Killer robots and the "day job"

Very few fiction writers achieve financial success overnight. This means that most of us have extensive experience with the dreaded "day job". 

Traditionally, the day job of choice for aspiring writers has been something in teaching--usually teaching English. 

A day job in teaching has many advantages for the would-be novelist: Educators have flexible work schedules. When you have the entire summer off, that gives you a big chunk of dedicated, pre-scheduled writing time. 

And if you teach English, your job involves books and literature. So even when you're "at work", you're spending time with something that you love.

Speaking of the "job" aspect:  While the educator certainly has a job to perform, the work environment in education is typically less stressful than average. (This is especially true for college professors.) Educational environments encourage contemplation, which is a big part of the writing process.

I should have gone into teaching. Masochist that I was, however, I majored in Economics and then went into the corporate world. I had to be different. 

I should have known better. Corporate environments are notoriously unfriendly to writer types: the stress, the conformity, the constant business travel. It is no accident that Fortune 500 corporations hire a lot more accounting majors than English literature majors. 

There is also the fact that most writers (myself included) don't like to take orders from other people. We aren't good "team players".

It wasn't all bad. I met some interesting people during my years in the corporate world, and had some valuable experiences. I also learned to apply business principles to my own life, which is a valuable skill for anyone to have. 

For the most part, though, I was the proverbial square peg in the round hole. My chances of rising to the level of senior management were roughly equivalent to my odds of winning the lottery.

However, my long slog through the world of cubicles, boardrooms, and factories (I spent most of my corporate days in the automotive industry) provided some unexpected returns. 

Many of my stories, like "The Vampires of Wallachia", have corporate themes and settings that appeal to non-literary types. I may not have been destined for the corner office, but I did learn about the corporate world from every conceivable angle. (I took business courses at the graduate level, too.) 

I believe that my unique background (as novelists go) shows up in my stories in the form of enhanced realism. I have insights that I simply couldn't have gained if I'd spent my pre-novelist career in the ivory tower of academia, teaching courses on Shakespeare and Modern American Literature. 

For example, my novel Termination Man is set in the automotive industry. While the companies and specific situations are fictional, the book draws extensively from my own experiences. I worked for a large automotive manufacture for 13 years. I spent additional years working for automotive components suppliers. Termination Man is fiction, but it reflects the reality of the automotive industry in many ways. 

Then there is my story "The Robots of Jericho". Like the aforementioned story, "The Vampires of Wallachia", "The Robots of Jericho" is posted on this site and is--if the blog stats are to be believed--this site's most popular page. (Both stories are included in the collection, Hay Moon and Other Stories: Sixteen Modern Tales of Horror and Suspense.) 

"The Robots of Jericho" is a long short story about industrial robots that come to life and go on a homicidal rampage inside a factory. While the premise of the story is fantastic, the setting of the tale is wholly realistic. A lot of mundane details about factories are embedded in this story. I believe that this element of "real life" facilitates the suspension of disbelief that is required for the reader to accept the story's supernatural elements.

The idea for "The Robots of Jericho" occurred to me about five years ago, when I was touring an automotive battery plant in northern Ohio. I was watching the robots move behind the safety cages, and they suddenly reminded me of the raptors in the Jurassic Park films. 
The rest of the story--including its more mundane human conflict--fell into place within a few weeks.  

Hopefully this post will encourage aspiring writers to see the "day job" from a new perspective. The day job is more than just a way to pay your bills until you succeed as a writer. The day job is also a source of story ideas.

Amazon.com and the scourge of fake reviews

From The New York Times:

"In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50."

The business of book reviews

I am coming a little late to this party, but I recently found out just how extensive the "fake review" issue has become on Amazon.com. I wasn't aware until now that bestselling author John Locke had purchased fake reviews for his early novels:

"John Locke started as a door-to-door insurance salesman, was successful enough to buy his own insurance company, and then became a real estate investor. In 2009, he turned to writing fiction. By the middle of 2011, his nine novels, most of them suspense tales starring a former C.I.A. agent, Donovan Creed, had sold more than a million e-books through Amazon, making him the first self-published author to achieve that distinction. 

 Mr. Locke, now 61, has also published a nonfiction book, “How I Sold One Million E-Books in Five Months.” One reason for his success was that he priced his novels at 99 cents, which encouraged readers to take a chance on someone they didn’t know. Another was his willingness to try to capture readers one at a time through blogging, Twitter posts and personalized e-mail, an approach that was effective but labor-intensive. 

