Tag: fiction

Line between traditional, indie publishing nearly gone: The Fussy Librarian

Published by Adam on August 17, 2015

Jeffrey Bruner, founder of The Fussy Librarian

Today’s indie authors can punch above their weight and take on traditionally published authors, says The Fussy Librarian founder Jeffrey Bruner.

The Fussy Librarian, based in Des Moines, Iowa, sends daily book recommendations to readers based on their preferences.

“The line between ‘industry’ authors and ‘self-published’ authors has just about vanished,” Bruner, a former journalist for Gannett, tells me. “An author can hire a cover designer and copy editor and produce a book that looks and reads just as well as anything by the big publishers.”

Also read:
How indie authors can break through the noise with NoiseTrade
How to find readers and get book reviews with Story Cartel

The marketing budget possessed by big publishers might not be as big an advantage as authors think when deciding between indie and traditional publishing, he says.

“The marketing budget of the big publishers usually goes to only a handful of titles — the superstars like James Patterson, John Grisham, etc.,” says Bruner. “Everyone else is getting the crumbs.”

It’s a sentiment also voiced by Guy Kawasaki, the former chief evangelist of Apple, who wrote a book on indie publishing.

“The fact is that they only do [extensive marketing] if you are Hillary Clinton or you’re David Beckham,” Kawasaki said last year. “They don’t do it for the other 10,000 authors every year because frankly they can’t call the New York Times 10,000 times every year.”

Bruner says that indie authors can do a lot with a little. “Self-published authors don’t need to have a huge marketing budget — just enough to create what Kevin Kelly calls 1,000 true fans. Once you have established that base, they will provide the word of mouth to boost you to 50,000, 100,000, 500,000, etc. But the book has to come first and it’s got to be great.”

He points to many tools available to indie authors today, including Rafflecopter for giveaways, MailChimp for mailing list management and PayPal for e-commerce.

“I’m not saying it would have been impossible to self-publish a bestseller 15 years ago, but it’s a lot easier now.”

Meet The Fussy Librarian

The Fussy Librarian seeks to help readers find well-written books, regardless of how they were published.

“We want to be your personal librarian, the person you can turn to when you want to read a good book,” says Bruner. “We’re like a matchmaker for readers.”

The company knows it must court authors if it wants to provide a valuable service to readers.

“Our business doesn’t exist without readers, so they have to be our primary focus … but you’re also not going to last long unless you provide great customer service for authors, too,” says Bruner.

While the Fussy Librarian is not the only game in town for book recommendations on the Web, the company tries to differentiate itself by providing more personalized recommendations to readers, he says.

“A lot of services send you a list of books. We email you a list of books that match your taste in reading.”

The Fussy Librarian breaks down book promotions into emails based on 40 genres, more than competitor BookBub, and also provides content filters for readers who don’t want to see books with profanity or sexual content, he says.

The company has tried to entice authors with competitive pricing offers. Authors pay a fee per genre, but get discounts when they promote books in more than one genre. Also, the Fussy Librarian doesn’t charge extra to promote box sets.

“Our company is privately owned, so we don’t have venture capitalists demanding a return on their investment,” says Bruner. “And we know that most authors aren’t rich, so we try to keep our prices as low as possible. The cost of living is low in Des Moines, so we don’t need to keep much for ourselves.”

How many readers see a promotion varies by the chosen genre, with anywhere from 25,000 for cookbooks to 95,000 for contemporary romance fiction, says Bruner. Readers see anywhere from three to 20 books in each email, depending on their preferences, he says.

With only one full-time and one part-time employee, the Fussy Librarian cannot read every book submitted to the site. To ensure a base-line level of quality, the website requires that books have at least 10 Amazon.com customer reviews with an average score of 4.0. If it’s a new release, the author must have a previously published book with 50 reviews on Amazon averaging 4.0.

Before starting The Fussy Librarian in 2013, Bruner worked as wire chief for Gannett’s national wire desk.

“Like a lot of people in journalism, I decided I needed a Plan B,” he explains. “I worked at the Des Moines Register and its owner, Gannett, started layoffs in 2005 whenever it decided the bottom line needed boosting. After surviving seven or eight rounds, I got tired of waking up each morning wondering if I would still have a job. I also calculated that, when adjusting for inflation, I was actually making less than when I was hired in 2000.”

