The Journal: Not a Good Day

In today’s Journal

* Oh Well…
* BundleRabbit Is Now PubShare
* Of Interest

I’m a little grouchy today. My apologies in advance. If you don’t want to put up with my grousing, I suggest you skip down to the “Of Interest” section.

Oh Well….

Although he “love[d] the book idea and cover” for my SF novel For the Good of the Galaxy:The First Nine Days, Dean declined to include it in the upcoming StoryBundle.

The reason? I don’t have a large-enough social-media presence, and therefore don’t have the platform to promote the bundle widely enough to be fair to the other authors in the bundle. Let me say up front, I understand that, and it’s fine although… frankly it stings a little. Or it did at first.

The fact is, indie publishing, just like traditional publishing, is a business, period. And in indie publishing, just like in traditional publishing, if you don’t have a large-enough following when certain opportunities arise, you won’t be invited to attend the party.

There are no seats at the adult table for the writer who chooses to remain a free-spirited child. And that would be me. I’m all about telling stories. Business bores me to tears.

As a result, I’ve never treated my storytelling as a business. Oh, I poked at it a little. I designed an author website and a publisher website, but I don’t have a blog that would appeal to readers on either one. Even when I was blogging over on my author site, I was blogging to other writers.

And frankly, for all the good the business site has done (7 years, not a single order from any booksellers), I might as well close it down and combine it with my author site. Or vice versa.

Nor do I “capture” emails for a mailing list on either one. Somehow that seems less than ethical to me, so I don’t do it. Of course, your opinion might vary, and that’s perfectly fine.

When those annoying “Leave your email address and get a free blah blah blah” pop-ups arise on other sites, I take it as a personal affront. I didn’t go there looking for a pop-up, and the pop-up is usually positioned directly between me and whatever I went there to see. Often the pop-up um pops-up even if I’m already a subscriber. How thoughtless and distasteful is that?

As for social media, by which people primarily mean Facebook and Instagram, it leans so far in one direction it might as well be lying down. I was on Facebook for a few years, but eventually I could no longer take all the lying. I despise liars. I personally hate them and believe it should be legal to shoot them on sight.

So that’s why I’m not on social media, and so I don’t have a “platform.” It’s also why I don’t listen to arguments from either side of the political aisle, any major news agency, or anyone purporting to support any major “cause.”

And I mean all of them, from which lives matter or don’t to the reasons for global warming to whether wearing masks makes a difference and what words one may say in what order if one wishes to be thought of as anything but a pariah. Seriously, who needs that?

Annneeeway, I’ve always preached that the best promotion is to write the next book. And I’ve always said the best payment I get for my efforts is not monetary. It’s being the very first person ever to be entertained by my characters’ stories. I guess if I ever get back to writing, I’ll stick with that. It isn’t that I’m too old to change, it’s that I’m too old to want to change.

It also dawns on me that I’m entertained by my characters and their stories even when I don’t write them. I write them primarily to put them out so others can be entertained also. But if I’m not allowed to entertain a broader audience because I don’t already have a broader audience… well, it’s a vicious circle, isn’t it?

Either way, after I’m gone, my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will have a passive-income motherlode worth several million dollars at their fingertips. If only they didn’t inherit my tendency for laziness or whatever this is. If only they choose to mine that motherlode. I wish them (and you) luck.

BundleRabbit Is Now PubShare

As I mentioned above, Dean declining my offer to let him include my novel in his new bundle isn’t what annoyed me, not really. At least I understood the whys and wherefores of his decision, and that’s fine.

This, on the other hand, is a hare of an entirely different color.

A long time ago I encouraged the use of a new bundling site called BundleRabbit. I have over 150 novels, novellas, short story collections and short stories listed with them myself, and my work has been included in numerous bundles. In fact, I still have work in eight bundles with them at this writing.

But whenever in 2021 the site was switched from BundleRabbit to PubShare—Without Freaking Notice, at least to me—all of my titles on the site were “unpublished.” Which of course rendered them unavailable for potential bundling.

Why? Because when the company changed over, they added one more requirement for books to be listed: A “teaser” of a few words is now required. And instead of letting the authors—or at least this author—know that they needed to update their listings, they simple delisted the books. Again, Without Notice.

Now, if I want to keep my account active and if I want that account to be useful as a tool for promotion, I have to take the time to plod through all the listings, one title at a time, and add that few-word teaser to each.

Frankly, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I feel as if I’ve been cheated. I’m taking a few days to decide whether staying with PubShare and updating all those titles is worth my time. It would be much easier to withdraw my titles from the current bundles and then close my account.

Now, if you were part of BundleRabbit and if you were made aware of this change when it first happened, I’m glad for you.

But if you listed any titles on BundleRabbit and this is all news to you, I suggest you check in with them. The new URL is https://pubshare.com/.

Talk with you again soon. With any luck, by then I’ll be back to my old chipper self. (grin)

Of Interest

See “A Novel Happens” at https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/a-novel-happens/. A rare look at DWS “outlining” a novel, sort of.

See “The Secret to Being a Successful Writer” at https://killzoneblog.com/2022/03/the-secret-to-being-a-successful-writer.html.

See “Anyword – AI Copywriter” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/anyword-ai-copywriter/.

Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.