Kerry Allen

I’ve read a couple of statements lately of people being put off when writers talk about their unhappiness with something they’ve written. I’m guilty of this, and I’m in plenty of good company, but I’ve been looking at it from a different angle in the past couple of days, and it ain’t pretty.

In my case, minimizing my ability/talent/expectations/everything else is a survival tool I picked up back in the Paleozoic era when I was but wee prey. When you’re at a lofty elevation (say, Cloud Nine), you are an excellent target and therefore more likely to become a target. Even if you’re lucky and the snipers are all lousy shots, sooner or later, you’re bound to get winged. You might survive the shot, but that’s small consolation if the fall from that lofty elevation kills you.

Ergo, upon completing some accomplishment, the safe thing to do is limit any floaty elation you may experience to 5 or 10 seconds, then come back down to earth, present a low profile, and try not to look worthy of a sniper’s attention. Maybe even grasp your arm and look pitiful, since it would be unsporting to shoot you when you’re already done for.

Speaking from three decades of experience, this method serves its purpose. Low expectations often result in being pleasantly surprised by even small rewards, and being knocked from a low perch leaves bruises rather than broken vertebrae.

But.

When you’re trying to sell a product, you have to jump up and down and wave your arms and make some noise to draw attention to it, or no one will know it exists. Okay, now that you have the customers’ attention, what’s your sales pitch?

“This isn’t very good.”

Whoadamn, look at everybody reaching for their wallets to get some of that low-quality merchandise because they feel sorry for you and respect your honesty.

It doesn’t work that way. People expect value for their money. You can’t get around this by giving the product away for free—they expect value for their time, too. They’re not going to give you either (their money or their time) after you tell them you have nothing of value to offer them in exchange.

Time to stop being self-defeating.

If you really believed you’d written worthless garbage, you would have shredded the hard copies and deleted the files from your hard drive in shame, not offered it to someone to read and invited their feedback. Unless you’re some kind of supermasochist who experiences paroxysms of ecstasy upon hearing your writing is an affront to human intellect (in which case, this little confidence pep talk is whistling through your ears right about now because you’re self-stimulating to fantasies of your future 1-star reviews on Amazon), you had to believe there was at least a 50/50 chance you’d hear something positive.

Congratulations! Your confidence has reached the minimum marketability level of 50 percent!

May not sound like much, but it’s actually an excellent, well-balanced position to be in because you’re in no danger of tipping too far to the other side of the confidence teeter-totter and coming off as an arrogant jerk. (Ironically, people have an even less favorable response to “I’m the bestest evah” than to “This isn’t very good.”)

From this well-balanced position, poised in the dead zone between neurotic and insufferable, you should be able, with practice, to avoid assigning value judgments to your work, at least in the presence of potential customers. (Sorry. If there’s a cure for insecurity, I don’t have it. We can learn to leave it at home in its crate when we go out in public, though.)

The process can be broken down into four simple steps:

1. Stifle any inclination you may have to tell people how to feel about the story before they’ve even read the first word (or after they’ve read the last, but that’s a whole other topic).
2. Tell them what the story is about.
3. Tell them where they can find it if they’re interested.
4. Fade into the background and let the story do the rest of the talking.

Bottom line: Pretty much everybody worries about not being good enough, but that’s not the connection you want to establish with readers in your promotional efforts.

There will always be plenty of people eager to point out your shortcomings. Let them have that miserable job. Don’t do it to yourself and risk alienating even one person who would have loved your story… if only she’d been tempted to read it.

Person Who Is Now On My List: You know, if you’re going with the genie theme, you really ought to make your blog more genie-like.

Me: Yeah, but that means screwing with the template. I had to screw with the template for a month just to make the damn thing functional. I’m kind of scared to screw with the template anymore. Last time I screwed with the template, all the white disappeared, and the whole blog was black text on a 95% gray background. I’m through screwing with the template.

PWINOML: But I found this cool graphic of a lamp for you.

(It is kind of cool. Watercolor or something, shades of pinks and blues and purples.)

Me: Meh. Needs to be about 600 pixels wider.

PWINOML: Come on. You can do something in Photoshop. Blotch some colors together, smear them around, do some kind of texture thingy.

Me: You know how I am with Photoshop. Last time I opened it up, I spent 19 days making a comic strip about my freakin’ romance novel.

PWINOML: But that’ll be a cute extra to offer your squeeing fangrrls when you’re famous. Plus, it’s funny as hell. (Plunks down in front of Me’s computer and gets fresh with the mouse. Photoshop awakens like the soul-sucking monster it is.) Did you ever finish coloring that?

Me: The base colors. I need shadows and highlights. I never do those right.

PWINOML: You know, since you’re a professional artist, people expect better of you.

Me: Shut up. You are so on my list.

