Money Can't Buy Me Love

<-- Laying aside the editor hat for a minute and taking up the writer one, my newest book from Secret Cravings Publishing will be out in September, and I have a shiny new cover to show off. I just need to write a fabby money-making blurb to go with it.

Five fiction mistakes that spell rejection: No. 5 - No Point

Fiction Mistakes that Spell Rejection

by Moira Allen

No Point


Editors — and readers — aren't just looking for great action and strong characters. They also want a sense of "why." Why should I read this? Why did you write it?

"This is not to say every work should address an Aesopish moral or a grand theme, but rather every story should contain at its core a reason to be," says Max Keele. "In fact, that is my single personal demand from a story: That it add up to something. That it shock me, scare me, unnerve me, make me think, or cry, or vomit. Something."

Ellen Datlow of SciFi.com says she reads far too many stories with no apparent reason for being. "I have no idea why the writer bothered to write the story — no passion, no unusual take on the subject, dull, unbelievable characters. A story has to have something special to make me want to buy it."

A story without a point tends to be "flat," according to Rhonna Robbins-Sponaas. "If we come away with the peculiar feeling that we don't really know why we've just read what we've read, or our first thought is that the washer has finished and the clothes are ready to be put in the dryer, then the writer hasn't conveyed the 'why' of the story as strongly as she could have and should have."

The solution? "Were I to tell a writer one thing, I'd tell her to go back and be certain what her story is, then be sure that she's answered the 'why' of the story so that the reader comes away from the experience with as much a sense of its importance as the writer had," says Robbins-Sponaas. Brown and English of Stickman Review urge writers to, "Write sincerely. Write stories about those things that matter the most to you. If you're writing about something you don't really care about, it'll be obvious to your readers, and they won't care either."

RIP LendInk

See what happens when you go away for a few days – you miss all the excitement.

I found my book on LendInk MONTHS ago. It had a lovely review from the person lending it which I duplicated on my blog (is that copyright violation, if I C&P someone’s review of my book?), but I did have a little “huh?” moment before I figured out what the site was all about.

I can’t believe that some people didn’t read that bit on the Amazon kdp form which says that you have to enable lending in order to get the 70% royalty rate.

However, and this thought just occurred to me, not all authors published on Amazon would have seen that form.

Let me explain. My first book was self-pubbed. I saw the form, I filled it in, I knew that by enabling the 70% royalty rate I was enabling lending. So far so good.

But, since then I have had two short stories and two novels acquired by an ebook publisher. So far, three of those have been published, all on Amazon and various other sites (under two different names as they are different genres). I did not fill in the form; the publisher did.

So it is possible that an author who has only had their books published through a publisher might not be aware that all books priced over $2.99 have to have lending enabled.

This was raised with our publisher by one author about a week ago and the publisher looked into it, explained to us all that it was totally legal and that by pricing the books at $2.99 or over, all the books were entered into the lending programme, and that LendInk were doing nothing wrong.

BTW, people, the past tense of ‘lend’ is ‘lent’, not ‘lended’. Your books are lent, not lended :)

Dare I mention that LendInk is not the only lending website out there…?

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This was in response to this blog post:

http://www.2abd.com/politics/copyright/lendink-taken-down-by-asshole-indie-authors/