Scouting for Good Books?

By Linda Lovely

Who doesn’t want to take advantage of something that’s free?

Readers who enjoy Kindle ebooks have tons of opportunities to download free books. Now they have one more—Amazon’s Kindle Scout program (https://kindlescout.amazon.com/).

Here’s how it works. Readers visit the site and peruse prospective titles in their favorite genres (romance, mystery, science fiction, general literature) by clicking on a book cover and reading a short blurb about the book. If it sounds interesting, they can read the book’s opening chapters. Then, if they think they’d like to read the whole book, they can “nominate” it for an Amazon publishing contract, and if Amazon elects to publish it, they’ll get their copy of the chosen title free. However, during any given time period, readers can only nominate three books. That keeps folks from clicking on every title in their preferred genres. In theory, this selection process provides a curator service. Only the best books of the lot gain publication.

Okay, what’s in it for authors? If Amazon chooses to publish their books, they get a $1,500 advance, 50% ebook royalty, and hopefully, a promotional boost from Amazon marketing. That’s why I’m considering offering my new book, LIES, to the Kindle Scout program. Of course, that doesn’t mean Amazon will choose LIES as one of its offerings. Who knows what criteria they use to select Kindle Scout titles, but I’m certain there are many factors unrelated to book quality (just like there are in traditional publishing) that go into decision making. For instance, if they’ve just put up two vampire related titles in the Sci Fi, Fantasy category, they might bypass an even better vampire book for the sake of variety.

Many authors, me included, are somewhat gun shy about programs like Kindle Scout because they are in essence popularity contests and we don’t like begging friends, family, and fellow authors to nominate our books to get the ball rolling. However, the potential promise of Amazon promotion is a powerful incentive. Plus, if your book doesn’t win an Amazon contract, you can go right ahead with your previous plans to independently publish the title. The only downside is that all those friends you begged to nominate you now know that your book “lost.” Will that influence their willingness to spend money to buy the book? Who knows?

Free books can be a curse or a bonanza for authors, who often offer books for free (or next to free) in the hope that if new readers sample one of their books and like it, they’ll buy their other books. It’s the age-old loss leader strategy. Authors even pay promotional bundlers for the privilege of offering their books free. The problem is that many readers have become so accustomed to downloading books for free that they no longer see a need to buy any books. In other instances, readers have downloaded so many free books it may be months—maybe years—before they actually read the free books they download today. In this case, the author “payback” of such readers buying their other books may take so long, they’ve given up on a writing career.

Nonetheless, we authors are a determined lot. I’m willing to give Kindle Scout a try. If they choose to put up LIES, you may well be hearing from me with a “Please consider nominating” plea.

So authors and readers, how do you feel about “free” ebooks?

It Pays To Be A Good Liar

Hi everyone.
B. A. Binns here.  April is confession month at Romancing The Genres

But I’m not here to confess. I’m going to tell why I embrace the art of lying. According to Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde, “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.” My art is fiction, forcing me to become a veteran liar.

Or maybe that’s vice versa, a chicken and egg thing.

Shrink alert here: People live inside my skull with me and they whisper their lies (I mean lives) to me. Seriously, I sometimes feel like I am channeling someone and just putting their stories on paper or on eReader screens. As Albert Camus, a French author and philosopher, once said, “The purpose of the fiction lie is to reveal big truths.” I have to lie, and lie well, in order to make readers feel emotions, see lives that are like, and yet often unlike, their own. I thrust readers into ethical dilemmas and force them to make decisions that might affect their lives, the country, maybe even the future of the entire human race…without ever being hurt by the consequences. Instead, readers see the result on their “whipping boy,” the protagonist, as he or she stands in for them on the pages and in the face of the hard truths of life.

One of my teenaged characters begins her life in my current  work-in-progress, Minority Of One, by reciting her great lies.

“My name is Sheila Galliano and I am excited to be starting my new school. I love being in Chicago. I would never go back to the way things were.” I manage those lies without hesitation.

She is Sheila, but she’s not a Galliano, she hates her new school almost as much as she hated the old one where she was the sole American outsider, and as for being in Chicago – she knows her mother only came to that city to reunite with an old lover, the man who drove her father to suicide. There is nothing she wants more than the impossible, to have her old life restored.

Sometimes human beings lie because the truth hurts. Here another Minority Of One character deals with the results of telling his family a hard truth:

If I could just get a do-over I think I would be smart and keep my secret to myself. Bite my tongue until it bled before I said one word. Truth set you free? My truth was a scalpel, easy in, and so smooth I didn’t even realize how badly I’d hurt my brother until the edge did its work and moved on.

Lies, baby. That’s the trick.

Many of us learn that the truth can be painful to ourselves and to others when we are very young, practically as soon as we learn how to talk. The ethical question for readers in this passage is, is this character correct? Are lies the answer? What about white lies and lies of omission? According to Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.” But is a lie to save someone else really bad? 

That’s a question Malik Kaplan, the protagonist in my Feb 2013 release, Being God, has to face when he lets his father believe he is guilty of a crime committed by another young man.

My father turns to me. “Did Spencer lie?” It almost sounds like he wants me to say yes.

My lies bind my lips tight. I can’t tell the truth and hurt my friend.

Fiction allows readers to examine issues and call into question their own beliefs, just as thrill rides let them test their reaction to danger, all in the safety of their own heads. YA fiction plays a special role in this, because it is read by adolescents and teens, people who are beginning to pull free of their parents grip, examining the rules and mores they have accepted until now. Adolescence is generally the time when we first at odds with those of the adults we love and trust; when we take our first step toward adulthood and a mind of our own. Teens are active in trying to find their own place in the world and not just follow the adult rules. That’s why they need stories. Non-fiction tells us what is, fiction lets us examine what could be. Fiction gives us an opportunity to think critically, to make decisions, and to test out results of those decisions.

Maybe fiction isn’t really a lie, just the truth as the imagination sees it. I spent a lot of time doing “what if” scenarios during my business career. As an author, I have to lie and tell the truth, all at the same time. When I talk to students, almost inevitably one asks me if my books are “real.” I could tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth by saying “no.” But that would end up being the biggest lie of all.

There is no Sheila Galliano living with the shame of her father’s suicide, No Malik Kaplan using alcohol to deal with feelings he is not worthy of love, no David Albacore wishing he could rip out the DNA that reminds him he is related to his mother’s killer.  But there are people who have lived pieces of those lives, felt the emotions, been presented with their problems and been forced to live with the consequences of the solutions they chose.  The feelings are real, even if I am not recounting a news story, or channeling the spirit of someone telling me the facts of his or her life, what I write is no lie. So now, when I am asked if my books are real, I tell students yes. There are people who have lived through the same things the kids in my book live through. Real people, real lives. Maybe even some of the kids listening to me speak.

And now, since “The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up,” according to author Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, one of my all-time favorite books, I will stop.

But don’t you stop. Please comment and share your feelings about “the lies that reveal the truth.” Is that really the purpose of fiction?