Indie News: Goodreads Gets Polite

Notice a change in the Goodreads forums lately? The moderation policy for the site has changed, and with it a lot of discussions. But how do these changes affect indie authors? 

Goodreads Manners

According to an announcement released by the site, the new changes will now prohibit discussion threads and "reviews that were created primarily to talk about author behavior."

Salon.com says it all stems from a conflict that arose last summer when indie author Lauren Pippa (Lauren Howard) challenged a Goodreads reviewer for a 2-star rating. She took her complaints to the Goodreads forums, sparking a heated debate that led several Goodreads members to flag Pippa's book with low ratings and "do not read" lists memberships. 

She aired her grievances on Twitter, which just fueled the flames of the fire. Apparently she then took to her blog to say she was bullied into canceling the release of her book.She later reconsidered. 

I advocate that all authors act with professionalism at all times, and I must gently remind all authors that everyone gets bad reviews. My favorite book, Gone With the Wind, unarguably a masterpiece and a classic, has lots of scathing 1-star reviews. It happens...but rarely do websites with 20 million members change their policies because of it. 

The point of this particular bit of news? That yes, a lone indie author can make a big splash with a book...and I hope your experience is a more positive one.

Books on Film: Planet of the Apes

I've always found Planet of the Apes to be a rather frightening story. I don't want a forced lobotomy, after all, and I just can't live in a cage. I like to pace when I think, and that would be maddening. But I didn't know that one of my favorite classic sci-fi movies was actually based on a French book. Did you?

The Book

La Planète des Singes, or Monkey Planet, was released in France in 1963. Pierre Boulle, the author, was already familiar with writing for American audiences. His other best-known novel is Bridge on the River Kwai.

The story isn't about America, anyway, it's about the entire world. It opens with three astronauts who are visiting a planet near the star Betelgeuse. They discover that the atmosphere is somewhat Earth-like, so they name the planet Soror. The water is drinkable, the air is breathable and the vegetation is tasty. So everything looks pretty good...at first. 

Then the astronauts go swimming and see a young woman. She kills their companion, a chimp named Hector. Things go downhill from there as far as the local population is concerned. The planet is populated by human-like creatures, but they are frighteningly primitive in nature. In fact, the astronauts are briefly captured. 

That's when they see the other occupants of the planet, ape-like creatures who wear clothing and carry guns. Several of the human-like creatures are killed, including one of the astronauts, by an ape hunting party. Ulysse, the main character, is captured by the apes.

He's taken to a research facility in a large city. Tests are conducted, and one of the researchers (Zira) becomes interested in the new test subject. Things happen, and there are a few twists and turns toward the end. The book has been translated, so you don't need to be fluent in French to read it. But you can also watch the movie if you like...and it is thoroughly American.

The Film

The first (and greatest) film version of Planet of the Apes was released in 1968 and it stars Charleton Heston -- so really, it's just not going to get any better than that. The movie was a gigantic hit right away, spawning a franchise that's still quite alive and kicking. Watch it today and the film looks dated, but in 1968 the special effects and makeup tricks were absolutely dazzling.

The lead character's name is changed to Taylor (good call) but much of the story and characters from the original book are still intact on film. Plus, Charleton Heston runs around in a loincloth practically the entire time. The movie also completely invents my favorite moment of the film, which you've probably seen spoofed a hundred times, when Heston screams "take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape." The insult is regrettable, but the delivery of the line is masterful.

If you've never seen it, see it. The ending of Planet of the Apes is utterly mind-blowing. This movie has been done and re-done and done again in skit shows, cartoons and on film, but this is the definitive version.

However, a newer one was made in 2001. It's a "loose" remake that was directed by Tim Burton, so you can probably guess how closely this version of the story mirrors the original (or even reality). Mark Wahlberg stars in it, Burton's wife is on board as usual and everything is different. But the fact that a film got made at all is a credit to the entire cast and crew.

The remake was put into development in 1988, after all. It was scrapped just before pre-production. Had it not been, you might be reading about Return of the Apes starring Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. Alas, the scriptwriter got into a dispute with Fox and the project was forgotten for a long, long time.

