithm-generated suggestions based on past buying, and fast, free (for Prime members) shipping is hard to beat.

For authors, there is definitely some downside. First, the cash flow is rather slow, meaning the investment in book production remains tied up for a while. Publishing is a business. Like many small business owners, indie authors are often cash-strapped. They may have spent thousands of dollars on editing, thousands more on interior design and layout, plus still more on cover design, proofreading, and ancillary services. Once the book is ready for market, there will me more spent on Amazon ads, Facebook ads, and whatever other paid marketing efforts are appropriate for a given book. In my case, Kindred Spirits has cost me roughly $8,000 out-of-pocket before the first dime of marketing money gets spent. Yet the time between a sale on Amazon and the author’s receipt of a royalty payment is measured in months. A book sold on Amazon in December will pay me at the end of February.

An even more worrisome financial issue for indies is that we have no way to evaluate the accuracy of royalty statements. If Amazon reports that I sold X number of books last month, I am aware of no way to either verify or disprove the reported figures. I have to take their word for it.

Then there are quality control issues. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of book reviews over the last six months. And I’m amazed at how many times print books from KDP (Kindle Direct Printing, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm) get dinged in the reviews for having physical defects. I’m talking about things like pages falling out of the bindings, or pages printed in the wrong order. These errors end up saddling authors with bad reviews, even though KDP, not the author, is responsible for printing the book. And getting a refund or exchange for a book bought from Amazon is by no means a sure thing.

Most authors would do whatever they could to turn an unhappy customer into a satisfied one. But people who buy from Amazon are Amazon’s customers, not ours. We don’t know who they are. Amazon knows their names, locations, and purchase histories. We writers know none of those things. In most lines of work, businesses owners know who their typical customer is. Operating without that knowledge, without that connection to the buyer, can be a handicap.

For all of these reasons, I intend to give my readers another choice. I’ll be selling Kindred Spirits direct-to-consumer via my own storefront on Shopify. I’ll be able to connect with my buyers, take personal responsibility for quality control issues, and get paid more timely. I’ll have no uncertainty about how many books I’ve sold this way. I’ll be able to let readers know when the next installment in the series is ready. And don’t let me forget to mention signed copies for those who want them!

If there is a downside to direct sales, I think it’s small. Shipping won’t be free.And it may not be quite as fast. If you want to start reading a print book the day after your purchase, Amazon will still be your best bet. But for everyone else, you have a choice. Including your local, independent, bricks-and-mortar bookstore There are a lot fewer of those than there used to be. I encourage you to buy from them from time to time to help keep a local small business in business.

Wherever you do your buying, my new novel will be available for sale this Friday, December 1. I’m hoping you’ll be among the new book’s first readers!

I’m not sure when an elevated cognizance of my own mortality first impinged on my thoughts. It might have started when a childhood friend and neighbor passed away a little while back. As young kids, Mark and I spent many hours tossing a football around my yard, pretending to be Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris. Or throwing a wiffle ball while one of us threw sidearm pitches like Kent Tekulve, and the other did the famous Willie Stargell windup at the plate. I changed schools in the ninth grade, and we lost contact for decades. A little over two years ago, he sent me a Facebook friend request, and I was happy to reconnect after all those years. I intended to start an online conversation to catch up with him, but never quite got around to it. Good intentions and all that. And then, in early 2022, he died. Because he was two years younger than me, his passing reawakened my own sense of mortality.

Or perhaps it started when I realized that all the doctors I have seen in recent years are younger than I am. That was not the case twenty years ago. But it is now, and I’m not sure exactly when that happened.

And speaking of doctors, I just got a diagnosis that rocked me back on my heels. It wasn’t the worst kind of news — I’m not terminally ill, or disabled, or anything like that — but it was significant enough to make me imagine my life’s clock ticking away the seconds more insistently than before.