PWINOML: Look, we’ll find some kind of genie-looking font and… God damn, how many fonts do you have?

Me: All of them.

(Six hours later…)

PWINOML: Okay, that font from four hours ago totally represented.

Me: What are you, a valley girl gangbanger? “It, like, totally represented, fer sure, yo.”

PWINOML: Get off my dick, homes.

(Twenty minutes of hysterical laughter, as PWINOML lacks male genitalia, and we can’t stop reenacting memorable moments from the BDB and various video games and Resident Evil movies, all of which we have watched this week because we both have a girl crush on Milla Jojovich)

PWINOML: (Taking advantage of Me being weak with laughter and pulling some stealthy ninja move that seamlessly shifts me into her place in front of the computer) Okay, get to work.

Me: Yeah. (sigh) See you in a month.

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So, at some indefinite point in the future, the blog will either get a makeover or explode.

Or be overrun by zombies that should have starved months ago from lack of human flesh to feast upon.

You never know around here…

I buy books online. I buy because I hear good things. I buy because I hear bad things from people I know to have no taste. I buy because it showed up in my Recommended for Kerry list on Amazon and sometimes they’re not totally wrong. I buy on impulse. I buy a lot.

Prior to buying, I read the description. I read a couple of reader reviews. I never read an excerpt (which is crazy, but I hate reading online that much).

But I remember my bookstore shopping days, when I could get my hot little hands on the books and stroke them and sniff them and call them George… and flip through them a little to find the Buy Me Now, Dammit incentive. My TBR pile has almost as vast a selection of reading material as my local book vendor. I wanted them all at one time or another. How do I decide what to read next? Yes, mood is involved, but if my mood demands a steamy vampire romance with gritty suspense elements and I have four books meeting that description, how do I choose one over the other?

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of that little excerpt when you flip open the front cover. Two of the four books nominated for consumption today had no such excerpt. Straight back to the shelf. The third was a seduction excerpt. Sorry, I don’t know you yet, I don’t want to watch you gettin’ it on.

The fourth took only a few lines of the excerpt to reel me in:

“Sit down,” said J.

I did. When he continued staring in silence, I raised my eyebrows and looked up at him as if to say What the hell is your problem?

A girl with some attitude. Gimme.

(That’s from Beyond the Pale by Savannah Russe, by the way.)

I have never understood why every book doesn’t have that little excerpt up front. How nice for you that you have 50 reviews lauding your last book as “sparkling and sinfully delicious,” but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about your last book or what anybody had to say about it. I have this one in my hands, and I want a taste before I commit to ordering a whole plateful.

Am I the only one who pays any attention to that page, or are the books lacking them missing out on a crucial opportunity to snag reader interest?

I’ve been a busy girl, savoring the awesomeness that is Meljean Brook’s Demon Angel (plug coming soon to a blog near you) and doing what I hope is the final merciless self-edit on The Manuscript, at this point entitled Wish List. (Don’t judge—I suck at titles. This one is better than the last one, trust me.) In honor of the occasion, I’ve fulfilled my promise to put an actual excerpt in the “click fake book cover for excerpt” spots on the web site, and to get it there in fantabulous .pdf format. (KNOWN ISSUES: Font issue resolved. Bloody miserable sneaky bastard typo resolved. Adobe crash issue fixed with installation of Adobe Reader 8. If you still can’t view it, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail.)

(This is why we put this stuff up now. Can you imagine it’s countdown-to-publication time and everything is buggy? It may not bother other authors, judging by some of the sites I’ve seen, but I can’t do that to you. I’m not a perfectionist, but when it’s something I can fix, dammit, I’m going to fix it.)

When there’s an actual book to pimp, the excerpt will be considerably larger. No point giving you a lot now, only to have it be unrecognizable when the editor gets through with it, is there?

Which raises the question—How big should an excerpt be? Talk to me about pages, since chapters vary too widely in length to make a good yardstick (mine, for example, are huge). How big a slice do you need to convince you to buy the whole pie? Is it something you can tell on the first page because of the style or a great opening line? Or is it getting far enough involved in the action that you must find out what happens next that makes you run out and buy the rest? Do you want to start at the beginning to mimic the reading experience, or do you want an excerpt from another part of the story?

I want to be reader-friendly. So tell me, reader, how friendly you want me to be. Sorry, I’m not the kind of girl who goes all the way (as in entire book for free), although I did think it would be pretty cool to throw the whole thing out there for, say, a month before the subsequent book’s pub date as bait to attract readers to the new release. (Subsequent book? My, aren’t I ambitious…) I don’t even know if that would be allowed, but I don’t see how it could hurt. After a year or so, sales are going to have slowed on Book A. Might as well get a little more mileage out of it to promote Book B, right?

But that’s a back-burner issue. For now, let’s focus on bringing you the excerpt of your dreams. Tell me what you want, baby.