Wahlberg plays Leo Davidson in this version and he's on a US space station. This time, he ends up in a space pod chasing a chimpanzee named Pericles. The story pretty much goes off on a dozen different tangents from there, and it's quite different from any other version. 

What Got Adapted?

Planet of the Apes is one of those stories that everyone's sort of familiar with, but it all started with just one book. There have been numerous sequels, prequels, remakes and spoofs, but there is just one original story.  The really big twist is the ending of the book -- which is different on film. You'll have to read it to see what I mean.

Dr. Zaius has a bigger role on film, but it's well worth it because he becomes more of a true villain as well. There's more to the story in the novel, and the theme of man vs. animal much more strongly pronounced. Read the book, watch the movie and see what you think of them both.

Writing 101: Are You Talking About Your Book?

You're a self-published author, so of course you're on Goodreads, and you've got a blog and you Tweet about your book all the time. So when I ask you if you're talking about your book, I'm not talking about all your online efforts. I'm talking about your daily interactions. Every single person you know, every store clerk and everyone you ride in an elevator with ought to know you're an author. Talking to someone face-to-face is the type of marketing that absolutely can't be overestimated in value.

Hello, My Name Is...

I'm bringing this up right now because the season for holiday parties is approaching. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's -- you've got several chances to get invited to a get-together, a party or a soiree. I want you to spend some of the evening talking about your book. If you happen to have some business cards, bookmarks and signed promotional materials with you...well, that's just good luck. 

Talking to people, looking them in the eye and telling them about your book is some of the best marketing you can ever hope to do. No one loves or understands that book better than you, so you're clearly an expert on the subject. This should make you feel confident when you're talking about it, because you can't possibly be incorrect. Tell them what you love about the book, why you think they'll love it, and make sure to say the title very articulately...more than once. 

You don't have to be obnoxious about it, but you should try to bring up your book when you can and discuss it. Don't turn it into an all-night affair and talk about your book for hours, but mention it. Chances are, people will start asking you questions and naturally lead you through the conversation. Through the normal flow of talking, you'll drift into other subjects. But maybe later that night, some of those people you spoke with will download your book. Some of them might do it at the party (thank you, smart phones).

If all your friends and family don't know about your book by the end of the holiday season, you're clearly not talking enough. So if you aren't already gabbing, get started. You can never sell too many books.

Writing 101: Email Marketing

Indie authors have to promote as much as they write (maybe even more) in order to sell books. But if you restrict all your marketing to Twitter, you could drive yourself insane. Don't miss out on email marketing. For indies, it's an invaluable promotional tool. If you do it the right way, it's also a fun way to stay in touch with readers and other writers. 

Pen Pals

Everybody checks their email. I've actually had trouble managing my own email time in the past, because I can just get lost in my own inbox. So I happen to know that email promotions work -- I'm one of the people who clicks the links you send me. 

And good news for you indie authors, I read books. So you'd better start using email marketing, and get more purchases from people like me. There's a simple way to do it: add a widget to your blog. Sites like this one (Blogger) and WordPress allow you to create a mailing list of your readers. Put all these people into a contact list in your email program, and send mail to them when you have a new book or a new promotion that you want to market. 

If you're going to send out emails, make them worth reading. Check your mails for key components to make sure your message is being sent out successfully.

• Short and sweet. Brevity is incredibly important when you're marketing through email. If I've got 50 emails to look at, what are the chances I'm going to read every word of your crazy 3-page epic letter? Keep it short, and that will be really sweet. 
• Funny. Make your email interesting by making it humorous. I'm much more likely to read a funny email than one written with plain, straightforward language. Be irreverent, be weird, make jokes, write puns. Be funny, and you'll get more clicks.
• Appeal. The world of the Internet is not black and white, so don't make your emails that way. Change the fonts, add colors, include images. Don't forget the links!

Keeping track of an email mailing list isn't so difficult, but it is one more thing to do. If you like, there is an easy way out. Amazon automatically generates emails for your books. If you want to keep your readers up-to-date with very little effort, just point them toward your Amazon page and tell them to sign up. This way, you don't have to write the emails. But use email marketing in some way, and sell more books any way you can.