All these things bring me to Reason #7 why I believe Kindred Spirits, my second novel, will be worth reading: With my unknown expiration date clearing its throat in the background (“Ahem!”), I gave serious thought to what I want my writing legacy to be. Sure, I wanted to tell a good story that would get your adrenaline pumping. If the protagonist’s pressures at work and issues at church don’t get your attention, her homicidal neighbor will. But I also wanted to give people something to talk about after they’ve digested the plot. I wanted to make this one count.

Let me put it another way: I’ve preached more messages and taught more Bible classes than I could possibly count. And I know that even people who were there for most of them will forget the lion’s share of the messages. That’s just human nature. But a published book may long outlive its author. So I’ve tried to think of all the things I’ve learned, all the mistakes I’ve made, and all the things I’ve taught. I asked myself what I’d want to say to readers if this were my last chance to say anything. What great truths would I want to convey? The Solid Rock Survivor series is intended to convey my most hard-won convictions about life. Fighting Back accomplished some of this. Kindred Spirits, I think, does it better. And book three, with a working title of The Long Game, should be better still, a fitting capstone to the series, and to my career as an author even if I never write another book after it. It reminds me of a snippet of conversation between my protagonist Roz and one of her neighbors:

“How long have you and Mrs. Grimm been neighbors?”

“Half a lifetime, I guess.” He sighed, perhaps an old man’s acknowledgment that the road ahead was now much shorter than the road behind.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not feeling at all morbid. I’ve had nonagenarians on both sides of my family tree. I still have a lot of plans. I hope to be running my firm, writing books, composing tunes, taking road trips — and still preaching and teaching — decades from now. But if it doesn’t turn out that way, I’ve done my best to make Kindred Spirits a book worth reading. And rereading. If you can see yourself enjoying Christian fiction with a bit of an edge, a bit of political incorrectness, intense action, and some deep thoughts, then I am confident you’ll like this book. I wrote it like it might be the last thing I ever did. Release date to be announced soon!

The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. Before that, they hadn’t done it since 1918. During that drought of 86 years, the perennial hope of Sox fans was expressed in the the phrase “wait ’til next year.” I feel like I’ve been living that experience as Kindred Spirits, book two of my Solid Rock Survivor series, has inched its way toward publication. And now, after more years than I care to admit, it’s almost ready. The timeline is now measured in weeks, not months.

I recently got the draft back from my excellent editor. She liked it. She raved about parts of it, and has observed that my writing has improved since the release of book one. I’ve worked through her zillions of suggested edits, accepting this one, rejecting that one, adding some clarifying material here, going for deeper point-of-view there. I’m confident that Kindred Spirits is now a stronger book than the version I sent to my beta readers. Next step is getting it typeset. That is happening as you read this. I’ll be releasing it both as a paperback and an E-book. No exact publication date yet, but it will be soon. Very soon.

While I count down the days to publication, I thought I’d give you a preview to help you decide if you might like to add it to your library. As you may know, my genre is Christian fiction. But please set aside any preconceptions you may have, because this book (indeed, the whole series) is not stereotypical of the genre. It’s different. Really. Over the next several blog posts, I’ll release the top ten reasons why this is true. I’m hoping the list will help you decide whether to give the book a try. Ready? Here goes:

Reason #10: It’s Not Too Sweet. Shout out to anyone old enough to remember when that was the marketing pitch for Canada Dry ginger ale. http://bit.ly/3DFvQeE

Some Christian fiction tales feature characters and situations so sweet, so precious, that they cross over from “clean” to cloying. I’m skeptical when the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and everyone else I meet on the page is conveniently Christian. When characters never say, do, or think anything that would not be pastor-approved. When there is a bad guy doing very bad things, but he is so far offstage you couldn’t see him even with binoculars. I understand the attraction; it would be nice to live in a world like that. But my characters inhabit the same messy world we do. It’s not always pretty, and the perils are real. I wrote the story to be inspirational and uplifting, but not at the expense of realism. Like its predecessor, Kindred Spirits deals with thorny issues, and you’ll see the world (and the church) as it is, warts and all.

