Is there a better way to reach more weirdos?

Today, I ran across this blog post from Raw Dog Screaming Press, which was talking about how some people are publishing a few thousand ebooks, often with knockoff titles of bestseller books to confuse readers. While there’s a number of small press publishers and indie writers who work to make quality ebooks, there’s also a lot of operations set up strictly for the purpose of making a quick buck off of impulse buyers. What this leads to is reader fatigue with book promotions of any kind. Readers can’t be sure who to trust, so they stop paying attention to announcements of book releases. These ebook spammers are only in ebooks for the money, and that makes it so much harder for the rest of us to get our message out through all the noise.

Raw Dog wrote:

Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. “I am a single mother who home schools her children,” says Peebles, who says she sells “thousands and thousands” of books a month. “Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month.”

Reading a quote like this makes me a very sad Zoe. I could be accused of a lot of things on my writing, but trying to trick readers will never be one of them. So yeah, it offends me that someone like Karen is enjoying so much success by taking advantage of people. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a similar kind of success. Yeah, I’m not in it for the money, but that doesn’t mean I find the idea of making a few dollars offensive.

Thing is, I can’t rightly say that I’d be selling more if only people like Karen would grow a conscience and stop selling their crap titles. Even with less authors in the pool, I’m still an acquired taste. With their focus on bizarro fiction, I suspect Raw Dog Screaming may also have the same problem. We’re not looking for just any reader. We’re looking for the distinguished connoisseur of weird shit.

A YA rant…

This morning, just getting off my couch, I stumbled onto a realization about something I hate about YA writing, and by extension something I hate about real adults. It’s a fallacy that is embraced by adults who read YA, and it’s an excuse that I hear over and over as a justification from real adults for why they try to program their teens like they’re personal appliances and not people with their own personalities and needs.

In two different reviews with two entirely different premises, the reviewers explained how the teen character gets into trouble, and the parents respond with unreasonably harsh punishment methods. Yet the adult reviewers both said, “I had an easy time relating to the parents, because they were just protecting their kids from bad influences.” Urgh!

News flash, adults: those “bad influences” are called “the rest of the human race,” and eventually, your own little bad influence is going to have to go out and deal with all those other people. The longer you insist on protecting and coddling your teen, the worse an influence they will be to someone else’s kids. That’s right, someone is looking at your “little angel” as their “little shit.” And they’re right to do so, because it will be your kid going “Hey, I’ve never done this before. Let’s try it.” It will be your kid acting as the bad influence because they had their own bad influence at home. YOU.

The sad joke is, for all your smothering efforts to coddle and protect your charges, you can’t change their minds on anything. You have a slim window of opportunity to influence their decision before they’ve made their minds up on any topic, but once your teen takes it in their head that something is a good idea, you have no more chance of stopping them than your parents had of stopping you before you made your own fuck ups.