Writing 101: Pinterest and Self-Publishing

I've found that Pinterest is a great way to distract myself from writing, but if you can manage to stay a little more professional than me it's also a great marketing tool. Pinterest and self-publishing were made for each other, in fact. It's a little site that became huge, and it's driven by ordinary people who are simply sharing what they like. If that doesn't have indie written all over it...what does? 

Get on Board(s)

I belong to several boards about books and reading, and I created my own boards to show off book covers, book blogs I like, books I've reviewed and books I love. There are a ton of book-oriented boards you can get into on Pinterest, but you can also take it one step further...and I think you should. 

Pinterest is great for sharing book covers, but please don't stop there. If you really want to promote your book, use the site to start building that world online. I've seen authors who create Pinterest boards for character weddings, for character closets (pictures of clothing and accessories and shoes), maybe even for the character itself (foods, hobbies, interests that represent that character). You can even build boards to represent the specific setting where your book takes place.

That's the great thing about Pinterest -- you can pin just about any photo, any time. Show me the car your character drives. Show me a girl or boy who looks like them. I want to see the house they live in, the hairstyles they use. Do they have a tattoo? A pet? A unique talent? Pin it to your book board! Take your readers deeper into your world, and take your promotions further.

Writing 101: Flashbacks

Unless you've decided to model your books after Charles Dickens, there's a good chance that many of your characters don't come to your book fresh and new. Some characters have a past, previous events that have shaped them...events that may continue to influence them. When this past becomes relevant to the character's present or future, the reader may need to know more about the past. The easiest and best way to do it? Flashbacks. But if you use them, use them with care...because flashbacks get very annoying very quickly.

The Past...Within the Past

By and large, fictional tales are told in the past tense. Flashbacks are always events that have happened in the past. So when you start throwing flashbacks into books that are already relating a story that has already happened...well, it gets confusing. This is only one of the reasons why you have to use extreme care when you write flashacks into your tale.

The other reason? It gets old really, really quickly. If I'm moving through a story, I want to stay in the timeline with the character. I want to see what develops next, and most of the time I don't really care about all the stuff that has transpired before. If those past events were meant to be the story, wouldn't they be the story? Anything that disrupts the flow of the story you're telling can make readers put the book down, maybe for good. So if you're going to go back into the deep past, you better have a great reason for doing so.

Why Flash Back?

However, the flashback is an oft-used literary technique. It's absolutely the best way to present a piece of the story that happened long ago, and show how it remains relevant to the story that's occurring in the book now. It's much better to put the reader into that past moment, and show them those events, rather than to simply refer to those events (telling the reader about them instead).

But do it too much, and you're just telling the wrong story. Readers want to stay in the action and in the flow of the narrative, and that's where you've got to keep them. So use flashbacks to make very specific points and provide very important information, but that's it. They are not meant to be filler and they shouldn't be over-done, because at the end of the chapter the reader doesn't want to know the character's entire life history. They just want the story, so don't use too many elements that will interrupt it.

Indie News: "Real Authors" and You

What's the difference between an author and a book writer? One HuffPo blogger opines that if you're self-published, you certainly aren't the former. In a post titled "Are Self-published Authors Really Authors or Even Published?" he explores the relative merit of not the books themselves, but the scribblers who create them.

Getting Real

Dr. Jim Taylor (University of San Francisco adjunct faculty) says that self-publishing allows "anyone with a computer and a small amount of money to call themselves authors."

The sentiment isn't far from wrong, but Taylor is certainly wrong when he says "despite their warts" the publishing industry is "an initial arbiter of literary quality," and points to different quality standards in the traditional publishing industry, as compared to indies.

And I pretty much disagree. I've read atrocious books that were traditionally published, stuff that's riddled with grammatical and punctuation errors. In one book I still have, the characters call each other the wrong names for darn near three whole pages. It's outrageous. I've also come across my fair share of wholly predictable, badly-written and just plain unreadable books that were all published traditionally, and some by big names to boot. Taylor waxes poetic about the thoroughly-vetted nature of traditionally-published books, but I think many avid readers would also disagree with him on this point. 

Publishers aren't the literary tastemakers of this world. Nor are the agents. And though she does have influence, neither is Oprah Winfrey. The readers are. 

