writing

The AI bots offer to save me from obscurity

/ Scott Nagele / 2 Comments

I hope an AI program is saving somebody’s life in a hospital right now, because it’s not doing me any favors.

I’m at the age when you develop a natural suspicion of a new technology, but I’m still young enough to recognize when somebody is using it to try to make a quick buck off me.

I hoped I could live in blissful ignorance of AI until the day when Skynet sends Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to wipe my puny human blot off the face of the Earth.

No such luck.

I’ve begun getting random emails, clearly AI-generated, from fake people extoling the countless virtues of the books I’ve written.

The emails contain more detail about the plots of the novels than a person could glean in a reasonable time from reviews and samples, but less and different details than a real person would mention after having read any of the books.

Also, the flattery is at a superhuman level.

The flattery is important because the purpose of each email is to convince me to pay the bank account behind the machine to help me find the audience my novels so richly deserve.

The “author” of the email claims to be the “curator” of a 2500 highly-motivated readers and reviewers. And how would you like for this “curator” to share your amazing novel with this hungry group?

I don’t normally respond to this type of thing, but one of them was particularly persistent. I let her know that she was free to share the book she loved so well with anyone she thought would be interested.

As you might expect, her reply included the price list for this group of book-lovers. Her voracious readers were on sale for $25 each. Yes, that means I pay people $25 to read my work.

I figure this must be the new math they got in schools now.

In my own way, I told her no thank you.

I can buy as many as I want for $25 each.

But she kept sending emails. I should mention that her emails contained a mildly sexy photo of a young woman in the signature. I think that was supposed to make me believe the picture was her, and perhaps I would be more willing to throw money at a mildly sexy young woman and her brothel of literary prostitutes.

I was not.

I did show the picture to my wife, who is mildly concerned that pictures of mildly sexy young women will induce a mildly dangerous heart attack within her mildly aging husband.

The sleuth I married initiated a web search of the alleged mildly sexy woman and came up with nothing. Apparently, the 2500 readers are all curated old school, because it’s not happening online. My wife also noticed that the name in the signature was spelled mildly differently from name in the email address.

I have not responded since. I’ve even stopped looking at the picture of the mildly sexy woman AI scraped off the web. That’s when you know you’ve lost me.

I have every reason to be satisfied with the transaction. At $25 per head, I’ve saved a lot of money on all the people who have never read my books. That’s a small fortune.

Plus, I feel better about our coming war with the machines knowing the cyborgs still haven’t mastered spell check.

Flowers – flash fiction

/ Scott Nagele / Leave a comment

The cemetery was within walking distance. In fact, it was in shuffling distance.

Arthur shuffled through the front entrance and made his way along a familiar route. He stopped at his usual place, before the stone that said Claire Adams. It would be nice if there were a bench nearby, but he’d grown used to talking to her standing up.

The stones on either side had flowers tenderly placed around them. Claire’s stone didn’t have flowers. Arthur never brought flowers. Weeks ago, those flowers around the other stones looked fresh and vibrant. Now they were brittle, dried out, and brown.

“Flowers die,” he muttered to himself.

He stared at Claire’s name on the stone. “Well, it’s prescription day,” he told her. “You know I always stop by on my way the to the pharmacy.”

“I miss you,” he said. “I even miss your scolding. You scolded me a lot towards the end. I wonder if you still loved me as much.” He shrugged. “Maybe you loved me more. To be honest, I have no idea. It was easier to feel certain about things when we were young.”

For a few minutes, he stood silent. He’d never loved the sound of his own voice. Silence made him think about the future, and he didn’t like that either.

“I’d better get going,” he said. “Got to get my scripts.”

He walked slowly these days, but he still had the stamina to make it to the pharmacy. He might have had his prescriptions delivered, but it was exercise, and he looked forward to seeing Sara.

Sara was the pharmacist who worked Tuesday mornings. She was warm and bright, and she was nice to him. A rare bouquet of kindness, she made the world smell sweet again.

Sara knew him. She knew all his prescriptions. He didn’t have to say a word to her about drugs. She gave him exactly what he needed. He never spoke to Sara about business. It was always a pleasant visit with a friend.

His pace quickened as he passed the sliding door.

The pharmacy counter was at the back of the store. Arthur’s lips turned up as he walked down the shampoo aisle. At the end of it, they fell into a frown.

Standing behind the counter, was a woman who was not Sara. She had a stern look. She did not smile like Sara.

“May I help you, sir?” she asked in a wholly businesslike fashion.

Arthur struggled to respond. At last, he found a couple of words. “Where’s Sara?”

The lady seemed puzzled. “Sara?”

“Sara,” he said.

 “Who’s Sara?” she asked, as if he were making things up.

“Sara,” he said. “The pharmacist.”

Recognition came at last. “Oh! You mean the girl who used to work mornings. She transferred to the store across town.”