At first, Bruner kept his day job at Gannett and worked on his new venture at night. Then, in October 2014, he submitted his resignation and made Fussy Librarian his full-time job.

“My only regret is I didn’t do it five years earlier,” he says.

Bruner says the service continues to evolve, with new features on the way. “We’re working on two major projects — one for readers, one for authors — over the next six months. We think they will both be innovations in the book marketing industry, so I’m reluctant to spill too many details, but they both hold tremendous potential and we’re really excited about them.”

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A matter of perspective

A matter of perspective

Published by Adam on July 18, 2015

First-person or third-person? Past or present tense? These are questions that I think about a lot as a writer.

My first novel We, The Watched employs first-person perspective with a present tense, but it took me a few tries on chapter one to get there. I remember trying third-person past, and then first-person past, but neither seemed to serve the story of a man who wakes up with no memory in a surveillance society.

In the end, I chose first-person because the story is about one man named Seven’s struggle to conform in a totalitarian world, and this perspective allowed me to really flesh out his internal conflict. Because Seven has no past, telling his story in present-tense felt right, too.

This POV was also great for making the reader feel like he or she was Seven. Readers come into books with no knowledge of what came before–and so did Seven. First-person present seemed the perfect way to make the reader feel like a participant in the plot.

Also read: World building in dystopian novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall

While this perspective worked well, I decided to shake things up for the sequel, Divided We Fall.

My second novel is no longer about one character, but two. Seven learns more about who he was before the events of We, The Watched, including an important person who he left behind. I opted for third-person this time so that I could smoothly switch between the perspectives of the two protagonists and highlight their relationship.

With third-person, you can do an omniscient, narrator style where the reader sees everyone at once and can see into everyone’s head. However, since Divided We Fall is about two people, I chose to limit each scene to just one of their perspectives. I like this approach because I think it makes readers feel more invested in the story–as if the events are happening to them.

This approach actually gave me a lot more freedom to play around with time. The perspective in my first novel forced me to follow Seven even when there was not a lot of action happening. In Divided We Fall, I could jump to a different character when things got dull, and jump back when they became exciting again.

Meanwhile, choosing past tense helped reflect that Divided We Fall is very much a book about looking back and coping with how things can change.

My upcoming third novel, The Wanderer and the New West, similarly uses third-person past perspective. However, I have expanded the number of POVs to include about seven main characters. This flexibility adds an epic quality to the story and keeps action levels high.

Of course, figuring out which character’s perspective to use in a given scene or chapter is not always obvious. Sometimes one character’s voice will bring a unique flavor that another’s does not. In some cases I’ve rewritten scenes several times before finding the best voice.

So wait, two books in a row with third-person past? Does that mean I’ve decided it’s the best way to tell a story?

No way! Actually, I recently wrote a short story (coming soon) in the world of We, The Watched and I went back to first-person present. I think it came out great! The decision on which perspective to use comes down to the story. What works for one kind of book won’t necessarily work for another. Often, it’s trial and error gets me to the right angle. The important thing is to keep trying and never be afraid of rewrites!

Feature image: “Relativity” (1953) by M.C. Escher

My own NaNoWriMo

Published by Adam on April 7, 2015

I’ve yet to do NaNoWriMo.

For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month is an annual event taking place in November in which writers try to complete a novel in a single month. It’s a great idea, but I’ve never participated.

For one thing, I work full-time as a journalist — basically writing all day — and I’ve never had the time or energy to participate. Also, maybe I’ve just never had the timing right. Every time November rolls around, I seem to be in the middle of a project and I don’t want to lift my head up to work on something new.

Still though, I’ve always liked the idea of spending a month just focusing on creative writing — a month to bash out ideas and just get in the flow of writing.

Thanks to the encouragement of my lovely wife Mallika, I’m finally going to do it. Okay, so not in November, and I’m not starting from scratch on something new… but I am going to spend the next month making a full-on effort to finish my in-progress third novel, The Wanderer and the New West.

Our time in Australia is in its sunset. Photo taken in Broome, Western Australia.

