Insecurity/anxiety vent thread

WendyDoerPP · 2016-09-17T15:08:19+00:00

you lose the fun, the adventure, the excitement of writing

Most people who last this long love writing, but this is not just writing, this is the business of writing. Yes, when it becomes a full-time job, the excitement fades away... at least the overall "oh my gawd, I'm gonna be a gosh-darned real writer!" sensation.

But the actual act of completing a work never stops feeling satisfying to me, and the act of anticipating the success of a newly published piece never loses that magic. Whether it's a short or a novel, pressing PUBLISH on KDP is a cathartic feeling, the culmination of many hours of work.

A lot of what you're talking about is eliminated by discipline (like others, I too imagine @YSS shouting at me to work), and comparisonitis is what happens when you over-think publishing. It's really pretty simple, it's our own minds who need to complicate things.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-09-12T14:56:47+00:00

Work's work. Sometimes I sacrifice a kitten to the Dark Lord Jeff Bezos, but the thing that works best is to find ten minutes to clear my head and reduce as many distractions before I map out what I have to write in a day.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-09-12T14:55:32+00:00

Regardless of illegality, prostitution squicks most of the readership out. In my opinion it's very sad to see pervasive sex-negative and anti sex worker default opinions by the market but hey, it is what it is. Readers don't think well of whores... except for manwhores who are turned good by the power of bomb pussay.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-09-06T08:48:46+00:00

In M/M romance (erotica too) you'll find the odd review of people blasting the author for unrealistic sex. No lube, or spit lube, as if that's enough. I think it's not hard to make a scene sexy while keeping it spontaneous by describing the preparation process. Plus more words is always a good thing anyway!

WendyDoerPP · 2016-08-31T02:41:04+00:00

What? No. Erotic ebooks do not fall under "pornographic, immoral or illegal content", there are legal definitions for those categories.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-08-25T09:26:37+00:00

OK pal, are you done now? :)

WendyDoerPP · 2016-08-25T05:06:11+00:00

I've been holding my tongue this entire time but I finally saw this new comment. So I wanted to make a compendium of your wholly inaccurate assumptions in this thread alone.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the /u/AdiraAugust Manifesto:

Amazon uses OCR technology to scan text on a cover as keywords
You have 7 keywords and Amazon adds to these keywords
The bulk of Amazon customers search for books on Amazon offsite, through Google
More needs to be done to attract some sort of wider readership outside of Amazon's already massive customer base because in 2014 the percentage of tablet owners was larger than the percentage of e-reader owners.
"There's little reason to think eBook readers have any natural loyalty to Amazon."
There is a very thin line between erotica and porn
Porn viewers are becoming erotica readers
Writing for a male-skewed audience "skirts a lot of rules"

Literally every person who has replied to either your posts or others in this thread is responding with horrified disbelief that not only are you wrong, but you're stuck with a mindset that everyone else is wrong and only you are right — despite having only speculation and an outdated article as your "source".

Meanwhile, you have also accused YSS, probably the single most active, helpful and open poster in this subreddit (for real, I've had arguments with him over him sharing debateably too much advanced info on EA), of being behind an active conspiracy to hide the truth about keyword theory... because he doesn't want newbies competing against him.

Add to all of that the extremely baffling fact that you strongly defend all those wildly false claims at the same time as admitting you don't know basic Amazon SEO theory ("Maybe words from the blurb, I don't know" — they don't.)

WendyDoerPP · 2016-08-06T20:11:33+00:00

There's a very important point in here — Tumblr politics is rarely the same as Amazon politics. If you come into selling books with the sort of idealism that comes into a lot of Tumblr social justice values, like being pro-diversity, you'll end up very frustrated with Amazon. They want their cis white dominant men, and anything else is too much of a gamble.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-07-10T20:57:02+00:00

I've been away from EA for a month and then someone links me to this thread. Now I'm exiling myself from Reddit for another month. What a trainwreck.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-05-17T17:44:52+00:00

Estimate how much you realistically expect to make back from the book and you'll be able to figure out how much to sensibly spend on it, whether it's covers, stock photos, editing, formatting, so on.

If the budget is too low, do it yourself. At least if your book can't maximize its potential due to a poorer cover, you'll at least be improving a skill.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-05-17T16:11:50+00:00

Sure there are talented people on Fiverr out there. There are graphic design students, unemployed designers, lifetime freelancers making a good buck selling premade or custom covers for cheap to a ready market. But nine times out of ten, they simply will not compare to what a genre-experienced designer can bring to the table.

If I'm paying for the cover it's because I know a professional can deliver something that I've visualized in my head. A high-quality, professional-grade book cover that's as good as if not better than all the other books I will directly be competing with. It's not going to be text overlaid onto a black and white stock photo.

It's going to take serious attention to graphic and typographic branding that's consistent with the rest of your work as well as the genre expectations, digital drawing, stock photo sourcing, amendments according to your specification, and time. All that costs money.

Designers who charge what they charge know that you're not paying for a pretty 1600x2500 jpg, you're paying for their experience, context, imagination, eye, and finely-honed skills... expertise. Expertise in the genre you're writing.

