​People write for all sorts of reasons. I write because there are these stories in my head, demanding to get out, to be shared with the world.
 
I write to be read.
 
I often say my stories are my children. I labored and suffered to bring them into being. They are my darkest dreams, my secret fantasies, my vulnerabilities, laid out for everyone to see. In other words…
 
I’m sensitive about my writing.
 
Given that, I should take the advice that I’ve often found myself giving to others in the past: DO NOT READ YOUR REVIEWS
 
Just don’t. No really. If you have the fortitude to just not look, I highly recommend it.
 
I, however, do not have that fortitude. I read every single one of them.
 
So how does a delicate flower like me cope with people kicking my baby?
 
Accept that it’s impossible to please everyone. 
When I get a bad review and the difference is a matter of taste, like they say the story had too much sex or too little sex or the wrong kind of sex, I can shrug it off. Maybe they think my MC is an asshole or my FMC is too whiny. Fair enough. Just because I love my characters doesn’t mean everyone else will. No story is loved by everyone. There are even people who dislike the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare!

Fix the things I can. 
If I am getting bad reviews for something like typos, I look over the story again and try to find them. If I can’t, I might hire someone for another proofreading. The wonderful thing about e-publishing is mistakes like that can be fixed. And if the issue with your book is technical, you can and should do something about it.

Realize that some people are just crazy. 
Some of my negative reviews are like “ewwww, gay people” in a book called Boy’s Name & Other Boy’s Name: A Gay Romance. *headdesk* Others are personal attacks. Those I ignore because they aren’t about me, they are about the person writing them. Why should I stress over things that have nothing to do with me except that I was in the crosshairs of someone having a bad day?
 
So that’s how I keep my head up through the onslaught. I’m sure it also helps that the majority of readers like my stories which gives me the warm fuzzy feeling one gets when their mom puts their drawing on the fridge. (I’m clearly an approval junkie. Time to call the psych ward.)

As I read this book, I found myself trying to compare it to other books and I felt like maybe I don’t read enough contemporary M/M because it had story problems that I can’t recall seeing in other books.
​
I think for some readers that will be enjoyable because it’s rare to find something in books that hasn’t been overdone. Others might not like it because for some the enjoyment is reading the same story told in different ways. While others might not mind difference, but might take issue with exactly what the difference is.

As a writer, I spend a fair bit of my time taking books apart. One side effect of this is I almost always know what to expect from a book. By the time I can state the main conflict I can usually say how the book will resolve itself. But with Road of No Return, even in its last pages, I couldn’t predict the ending.

​I read a later book by these authors first and while I enjoyed it thoroughly, I had no problem predicting how the book would end even halfway through. So I think it’s specific to this book.

We all have little things that drive us crazy. Some of our pet peeves are perfectly reasonable, some…not so much. Today I’m going to share the one thing that really drives me up the wall.

First off, if I’m in this situation, I’m probably in a face to face conversation which means something has gone terribly wrong forcing me to emerge from my cave and make eye contact with people. These conversations go a little like this:
 
Person: So, what do you write?
Me: Right now I’m working on a romance series that takes place at a school for paranormal creatures.
Person: Oh, so like Harry Potter?
Me: No. They are all adults, attending a university…and they’re gay.
Person: So like Harry Potter fan fic?
Me: No, it’s nothing like Harry Potter. There are all kinds of paranormal beings, werewolves, vampires, etc.
Person: Ooohhh…
Me: *sighs in relief thinking they finally get it*
Person: So it’s like Twilight?
 
WHY? Why do people take any one aspect of a story and compare it to popular fiction? Are they trying to tell me it’s all been done before? Yes, vampires have been done before. Aliens have been done before. Magic has been done before. But when you take one aspect and just assume my book must be just like the first book you can think of that also has that in it, I kinda want to strangle you like a cartoon Homer taking out Bart. And since I’m an anti-social hermit, there is a chance I just might do it. I bet no one in prison will suggest my stories are derivative! 