The great success of self-publishing is obvious: the world wouldn't know about people like Amanda Hocking and EL James otherwise. They've sold more books than many of those "real" authors who cram the virtual bookshelves and make it all the harder to find the really great reads.

If you publish on your blog, if you publish on KDP, if you publish through Simon and Schuster, you are an author. Don't let anyone tell you any different. Anyone who writes a book from beginning to end and then puts it out there for the world, in any sort of way whatsoever, is an author. And to hell with anyone who says they aren't.

Books on Film: Lord of the Flies

It's not your typical horror story, but Lord of the Flies scared the bejesus out of me when I read it. The story was even more horrifying as a movie. If you can't figure out what's scary about a group of young boys marooned together in a remote location, you've never had brothers...and you've also never read this book. It's time to familiarize yourself with this terrifying dystopian tale.

The Book

William Golding published Lord of the Flies in 1954. He was waaayyy ahead of the current dystopian trend.  It was his first novel, it was adapted into a movie and it's still read in schools all over the world. It's so controversial, people are still fighting it's use as a teaching tool today.

To me, this book always meant one thing: get a group of guys together, and the wheels just fall off the cart. But actually, Lord has a lot of deep symbolism and important meaning (so they say).  

Here's how it goes down: there's a nuclear war. Britain is being evacuated, but a plane carrying civilians crashes in the Pacific Ocean. As a result of this event, a group of school children have been marooned on a remote island. One group is a choir, and they have a leader with them, but most of them have never met each other before this. However, they are all pretty well-educated and they're all refined Brits (it's a British book, by the way).

Not for long. The story is about how the boys turn -- rather quickly, as it would happen -- into total barbarians. It gets nasty. In the beginning, two of the boys find a large conch (a type of shell). Blonde Ralph and overweight "Piggy" use the conch as a horn to signal others. In this fashion, Ralph becomes the official leader of the band of survivors. The boys' choir, led by redhead Jack Merridew, does not vote for him. The rules are simple. Ralph will work on a smoke signal for passing ships, and the conch will be used as a symbol. Whoever holds it may speak at formal meetings.

Jack turns the choir into a hunting group that will find food. Ralph is a clear leader for the "biguns" (the older boys) and though Piggy is his right-hand-man (so to speak), he is the outcast of the group. Simon is the third leader, in charge of constructing shelter and of herding the "littluns" (the younger boys).

The structure doesn't last worth a darn, and soon boys are being lazy and telling stories about a monster they believe lives on the island. Jack promises to kill the monster to gain esteem among the boys, because he wants to wrest control away from Ralph.

Soon enough, Jack has developed his own tribe at Castle Rock (a mountain of stone and a source of inspiration for Stephen King) and begins acting strangely. Simon ends up going a little crazy, and he discovers the Lord of the Flies -- a severed pig head.

Things get much, much worse from here. There is violence, there is bloodshed...there's a lot of completely primitive behavior, and this is why the book remains controversial. You'll have to read it to get all the gory details, and drop your jaw at the very surprising twist ending (it shocked the heck out of me, anyway).

The Film

Lord of the Flies had been majorly adapted to film only twice, the first time in 1963. Plotwise, the story is very faithful to the book. However, much of the movie was not even scripted. Most of the boys in the movie had not read the book and were not given much dialogue to memorize. Instead, the director explained each scene to the boys and then allowed them to act it out. Therefore, much of the speech is changed on film. But since the main plot points are depicted, this remains the best version of the story.

But if you're hankering for a newer one, the book was adapted again in 1990. This time around, a lot of the plot was changed. The boys are American and they attend a military school, already a huge change. Only one school is present on the island, but in the film there were two. Ralph isn't mean to Piggy in this version, and the phrases "biguns" and "littluns" are omitted entirely. The movie also has a lot more profanity, perhaps because that's more realistic when the characters are American. Some of the violence of the book is toned down. None of the boys look like they should. But much of the original ending remains intact, though the dialogue is changed.

What Got Adapted?

There are more minor differences from the book in both films, but you'll have to read the story to discover them. It's frightening, and that makes it a perfect October read.