“My first marketing goal was to get five five-star reviews,” he writes. “That’s it. But you know what? It took me almost two months!” In the first nine months of his publishing career, he sold only a few thousand e-books. Then, in December 2010, he suddenly caught on and sold 15,000 e-books. 

One thing that made a difference is not mentioned in “How I Sold One Million E-Books.” That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford.  “I’m ready to roll.” 

 Mr. Locke was secure enough in his talents to say that he did not care what the reviews said. “If someone doesn’t like my book,” he instructed, “they should feel free to say so.” He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility. 

In a phone interview from his office in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Locke confirmed the transaction. “I wouldn’t hesitate to buy reviews from people that were honest,” he said. Even before using GettingBookReviews.com, he experimented with buying attention through reviews. “I reached out every way I knew to people to try to get them to read my books.” 

Many of the 300 reviews he bought through GettingBookReviews were highly favorable, although it’s impossible to say whether this was because the reviewers genuinely liked the books, or because of their well-developed tendency toward approval, or some combination of the two. 

Mr. Locke is unwilling to say that paying for reviews made a big difference. “Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful,” he said. “But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.” 

 Mr. Rutherford, who says he is a little miffed that the novelist never gave him proper credit, is more definitive. “It played a role, for sure,” he said. “All those reviews said to potential readers, ‘You’ll like it, too.’ ” 

There are, I think a few disclaimers worth noting: It's obvious that some (real) people like John Locke's books, or they wouldn't continue to sell. (Locke is still near the top of many bestseller lists on Amazon, a full year after this scandal broke.) Whether you like Locke's novels or not, he is serious about writing fiction that appeals to a certain audience. 

Moreover, all writers (myself included) have encouraged enthusiastic readers to write reviews. We've also all given away books to the owners of pertinent blogs and websites, in the hope that the blog/website owner would review them. (This is how my first nonfiction book began to see significant sales, in fact.)

But encouraging reviews is one thing. Giving away books is one thing. These are both accepted, established practices that have a long history in the publishing business. 

Buying reviews is quite another. 

Schemes like the now defunct GettingReviews.com undermine the basic credibility of the Amazon customer review system. There has always been the occasional "planted" positive review. But when you turn the fake review into a full-bore commercial enterprise, this turns the 5-star review into spam. And this cheats those authors who have earned 5-star reviews by pleasing real, unpaid readers. 

Fake negative reviews are a problem, too.

You might love controversial blogger/author Vox Day, or you might hate him. Vox is quite opinionated; and he pulls no punches when attacking those with whom he disagrees. 

If you disagree with a blogger and feel a need to shout down or denounce him or her, then there is proper way to do that: openly-- on your blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook. Even for non-bloggers, there are plenty of places to express your opinion online nowadays.

But you shouldn't post fake reviews on a blogger's review page, as happened to Vox Day after a recent highly publicized "kerfuffle" with some of his fellow writers in the SFWA. As the hyperlinked post makes clear, a person who didn't like Vox's political positions decided to penalize him by posting obviously fake, generically negative reviews of his novels.

I wouldn't encourage you to do this to anyone--regardless of his or her politics. For example, I've criticized SF writer John Scalzi from time to time here, for his opportunism and knee-jerk political correctness. But even if you agree with me about Scalzi, don't post a negative review of Old Man's War or Redshirts on Amazon in an attempt to silence or distract him. 

First of all, it won't work: Amazon.com is aware of the problem of retaliatory/personally biased negative reviews. There is a procedure that writers and publishers can follow to have them removed. 

A negative review from a reader who has not read a book is always painfully transparent. An experienced Amazon.com customer has seen plenty of these, and can easily recognize them. 

These fake negative reviews have the same net effect as fake positive reviews: They suggest to readers that all Amazon reader reviews are tainted by ulterior motives, and are therefore suspect.

Any solution for fake reviews? 

As a reader, I've long since learned to take both positive and negative Amazon.com reviews with a large grain of salt. (This is especially true when evaluating any nonfiction that has any sort of a political slant.)