Marketing is by far the hardest part of being an indie writer. First off, writers tend to be less social than most of the populace. We spend day after day at our computers typing away about alternate worlds and then we're supposed to come out of our cave and impress people. Pfft. Good luck with that. So today I'm going to share another lesson I've learned through fucking up. May it help you avoid the same mistakes.

I, of course, assumed the problem lied with the book itself. Because I'm dumb. I didn't think for once that the blurb I wrote at 4am with one eye open might be the reason no one, anywhere wanted my book. Nope, didn't occur to me once.

There are several issues with this blurb. Most of it having to do with me paying absolutely no attention to what the people who'd read this kind of book want to be promised is contained within. People reading the Love Unleashed series want brutal, aggressive and sexy. I promised them "love and friendship". *pukes* I'm sorry, I must have gotten this book confused with my fluffy bunny romances. My bad.

So, how did I discover I was a moron? When I published Marked and it performed the way I was expecting Ravaged to perform with none of the benefits Ravaged had, like being a prequel to Pillaged.

This one I wrote around 10pm when I had both eyes open. As you can see it contains more words that will jump out at the kind of reader who will want to read this book: BRANDED AND DEGRADED, COLD AND ALOOF OWNER, FEAR OF BEING DISCARDED, LIFE DEPENDS ON PLEASING HIS MASTER.

These things scream "buy me, buy me" to the type of person into that stuff. In the other one, the type of person into "friendship and love," which is vague as hell, isn't looking for a sexy slave story. And to write that the lord "would do anything for him", was I drinking? I made my hero sound like freakin Bella.

But moving on from past mistakes. This is how you avoid doing what I did:

• Take off your writer's cap. You are now a marketer. The book is your product and you must treat it as such.
• It's not about the plot. Writers tend to write vague blurbs because they are afraid of giving away too much. Blurbs aren't a summary, they are a sales pitch. Don't worry about giving away the plot, worry about saying the things that the prospective reader is looking to hear.
• Don't be vague. In an effort to "save the good stuff" people will write very vague blurbs, but remember, no one has decided to buy it yet. Saving the good stuff might mean no one picks up the book to see what the "good stuff" is. Vague blurbs may as well read as "Once there was a character, who went somewhere, and did something and it was cool." Oh yeah, I see people falling over each other to get to that one.
  
• Imagine this reader and figure out what they want. Like I said before, while love and friendship is a major theme in my story, that's not what someone looking at my darker more brutal works are coming for. They want the pain, the fear, the drama. So a more appropriate blurb highlights those aspects. You need to figure out what your reader wants from your story and promise them it's in there.
  
  When writing your blurb pretend instead of trying to explain to a reader what it's about, you're trying to get a friend to read it. If I was trying to get my best friend to read the Scarlet Letter I wouldn't be like, "In 1642 a young woman endures a harrowing trial through which she tries to maintain her dignity." But that's how a lot of blurbs read. I'd be like, "She got pregnant in a Puritan town while her husband had been missing for years and she wouldn't tell anyone who the father was, so they decided to punish and humiliate her for it." Which description would have you more likely to pick up the book?
  

So that's it. All the tips and tricks I have for writing blurbs better than I did. If you have any other secrets feel free to put them in the comments.

If you're not a writer or don't frequent writing sites, this post won't mean much to you. But if you are a writer that hangs out on writing sites, I'm sure you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

Someone wondered how the misidentification of passive voice started, this was my answer:



My guess is at some point someone said, "Hey, a lot of your sentences are passive, for fiction you should use more active sentences."

And they were like, "Passive?"

"You know instead of She was bitten by the dog say The dog bit her."

And they saw the lack of "was" as the difference between those two sentences and went forth to spread the word that "was" is evil.

So armed with this new found knowledge, these internet warriors scratched out sentences like "She was running out of time" and replaced them with "She ran out of time" because it's more "active" ignoring it no longer makes sense. Or if they realize it doesn't make sense, something super awkward like "She began to run out of time."