Reason #9: You are now free to move around the country. I took pains not to set my stories in generic Anytown, USA. I think it was Abraham Verghese who famously opined “Geography is destiny.” Ever since I heard that, I’ve wanted the settings of my stories to matter. I develop these places as much as I do the human characters. I want the setting to have an impact on the plot and/or the character development.

For example, in Fighting Back (book one of this series) I learned of the historical connection between pre-Revolutionary Plymouth, Salem, and Framingham, Massachusetts. [Minor plot spoiler for book one here.] When I learned that Salem was founded by religious refugees from Plymouth, and that Framingham’s Salem End neighborhood was in turn settled by religious refugees from the Salem witch trials, I just had to set my story in Framingham. Because protagonist Eddie is himself a refugee of sorts, and I could think of no more logical starting place to begin his journey. His adventures eventually take him all up and down the east coast. To quote the old Amtrak slogan, readers get to “see America from see level.”

Likewise, Kindred Spirits begins in Framingham. But protagonist Roz takes a significant detour to Beaver County, PA. Readers who live in that area (or who used to) will see a lot they recognize. And one character’s take on growing up in Roz’s home town will have a profound impact on how Roz deals with her problems back home in the Bay State. I’ll admit that I’m curious to see how my Beaver County readers will react to this.

Reason #8: Man’s best friend. Did I mention that readers will get to meet this little guy? He might not be a differentiator, but you have to admit he’s cute. I’m pretty sure he’d want you to read all about him.:-)

Book reviews. Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them. Consider the following quotations from book reviews I found on Amazon:

I can’t believe I actually finished it. How does this author sell anything? I know he has a big name, but how? Really, do yourself a favor and just read something else.

What a thoroughly stupid book.

This is one of the very best books that I’ve read recently!! I think anyone that enjoyed the television show quantum leap would love this book. I enjoyed the twists in this book. Man you just have to read this. It is that good!

WOW – a story of life, death and survival! Science fiction with detail AND “real” understandable humans and their life challenges. Emotionally intense, well written with the story never failing to draw the reader into the future – Or the past!

Its really sad what passes for literature these days. Unless you’re impressed by the word Absalom and stilted dialogue there’s nothing worth reading here. Amazing that a book with almost 500 pages could be so rushed and incoherent. I’m sure it’ll be another bestseller. Pathetic.

Two positive reviews, and three negative ones. Two that would make any author proud, and three that might well crush the spirit. What surprises me most is that all five reader reviews are for the same book! So depending on whom you believe, it’s either one of the very best books ever, or it’s thoroughly stupid. Perhaps if I knew the reviewers, knew something about their literary tastes or points of reference, it would be helpful. But I don’t know them, so those five reviews bring me no closer to forming an opinion of the book than I was before I read them.

And that encapsulates the ecstasy and the agony of reviews. They’re so important, so necessary, and yet so useless. Potential buyers know that a book’s cover and back blurb are marketing materials, designed to induce them to buy. Before they part with their hard-earned cash, many people want social confirmation from neutral third parties who have read the book. So authors go to great lengths to cajole readers into leaving reviews. We’ll place a request for reviews in the final, pages of an e-book. If we have a buyer’s email address, we’ll email requests for reviews. We’ll slip such requests into hard copy books that we sell at live events. A nightmare scenario for writers is to have a book that’s been available for purchase for a year, but has only garnered a dozen reviews. That suggests few people are reading the book. It’s like driving past a restaurant that is open, but the parking lot is almost empty. Most people feel more confident choosing a restaurant — or a book — that is more popular.

