Why I Quit Reading About Writing.

Louis Shalako

It took a lot to get me to quit reading blog posts and informed opinions on the subject of writing, books, stories, publishing, and the industry.

At first, it was a learning experience. The truth is that I did learn something. I learned a lot. 

There is a point of rapidly diminishing returns. People are pretty good at writing provocative titles, and some of it was clearly click-bait. Some of it was from long-time industry professionals.

Therein lay the danger.

At some point, I got really tired of reading about an industry that has never taken any real notice of me. I got tired of promoting folks who were never going to give me the RT. They were never going to invite me to be in a box set with them. They were never going to give me a blurb, a guest-post, or a mention. The featured book at the bottom of their blog was never going to be mine, and it seemed that I had worked very hard to be their minion, just another doormat on the stairway to their own personal heaven.

I looked up to those people, admired them, liked them, listened to them, hung on every word sometimes, all in the rather vain hope that there was some golden nugget of wisdom in there that might help me to crack this code.

We’ve all seen some fatuous non-issues, blown out of all proportion by sophomoric, high-school immaturity. The only good thing is that they’re easy to spot.

Do I love books? I always found that a nonsensical question.

Do you have to read a lot to be an author? Gee, why would anybody think that?

What is an author? Will ebooks destroy western literature? What is a real author, who does not have the right to call themselves an author, and what about all the unedited books on Amazon?

Basically, I’ve just had enough. Even then, I kept going. It was a kind of reassurance—like bumping into an old friend. There was some level of emotional connection there.

It took some real, bitter disappointment to cut them off entirely. I had to get angry with myself, for allowing myself to be taken in. To drop my own plan, my own theories and start following their crock of shit advice.

The trouble is when some of the advice isn’t really relevant. And yet the person writing has such credibility. It’s persuasive, and you feel they’re talking directly to you.

It is the relationship that we crave, and ultimately, it is one that fails because it’s not a relationship at all. It is an illusion. It’s just another click-farm, when you get right down to it.

To tell me for the nine-hundredth time that in order to succeed, ‘first, write a good book,’ and for the nine-hundredth time, ‘get a professionally-made cover,’ does not do me any good if I am not in a position to take that advice. After twenty years on an Ontario Disability Support Program pension, I am in no position to do anything.

Most books are actually pretty good. Most of them are not brilliant. That is just the way it is.

I got tired of people saying that authors can’t spell, don’t have good grammar, can’t proofread, can’t format their own books, can’t lay out a cover, can’t promote, you must do that, you must do this, and you must do something else. Oh, and here’s one thousand, one hundred and thirty-seven MUST HAVE TOOLS FOR AUTHORS. And oh, yeah, you must spend thousands of dollars on your book if you ever want to have any hope of succeeding in this industry.

What an untalented bunch of pretentious, semi-literate boobs we must be, eh?

I’m no longer reading anything at all that has to do with this industry, ladies and gentlemen, and maybe it’s just time we accepted that fact.

But reading the same shit over and over again was too much for me. At this point in time, there are certain websites that I may never go back to again. It’s a little vow I have taken. I know exactly what I’m going to find. Advice that I can’t take, advice that is just plain wrong for my circumstances, and advice that starts off with a certain set of assumptions that in the longer term did more harm than good.

Don’t think that’s not personal, because it is.

You’ve taken all the joy out of something that used to be fun.

Screw you.

END

There might be some free books here if the reader would care to take a look.

 

Intangibles.

Selling intangibles means selling things like luxury in an automobile, or security in an insurance policy, or the peace of mind knowing your family is protected by a smoke or burglar alarm.

Luxury can be defined in word or reality, but it's the feelings that it creates that really sells the product. After a time, you fell in love with your little car. You sleep better at night knowing you are protected. It's those feelings that customers seek.


The car, the insurance policy, the alarm device is real. The luxury, the security, the peace of mind are the intangibles. You can’t touch it, see it, hear it, taste it or smell it. You can’t eat it, so why is it so important?

Intangibles represent feelings. And everybody has them.

Once you understand this, you are ready to sell intangibles for fun and profit.

You get out of something what you put into it. Ah, but what if you get more out of it than you put into it?

You have a profit.

In terms of writing a book, if I spend the time, say three months, to write it, edit and format it, put it up on a sales platform then guess what: I have a novel, i.e. presumably no more than the sum of its parts in terms of man-hours, uploading time, word count, the time spent on a marketing image and getting an ISBN.

I put a novel in, I get a novel out. It’s that simple. I put in the work, and out comes a novel.

Zero dollars have been earned by that book on publication.

The first book I sell earns a profit, on paper, because I haven’t spent any cash on it. Let’s not bother with estimating what I put into it in terms of so many dollars an hour. In all humility, my time is what I make of it.

But there are also intangible profits, feelings as it were. I get to look at another book—one written by me. It’s what I always wanted to do. So why waste time over-analyzing? Why not just do it?

There is this feeling of accomplishment, for I have created another work of literary art. I like art.

I like experimenting and learning new things. The results are interesting and to write a good story is challenging. I like challenging myself.

Art is all about nuance, and I like nuances. I like it when wisps of smoke go off in all directions in fading blue curlicues and the reader’s mind is taken off into their own unique creation as they speculate and realize that there are permutations outside the book and yet the author has chosen to leave them out. That’s why there are spin-offs and trilogies and series in books and stories. The readers themselves demand them.

I get feelings of satisfaction, self-worth, the feeling that I did something that I felt I must do with my life. I get all sorts of good things from publishing a book that might not sell in spectacular numbers. I enjoy the work. When I was a kid, I spent many happy hours dabbling with acrylic paints. It was fun.

The work above is actually a one-by-twelve pine board with lines gouged in it with a buck-knife. I took a sort of Japanese ‘floating world’ approach, with a bit of a misty feeling and an elevated point of view. The pigments are acrylic.

I guess you had to be there.

I like the colours, I like the composition. The last time I tried to paint, honestly, I wasn’t very good at it. You kind of have to love it and do it every day if you possibly can. But this painting conveys a certain feeling.