As people killed off the wases ruining their great literature, they realized right next to them were -ing words. Those were also removed when the sentence was fixed, so clearly those were bad too.

Then someone somewhere saw verbs with -ing were gerunds and therefore their foe had a name! (even though it's only a gerund when being used as a noun so actually applies to zero percent of the cases they are against)So they decided, in the name of good literature, the gerunds and the wases must be destroyed!

And then self-publishing got big and people needed platforms. But other people didn't care what they had to say...unless they were teaching writing. So taking their shoddy knowledge, they made blog posts, which they later turned into e-books. And the grossly incorrect fallacies spread. And now they had authority! It's in a book! It's on a website! It must be true!

Sure they could have been spending that time learning about story structure and characterization, but that shit's hard. Easier to do a "find all -ly" in Word.

/end rant

I have two books on sale. The first one is the College Pack which consists of three stories. All of which take place in a college setting. Frat House Rulez, Games We Play and Maid for You.

College Pack - Amazon

The other is Love Unleashed. Three stand alone stories about D/s romances that all take place in the same brutal alternate reality. This collection contains Pillaged, Ravaged and Seized by a Mercenary.

Love Unleashed - Amazon

I can't believe I'm writing this post. And for my next act I'll be sticking my tongue into a live socket. This is going to be a bit crass, because I need to address some things no one else seems to be talking about.

But I can't help myself. I've seen some reoccurring statements that really bug me and I need to speak up:
1. The books doing well in KU2 are the ones that give readers a better reading experience
2. Amazon made this change because it's what readers wanted

The first thing to remember is for KU to make money, subscribers need to read less than they pay for. That's very important when figuring out what was going on and why it needed to change. Remember, the goal is to get someone to pay 9.99 a month while NOT reading 9.99 or more worth of pages.

And that brings me to the common misconceptions of Amazon doing this for readers and longer books being inherently better for readers. Real talk here, know why KU1 was hemorrhaging money? Billionaire Step-Brother Ravaged by the T-Rex.

Yep. People were eating that stuff up, so much so that more and more people subscribed to KU every month and more and more writers produced more and more short smut. And guess what, those readers were quite "satisfied". Thank you very much.

And yes, Amazon had every right to change a system that was causing them to lose money. That's not my point. What bothers me is the callousness towards the people who find their income utterly cut off with two weeks notice. I'm sorry, but even if your business is pseudo-incest monster porn, when you wake up one day and find with an email your entire business model has been rendered obsolete, you get to pout. If this were Wall Street, people have thrown themselves from windows for less.

So this smug attitude of "I'm making three times the income now because I deserve it" needs to stop. The reason Amazon is pushing for longer works is they are hoping the porn consumers leave and people willing to spend a month getting halfway through an elven tome will take their place. It's not because elven tomes are inherently better or give readers more satisfaction. It's because they take longer to read.

And I've also heard the argument that short story writers should just produce a page of short story for every page of novel that long form writers create. The problem with this is that it ignores genre. Now I can read an 800 page historical. I cannot read 800 pages of Milking the Babysitter: A Hucow Romance. And it's not because 800 page historicals are just naturally better. It's because these things are meant to be consumed differently. A big fat novel is like a juicy steak. A short story is like candy.  While someone might eat a pound of steak, expecting them to eat a pound of candy is crazy.

It doesn't mean that steak is better and candy sucks. It just means these things are consumed in different quantities. And judging from how many writers are in tears since July, the public was eating a fair amount of candy. But people aren't going to start eating ten times more candy so writers can get paid the same they were making before.

So yeah, Amazon's bottom dollar will always come first and this time that reality hurt a lot of writers. But that's no reason to create this huge division based on things like length and genre.

TLDR; Hug a short story writer and don't believe the hype, KU2 is not a meritocracy.