Across town might as well be the far edge of the universe. Sara was gone. Forever. Replaced by this stranger who would talk about prescriptions.

“Do you need to pick up a prescription?” the fading pharmacist asked.

Arthur stared at the counter. “Flowers die,” he mumbled.

“Excuse me? Do you need something?”

It was too late to start over. Arthur looked up at her drying edges. It was too late.

“No. Nothing,” the old man said as he turned and slowly shuffled away.

Buying eyeballs at 5 cents a pair

/ Scott Nagele / Leave a comment

Indie authors learn to take their victories where they can. Every improvement, in terms of drawing attention to your work, is a victory. It doesn’t matter that it might be a blip in the road to an author supported by a major publishing house. Everything is relative. They key is to be going in the right direction.

As a small fish in a big pond, it often becomes more important to count eyeballs than to count money. Maybe someday you’ll be able to count money in a meaningful way, but first you need the eyeballs.

Counting a worthwhile number of eyeballs means discounting books, often to the point of giving them away. An author who has sunk a certain amount of money into producing a book would like to be able to recoup some of that investment, but that may have to wait.

I’ve given away books before (or maybe I should say, attempted to give away books). I have finally come to accept that it takes a monetary investment to effectively give away books. It’s not enough to make your ebook free on Amazon for a few days. There are thousands of ebooks available for free download on Amazon every day. It’s easy to get lost in that mass, and consequently, not be able to give it away.

It was difficult to reconcile myself to the idea of spending money to give something away for free. I finally bit the bullet and chalked it up to another part of the investment necessary to producing a book.

I spent $179 for concurrent 1-day campaigns on Freebooksy and The Fussy Librarian. This included having my most recent book featured on each website and included in an email to each site’s subscribers. I used KDP Select to make my ebook free for the 3 days surrounding these campaigns.

I really didn’t know what to expect. I thought 300-500 downloads would be great.

The first day my ebook was free (pre-campaign), downloads totaled 5 copies.

The second day (campaign day), downloads totaled slightly more than 3,000 copies.

The third day (post campaign), 400 more copies were added to that total.

My high-water mark was actually #30 in the Free Kindle Store. This was a better result than I expected.

Okay, I spent $179 giving away 3,400 books; what does that do for me?

Time will tell, but if 1% leave reviews, that’s 34 reviews. My hope is that those reviews will provide some of the objective persuasion necessary to convince readers to select the book when it is no longer free. Sure, there’s some assumption built into that plan, but I feel better about it knowing that, potentially, 3,400 extra pairs of eyes are reading my book.

I’m counting that as a victory.

A book in the hand is worth four waiting for edits

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

The last time I wrote a post here about my writing projects, and I’m ashamed to say how long ago that was, I wrote about a four-book series in which I was knee-deep at the time. The good news is that I finished writing that series. The bad news is all the post-writing difficulties. Professional editing alone represents a prohibitive cost to the production of the set. And that’s just one of the things that needs to happen to the adolescent manuscripts before they can grow up to be big, strong books.

While considering how to embark upon that transition (i.e. banging my head against a wall), I have not been completely idle in other areas, except for blogging, in which pursuit I have been near completely idle. While I have not been blogging, or producing a marketable series, I have been working on this:

Granted, it’s not a series. It’s just a solitary novel. But on the plus side, it has been professionally edited. More to its credit, it has a cover, front and back. It’s even formatted in an easily-readable fashion. It may be a little thing (compared to a multi-book saga), but it’s very nearly done. That is to say, it’s almost an actual book, the kind people could buy and read if the fancy so struck them. And as Hans Christian Andersen was wont to say, “That is certainly something.” (Disclaimer: I don’t really know what Hans said in Danish; but the English translations usually amount to the quote above.)

If I click all the right buttons on the right web pages, this book will be released in May, 2023. If I don’t, it’s off to remedial button-clicking class for me. Anyway, enough about my technology issues, here’s the marketing blurb.

Emma and her parents share recurring dreams, in which they are a different family, living 100 years ago in an unfamiliar place, and heading toward tragedy. When Emma’s parents discover their dream family actually existed, it becomes clear that these visits to the past are more than mere dreams—they are playing an unseen role in this historical family’s lives. As the century-old history of this troubled family materializes, it reveals the truth that the impending tragedy spells doom for both families. Only five-year-old Emma has the power to avert disaster, but it will require extraordinary courage against overwhelming evil for Emma to save both families from destruction in The Other Place.

I will post more updates about this book through its publication. In theory, this will serve the dual purposes of building awareness about the book and making me back into the sort of active blogger I used to be. It may also give me something better to do than bang my head against the wall trying to discover a way to manage the production of four hefty novels in succession. That would be the icing on the cake, but a good cake without any icing would be enough for me right now.