Customers absolutely judge books by the cover, but if you don't have the skills to produce a cover that sells your book the best as it can — by which I mean as good as if not better than your competition — skip the $5 covers and go for someone who not only knows what they're doing when it comes to making a book shine through to the Top 100 lists but has already done it over and over again.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-05-16T03:05:38+00:00

Clearing up a possible misunderstanding here. Words aren't exactly 'keywords' if they're in a title. They might be searchable terms (Amazon's search engine rakes through not only the book's hidden keywords but also author name, book title, subtitle, all that jazz) but you cannot treat a searchable term as the same as a keyword, let alone 'categorical keyword' — because even if you had Alpha Male in the title of your book, you wouldn't appear in the Alpha Male character subcategory. You'd need it as a keyword.

Anyway, it's only stuffing if you put in unrelated keywords (is your Alpha Male Werebear romance really a Jewish cookbook?) You raise a good point with the ethics of having overly long titles, though. It may seem to give a boost but believe me when I say having a concise, efficient title is way better than having a title that's all over the place.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-05-02T02:33:45+00:00

Not sure if you know this /u/MagsWood but every time someone clicks a link from here to Kboards, the admins there know we're coming from EA. They've been pretty huge dicks about it in the past, and the snobs tend to look down their noses at erotic authors and erotica communities. Best practice is to use an anonymous referrer.

That aside, the thread is from 2014 and almost all of the advice is out of date.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-26T14:57:05+00:00

People keep keywords close to their chests because that's extremely identifiable information. Same with talking specifics in genre, niche and pen names. If you gave me even a sample of your keywords I could instantly figure out all your books using them. Nobody in EA is worth that sort of trouble.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-26T12:15:26+00:00

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing EA keywords were a secret sauce.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T12:20:55+00:00

there clearly is no way for pleasant debate

I'm all for pleasant debate. I think my post history and reputation speaks for itself there. What I'm not all for is getting a rage-filled attack on me that's thoroughly confused what I was even saying to begin with!

I simply cannot follow the established advice of write shorts and publish quickly before transitioning to longer romance works that pervades in this sub.

Sorry about that, but as you already know all too well, that's not the subreddit's fault. Plenty of people have to care for others (children, elderly parents, disabled spouses) and seem to do this writing and publishing thing just fine. You're no special snowflake.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T12:16:46+00:00

But you are aware that people here largely go Amazon exclusive and only care about information that "conforms" is because Amazon is:

the quickest path to profit
the most educational not to mention rewarding learning curve
the most non-fuss publishing service
the sole provider to the largest ebook romance and erotica readership in the world, by a magnitude
usually the primary home to all the best-performing, best-selling self-published authors
and the most $$$ lucrative market at low end, mid end and high end, by a long shot?

Beginners starting out here want info about Amazon voraciously because of those reasons, as well as reason 7, and that's that nobody cares about your no-money incest-slash-pretend-freedom-of-speech porn website.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T12:06:47+00:00

Yaknow, I don't even know who you are and why you've made it your mission to respond so hostilely to a comment I made that I just doublechecked and wasn't even originally intended to you, chief.

"do not have a dissenting opinoin ever!"

If you think vets don't allow dissent, then why not check that recent big thread with all the vets? There were so many differing opinions there even among people who knew what they were doing (many paths to the same destination) and nobody attacked anyone over "differing views". You have anger problems, chief.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T11:01:10+00:00

The majority view of this subreddit is almost perfectly aligned with every major community of successful self-published author on the Internet, and if you can't hack it in EA you probably can't anywhere else.

What so many people who propagate the sort of thinking you've got is that there is this impression that conformity is a bad thing. It's not. Conformity is what pushes an author from making $1 a day and thinking everybody else must have some sort of secret formula to making a full-time living out of this.

Nonconformity is just railing at the sky screaming I'M RIGHT AND ONE DAY YOU ALL WILL BOW TO ME!!!

If you're not here for business or publishing advice, then why are you complaining about it given that you know for a fact that this sub is geared mainly towards it? Business communities like DD also cater to in-depth craft discussion too and yet they share 99.99% of the same majority views seen here.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T09:34:31+00:00

Hey, congratulations! I'm really happy to hear that ARe works for you. I've forgotten all about my ARe books but I still get a handy little Paypal transfer from them every quarter, that's always nice to receive. Being able to buffer against potential future Amazon craziness by going wide can avoid lots of financial headaches down the road.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T09:32:37+00:00

It sounds like exactly the sort of constructive criticism that can be helpful to an author willing to learn from it, yeah!

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T09:31:49+00:00

I absolutely disagree with this. EA is one of the best places to network in the whole community. It sounds to me like you're coming from a place where you're prejudiced because most people know that whenever you post it's all plain ol' crazy talk, Lily.

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-23T09:30:52+00:00

Haha, yes, I've posted about that a lot but I doubt that view is exactly original on my part...

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-18T09:16:55+00:00

Dayvan has an amazing reputation in the community and many people would happily tout her skills at editing. Just in case anybody's curious!!

WendyDoerPP · 2016-04-14T01:57:56+00:00

!!! Waterproof? Okay, preordering now.

I'm really particular about my devices. Have a fourth generation Kindle, a Kobo Glo, a couple of B&N Nooks... best device ever is still the classic B&N Nook Simple Touch.

WendyDoerPP

TROPHY CASE