I wouldn’t be able to do this if not for the fact that Mallika and I are in the midst of a huge life change. After three years living and working in Australia, we have decided to move back to the USA. I finished working at IDG Australia at the end of March, and as a result have about four solid weeks to focus on my novel.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m about two-thirds of the way through. I’ve written all that over about two years (including development of the idea and the actual writing), all while self-publishing and promoting my first two novels and working that full-time job to which I keep referring. I think now, though, that I’ve got enough momentum to finish the remaining third of the first draft in the next month if I give it my devoted and undistracted attention.

Happy to report I got to work today and wrote two new scenes and tuned up a few existing chapters. I have to say that it felt really good. In fact … I better get back to work!

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Library Journal tags We, The Watched in SELF-e

Published by Adam on March 5, 2015

I’m excited to say that my dystopian novel We, The Watched will join SELF-e, a select list of self-published eBooks curated by Library Journal and Biblioboard!

This means my novel will soon be available to libraries all over the US through BiblioBoard Library. The first Library Journal SELF-e curated collection is expected to be available to libraries in mid-2015.

We, The Watched will also soon be available to readers throughout my home state of Pennsylvania in the Indie PENNSYLVANIA module as a highlighted selection.

The idea behind SELF-e is to expose notable self-published eBooks to readers around the country who are looking to discover new authors. Libraries can make ebooks available for free with no requirement to return the book and no multi-user restrictions.

Hugh Howey, author of the sci-fi series Wool and a major advocate for self-published work, has had some great things to say about SELF-e.

“The number one challenge any author has is building an audience,” he says on the BiblioBoard website.

“Once they have an audience, they have an opportunity to grow their work professionally. Librarians can be a powerful marketing force for emerging authors, especially if they can promote the books without fear of success. The SELF-e approach to curation combined with simultaneous user-access will encourage books to be discovered and even go viral.”

In We, The Watched, an amnesiac struggles to conform in a surveillance society he doesn’t remember. Resistance is heresy and punishable by death. But some seek to ignite a revolution.

You can buy the novel in print and eBook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other major online bookstores.

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World building in dystopian novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall

Published by Adam on March 1, 2015

We, The Watched and Divided We Fall are set in an unnamed nation that is not unlike the US, UK, Australia or other “western” countries, but is much further along in its use of government surveillance.

While technically science fiction, I purposely avoided any out-there, overly futuristic elements in order to keep these books as grounded in reality as possible. The surveillance technologies discussed in the book mix what’s available today with what there is potential for in the future. I wanted to create a place that, while fictional, didn’t seem like much of a stretch given the current debate over government surveillance.

My novels have two interlinked, overarching conflicts, with three sides.

Within the country, you have the government and the Church together in a fight against revolutionaries who call themselves the Underground. Essentially, I took America’s First Amendment promise of separation of Church and State and turned it on its head. By uniting, they exercise totalitarian control over the people. The government provides physical enforcement while the Church spreads the psychological propaganda that keeps the people in line.

Illustrating the merger of Church and State is the motto of the Guard, the nation’s army:

PATRIOTS ARE THE TRUE. HERETICS ARE THE DAMNED.

Holding to that policy, the Guard keeps a Watched list of suspicious citizens. Those who are found out as Heretics face public execution.

Are you being watched? Take the quiz!

Naturally, not everyone’s going to agree with that, and the strongest opponents have formed a revolutionary group called the Underground. Funded by a mysterious benefactor, the Underground collects evidence of the government’s wrongdoing in an effort to gather followers and spur an uprising.

The symbol of the Underground. — The fire-eyed graffiti symbol of the Underground.

Meanwhile, there is a second conflict–an international war between the nation and an unnamed Enemy. The division between the government and the Underground makes the nation weak against the Enemy. The more internal division, the worse things seem to get in the war against the Enemy.

The hero of my novels, Seven, enters this nation without memory. Like the reader, Seven finds it all very strange and forms an opinion of who is in the right and who is in the wrong. But what can one man do, especially when the punishment for treason is execution?

Find out this answer and more in We, The Watched and the sequel, Divided We Fall, available now from Amazon and other major online booksellers!

You can also get the first book free by signing up for my newsletter via NoiseTrade below! If you sign up in the next month, I’ll throw in the sequel! (eBooks only)

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Tag: fiction

Line between traditional, indie publishing nearly gone: The Fussy Librarian

Meet The Fussy Librarian

A matter of perspective

My own NaNoWriMo

Library Journal tags We, The Watched in SELF-e

World building in dystopian novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall

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