High Anxiety

by | August 21, 2015 | General | 6 comments

By Lisabet Sarai

I guess I must be really out of the loop, because it was only this month that I first encountered the term “30 day cliff”. That was in a discussion on the Excessica authors’ forum. Some of my colleagues were lamenting about the difficulty of bringing out releases frequently enough to keep them from “falling off the thirty day cliff”. From context I surmised that people believed you had to get a new book out every month in order to retain readers’ attention.

At first I shrugged off the whole topic. A book a month? Preposterous! And what was so magical about 30 days, anyway? I figured this must be one of those marketing rules that get bandied about the Internet with no real support from the data at all.

When I did a bit of research, however, I discovered that the 30 day limit apparently has its source in Amazon’s all powerful algorithms. The article below, for example, provides quite graphic evidence for this sales precipice.

http://evahudson.com/amazon-30-day-cliff-omg-its-alive/

Just what authors need. Something else to worry about.

Writing well is hard work. Heck, even writing poorly takes time. Then there’s the editing (for those of us who care about that step), cover art, penning the blurb, and formatting for different publishing platforms (if you’re self-publishing or working with a co-op like Excessica). Updating your website and blog. Sending out tweets or posting your news on Facebook. Begging your author friends to feature your newly birthed literary baby on their blogs, Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. Submitting the manuscript to review sites. Arranging blog tours. Running contests to attract readers. Running around like the proverbial decapitated fowl, waving your arms and shouting, “Look, look, I’ve got a new book! Buy my great new book!” until you’re exhausted and hoarse.

Do that every single month? Are you nuts?

Sure, I know some authors who do this, and more. I have one or two colleagues who send me media kits for their latest titles pretty much monthly, for posting on my blog. Some of them are quite well-known—certainly compared to me. Many of them write well, too, although I have noticed that their excerpts all sound similar. I guess if you’ve found a formula that’s successful, it’s crazy not to stick with it.

Doesn’t work for me, though. I have limited time to devote to my writing career, such as it is. Marketing already takes a serious bite out of that allocation. I’d love to have more people buy my books, not just because I’d like to make more money but because I want to share my erotic visions with a wider audience. However, pressure dries up the creative flow, at least for me. If I have to force myself to write, I know I won’t be satisfied with the results.

I’m pretty confident I could turn out a new 30K book every month—especially if I quit my day job—but I’m also certain these books wouldn’t be very original, or surprising, or memorable. Probably I’d write yet another BDSM initiation story, with a self-assured, ironic, slightly distant hero and an intelligent, feisty heroine who’s aroused and appalled at her own desire to surrender. That’s my Ur-story, one I’ve already written dozens of times, one I love but try to escape for the sake of novelty and exploring new territory. That story sells. I know it does. I could change the names, the location, the initial scenario, the sexual actions and the kinky implements, and sell it again and again.

The notion makes me slightly nauseous.

So despite the clamor by my colleagues—in defiance of the current market wisdom—I choose to turn my back on the precipice. I reject the anxiety whipped up by the pundits and claim my right to define for myself what it means to be a successful author. For me, the criteria include quality, diversity, originality and authenticity. Frequency just doesn’t enter into the equation.

Lisabet Sarai

Sex and writing. I think I've always been fascinated by both. Freud was right. I definitely remember feelings that I now recognize as sexual, long before I reached puberty. I was horny before I knew what that meant. My teens and twenties I spent in a hormone-induced haze, perpetually "in love" with someone (sometimes more than one someone). I still recall the moment of enlightenment, in high school, when I realized that I could say "yes" to sexual exploration, even though society told me to say no. Despite being a shy egghead with world-class myopia who thought she was fat, I had managed to accumulate a pretty wide range of sexual experience by the time I got married. And I'm happy to report that, thanks to my husband's open mind and naughty imagination, my sexual adventures didn't end at that point! Meanwhile, I was born writing. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, though according to family apocrypha, I was talking at six months. Certainly, I started writing as soon as I learned how to form the letters. I penned my first poem when I was seven. While I was in elementary school I wrote more poetry, stories, at least two plays (one about the Beatles and one about the Goldwater-Johnson presidential contest, believe it or not), and a survival manual for Martians (really). I continued to write my way through high school, college, and grad school, mostly angst-ridden poems about love and desire, although I also remember working on a ghost story/romance novel (wish I could find that now). I've written song lyrics, meeting minutes, marketing copy, software manuals, research reports, a cookbook, a self-help book, and a five hundred page dissertation. For years, I wrote erotic stories and kinky fantasies for myself and for lovers' entertainment. I never considered trying to publish my work until I picked up a copy of Portia da Costa's Black Lace classic Gemini Heat while sojourning in Istanbul. My first reaction was "Wow!". It was possibly the most arousing thing I'd ever read, intelligent, articulate, diverse and wonderfully transgressive. My second reaction was, "I'll bet I could write a book like that." I wrote the first three chapters of Raw Silk and submitted a proposal to Black Lace, almost on a lark. I was astonished when they accepted it. The book was published in April 1999, and all at once, I was an official erotic author. A lot has changed since my Black Lace days. But I still get a thrill from writing erotica. It's a never-ending challenge, trying to capture the emotional complexities of a sexual encounter. I'm far less interested in what happens to my characters' bodies than in what goes on in their heads.

6 Comments

  1. Sessha Batto

    I have a hard time thinking of 30K as a book…much less writing one every single month. If you are writing merely to profit I guess you do what needs to be done. For myself, I am happy with one or two novel length releases a year that I can feel proud of. Sales, ranking, algorithms, promotion, none of that ever even enters the equation!

  2. Amanda Earl

    this explains why there are so many crappy books. sorry to be grumpy about such, maybe there are writers who can turn out excellent work monthly, but it really turns me off to think of them, nose to the keyboard, typing & typing. i'd rather they get laid more often & put out one fantastic book of their lives or maybe the occasional bit of brilliance. yuck.

  3. Donna

    Wow, this is depressing, and definitely explains the explosion of crappy books. I know I simply could not sustain this kind of output. I'd burn out before the first month. This just strikes me as another way we can be enslaved by the information overload. We just have to step back from the madness and reaffirm the reason we write and the reason we read. I truly do not want to waste my reading time on a book dashed off to satisfy the gaping profit maw. Good to get the perspective!

  4. Jean Roberta

    Good for you, Lisabet. I can't imagine anyone producing a 30K novella AND doing all the promotional work every month for years at a stretch. A writer like that would burn out, crack up, jump off the cliff. I'm sure that plan wouldn't work for the long haul, and it certainly wouldn't produce writing that would still be read after the writer's untimely death. As an English instructor, I always wonder: will anyone read this in 5 years, 20 years, 50 years? The best work lasts much longer than a carton of yogurt.

  5. Fiona McGier

    I guess it's a vicious cycle: publish more, people buy more, make more money. Or: work other job(s) for the money, publish less, people buy less, make less money from writing, family convinces you to spend more time working, less time writing. Sigh.

  6. Larry Archer

    I see it happen to mine also, sales drop like a rock after a month. It was especially apparent when I started putting books in KU. Excellent post.

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