2024

I’m trying to make this comment succinct and concise! Let’s see how well that goes.

First! ‘Those Strange Women’ is your signature series. It’s your ‘Lord of the Rings’. Don’t do this for me! Do it for yourself. Do it because you don’t want to be the next George R. R. Martin. He’s the author of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ who was the inspiration for the HBO Network series ‘Game of Thrones’. His worldly accomplishments have made him wildly successful and filthy rich, but he’s still a massive disappointment to his fans because he just couldn’t finish his series. That is his legacy. That’s what he’ll be remembered for.

Now I’m not saying that Martin owes anything to his fans just for reading his books, although he kind of does. He promised a series and failed to deliver. It’s more about what Martin owes to his own work. He called this story into existence, he gave it life, and he meticulously created a world for it that feels real, that lives and breathes because of its own realism, verisimilitude and logical consistency. He made people and places that felt real enough to him to send them out into the world, where they felt real to millions of readers. To leave this work half-finished, lame, with plot threads and characters hanging in the wind like bloody tatters is an act of desecration, a willful mutilation of something beautiful. It’s a crime against art.

When you finally finish ‘Those Strange Women’, it won’t be me looking at you in the mirror with a smile of victory and triumph on your face, it will be you. It won’t be me that your wife tells you she’s proud of, it will be you. Even if you had no fans, even if this was just yourself, the idea that you wrote and successfully completed a multi-volume urban science fiction series the way you conceived of it, the way you wanted to tell it, is something you will carry with you for the rest of your days. You don’t need me to feel that kind of pride in yourself, which barely describes the feeling the accomplishment it will give you. That will be like nothing else you’ve ever imagined.

No pressure though!

However, if the idea that I myself will be personally crushed if you don’t fulfill your promise helps to motivate you to finish, then by all means, consider me invested! I have faith in you!

Second! How to make your books more profitable, by Superfan Robert:

Step 1 – I have two words for you, Ms. Ferrara – AUDIO BOOK. Or, maybe ‘audiobook’. I’ve seen both. You will have to shoulder your own production costs, however, things have gotten better royalty-wise at Audible since the great author revolt of 2023. Audio-books accounted for 65% of fiction book sales in 2021, and sales grow yearly by about 10%.

Step 2 – I have two more words for you – self-promotion. Okay, that’s more of a hyphenate. Maybe SHAMELESS self-promotion. Anyway, the name of the game for independent publishing is doing your own marketing, and that includes social media. Do all the social media things. Promote your book on X, tag other authors who will tag you back, make book trailers with music and graphics, and most importantly, find a group of fans and cultivate them like you would a garden of particularly fragile and intransigent orchids.

And here’s the hard truth, and I hesitate to say this because it’s not particularly nice: you need other fans besides me and the lesbian reader community, we’re just not enough. I like being Kristen Schaal to your Flight of the Conchords but it doesn’t buy you a steak dinner. I love LESBIreviewed’s channel and her commentary but her views are in the double digits. I would branch out and cultivate contacts in the horror infosphere. Post on boards, review indie horror movies, write ponderous but common-sense thinkpieces and at every instance of your name you inscribe “author of ‘Eritis Mea’ and the award winning ‘Those Strange Women'”. There is still a market for decent horror out there, I saw it first hand last night when we sent to see “Nosferatu” at the local cinema fivedozenplex and later when we had a few beers and watched a film called ‘Barbarian’ back at my friend’s house.

Step 3 – multi-media collaboration. Find some upcoming graphic novel or indie moviemaker and license your work for another medium. They’re putting horror short films up all the time on ‘Alter’ or ‘Omeletto’ on YouTube.

Step 4 – say goodbye forever to your free time. The one thing all my suggestions have in common is that they are relentlessly time-consuming. HOWEVER – I guarantee you that at least in the short- to medium-term you will not make more money doing all this than you’d get from a year of steady work at your day job. I know from being a loyal reader of your blog that you have a partner and you have a life. Committing yourself to a dream of literary fortune isn’t just making decisions for yourself, it’s for your whole family, partner, pets, and your stuffy collection included.

The Downside to Profitability: So what if you’re TOO successful? Say for instance you become fantastically profitable, what happens when some malevolent fame-whore doxes you for clout on his or her TikTok Channel? You have said before that you live in a country which sees your sexuality as an illness. What are the professional, not to mention family consequences of laying your identity bare to the masses? I know you know what I’m talking about, since this was one of the themes of Snow White 2. Consider how far you’ve come already. You’ve had a successful indie career and you have a small but loyal following, consisting of a bunch of lesbians who bought your book during the IHS yearly sales and myself. We’re not totally nothing!

When you consider professional writing in terms of how much time, trouble, effort and money you invest in it, as I wrote earlier, the return is rarely as favorable as that of your day job(s). Statistically speaking, you are never going to make more from writing than you would from your day job(s), and let’s face facts here, authors like yourself, who write weird, wonderful novels that defy easy categorization and challenge the reader, are rarely recognized in their own time. Some mid-level publishing hack is going to make money off publishing your books posthumously while you and I are pushing up daisies. They’re going to have amazing covers, and people you barely know are going to be reminiscing about you on YouTube in 60 years, while contemporary authors dismiss you as “outdated” and “problematic” for their enlightened modern era. Second, it’s kind of a stretch to even consider modern-day publishing as “profitable” in the first place. The entire structure is propped up by investment money from hedge funds and the straight romance novel industry.

In conclusion: I’d hate to read one of your novels someday and see a character named “Jobert Renner” whose pessimism prevented you from living your literary dreams. However I’m perfectly happy waiting as long as you need to read the rest of the series (or Snow White 3). Write in your spare time. Write when you feel the itch. We all live lives of regret, let that regret be that you made your readers wait a few years rather than not living the wonderful life you had right in front of you.

Okay, that was NOT succinct and concise. Nope. Happy New Year!