As a writer, I've learned to stop sweating the review rat race. I certainly appreciate reviews (especially positive ones); but I think that the success of businesses like GettingReviews.com points to a glaring problem online: The obsession with "buzz" has caused many authors, inventors, and others to behave like the dotcom entrepreneurs of the late 1990s, who were far more concerned with "eyeballs on pages" than with "substance on pages".

Nor does it make sense for writers to constantly ask readers for reviews. The fact of the matter is that only a small percentage of readers will take the time to review a book. Moreover, readers don't like to be pestered into becoming an unpaid member of a writer's marketing department. 

My (partial) solution is to make more of my fiction available online. A reader might doubt a 5-star review of Blood Flats, Eleven Miles of Night, or Termination Man. (And based on stories like the aforementioned one in The New York Times, I can't say that I entirely blame them.)

However, if a reader likes a writer's actual writing, then they like it. You can fake a 5-star review; but you can't fake five or six chapters of a book that engage a reader. 

If you enjoyed one of my books and want to write a review, I'll certainly appreciate that. However, I'd much prefer that you spend that time perusing the additional books that I have excerpted on this site. 

My focus, from a marketing perspective, is on turning non-readers into readers, not on turning existing readers into "evangelists" for something that I've written.

What scares me, you ask?

After yesterday's post about my new novel, Eleven Miles of Night, a reader asked:

"Ed, what are your favorite horror movies and books? Were there any that particularly frightened you?"

To answer the first question: There are plenty that I've enjoyed over the years. 

In high school, I was a big fan of Stephen King's early novels: Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Shining, etc. During my college years, I went through an H.P. Lovecraft phase, in which I read practically everything that he wrote. More recently, I've read several novels by Brian Keene that were page-turners (especially The Rising and City of the Dead.) 

I haven't been quite as impressed with horror movies. The sad fact of the matter is that most horror films (especially those of recent vintage) are just plain bad. There are exceptions, of course: I was an addict of the AMC series The Walking Dead during the first few seasons.  I won't deny that The Walking Dead has lost some of its charm for me since it debuted in 2010. The first few seasons were pure gold, though.

While I've derived pleasure from the above horror novels and films, I can't say that any of them really "scared" me--as in keeping me awake at night. This was true even of the scariest horror film of them all: The Exorcist.

When The Exorcist was released in 1973, it disturbed a lot of people who saw it in theaters. I've talked to more than a few Baby Boomers who've told me that The Exorcist gave them sleepless nights.

I was a bit too young for horror films in 1973, but I finally got around to watching The Exorcist on DVD about ten years ago. The film did eventually give me one nightmare, but I slept like a baby the night I watched it. 

(I think that The Exorcist has lost some of its punch because its tricks and conventions have been imitated by so many other filmmakers over the years. In 1973 The Exorcist was groundbreaking; by today's standards it is relatively standard, as horror films go. But that's another blog post.)

What does scare me, then? The answer might surprise you: Nothing creeps me out like those "true ghost stories"--especially the ones that have an air of realism.

As chance would have it, I live in a relatively haunted part of the world (if you believe the ghost-hunters, that is.) My hometown of Cincinnati is home to an above-average number of buildings, graveyards, and bridges that are reputed to be haunted.

I live only a few miles from "Dead Man's Curve" on the old Ohio Turnpike (now Ohio State Route 125). This stretch of roadway has been called, "one of the most haunted spots in the U.S.". Numerous fatal accidents have occurred there, including a particularly nasty one in 1969. The area is rumored to be the site of an old Native American burial ground. 

Travelers have reported seeing a "faceless hitchhiker" on this section of highway between the hours of midnight and one a.m. I've never driven over the Dead Man's Curve during the supposed "haunting time", but one of these days, I might. (For more information about this reputedly haunted location, watch the YouTube clip below.) 

Every now and then I do get creeped out, thinking about a genuinely haunted spot so close to my front door. Yes, I know that faceless hitchhikers and ghosts don't really exist; but I still haven't driven over the Dead Man's Curve between the hours of midnight and one a.m. I see no advantage in tempting fate.

So it is the "true" ghost stories that keep me awake at night, because they might just be true after all. No one claims that The Walking Dead is real. But I've met at least two people who claimed to have seen something along the Dead Man's Curve late at night.

(Eleven Miles of Night is a novel about a roadway in Ohio, though it isn't modeled on the Dead Man's Curve of State Route 125. I'll discuss the inspiration for Eleven Miles of Night in a subsequent post.)