To avoid that dearth of reviews, authors sometimes use services like NetGalley to give away free copies of our work to total strangers “in exchange for an honest review.” I’m not sure how this came to be. Self-published authors can spend thousands of dollars on cover design, interior design, editing, and advertising. Those expenses are in addition to the hundreds of hours spent researching, writing, and revising the text in order to tell the best story we can. Having to give away the finished product in exchange for reviews just feels wrong to me. After all, do restaurants give away free meals in exchange for honest reviews? Hotels don’t trade free rooms for reviews. Uber drivers don’t give free rides for reviews. Does anyone besides writers do this as a standard part of their marketing plan?

As if that weren’t bad enough, some reviewers go out of their way to add insult to injury. These folks can’t content themselves with “It wasn’t my cup of tea.” They have to savage the book and the author. It’s like kindness and self-restraint have become relics of the past. The kindest reviews probably come from people who know the author. But Amazon is ruthless about weeding those out. If they figure out that one of the reviewers is Facebook friends with the writer, they will delete that review on the assumption that it is not objective.

So as much as I’d like to dispense with reviews, I know I can’t. I’m going to fish for them like every other author out there. I know I need at least a hundred reviews if my book is to have any chance of selling well. Thank you in advance if you write one. I’m just not going to read mine!

In the wee hours of Monday morning, I received a jolt of inspiration I wanted to share. Every once in a while, I read something that reminds me of why I decided to become an author. It’s easy to lose sight of the why, and instead get lost in all of the how: the stylistic conventions (show, don’t tell; and lose the adverbs, please), drive for productivity (You aren’t writing a thousand words per day yet?); the platform building (free content in exchange for email addresses).  But shortly after midnight, I chanced to read the opening pages of an old book that brought my priorities back into focus.

The book is called The Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak. It’s science fiction, which is not a genre I often read.  I was blown away by the prologue. The writing is that good.

The first pages show us the aftermath of war, a subject about which an enormous amount of ink has been spilled over the centuries. He’s boiled it down, reduced it to its essential essence. His words form a rich literary broth, and the taste lingers in memory long after the reading. He presents timeless truths and universal realities. This is writing as art, rather than mere commerce. It’s hard to imagine Simak thinking about his work as product, or as a lead magnet, or as a way to create multiple streams of income around whatever business he engaged in.  He was creating something of substantial value, something that would outlast him. And indeed it has; the author has been dead for over 30 years, yet his 54-year-old book will surely feel as powerful in the year 2050 as it did back in 1963.

It violates many of the rules the experts preach in their blogs, podcasts, writing workshops, and online courses.

1. The opening page does not introduce you to a point-of-view character — or any character, for that matter. The experts tell us we have to introduce the POV character by name right away.
2. It starts with description. The literary fashion police insist we begin with narrative. Like the opening scene of a James Bond movie, we are told to drop the audience into the middle of an action scene, or we will lose them before the end of page one.
3. It moves from description to backstory; what things were like before they reached the state we read about in the opening sentences. The rule makers tell us backstory is bad.
4. The writing is beautiful. The arbiters of taste declare that if readers notice the writing at all, then the writing is getting in the way of the story. By “story,” they mean only the narrative plot.

I loved the beautiful prose. I appreciated the poetic juxtaposition of gouted and spouted; of “the screams of horses”  and “the hoarse bellowing of men.”  In a few words, he sums up the aftermath of battle: “the words unspoken and the deeds undone, and the sodden bundles that cried aloud the emptiness and the waste of death.”

This is how I want to write when I grow up. Not necessarily in the same style, but with as much power and artistry. After all the currently fashionable writing rules have been forgotten, artistry will remain. People don’t read the works of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, or Jane Austen because they are fashionable or stylistically correct. They read them because they are great literature.

I’m not saying that the “rules” of fiction writing are irrelevant. I am saying that the rules exist to serve authors. Authors don’t exist to serve the rules.  [That’s not a new concept. Jesus notably told the Pharisees in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”]  Writers are prone to forget that, sometimes judging a book’s quality only by how closely it adheres to the rules of current writing fashion. Let me suggest a better measuring stick: how clearly does it speak to the soul? Now go churn out some marketable product create something great!