How to annoy a published writer (one in a series of a thousand ways)

Something that gets on my nerves is getting writing and marketing advice from non-writers. The other day, a local friend of mine was over at the house, and I talked some about what I am currently working on.

("Icarus: In the future, a thousand people live and work in outer space. They depend on Earth for supplies. What do they do to survive when Earth goes dark?")*

So they tell me that I really should look at a link that a mutual friend of ours shared about "getting published." I tried to take the route of "Can I at least write one of the books first?" as well as "I am a hybrid writer--I have been on both sides of the business--I think I know what I am doing, and quite frankly have already decided how Icarus is going to be released (as well as the other projects that I am working on)." They sent me the link anyways.

And they had to dig to get to it. (The post was buried deep--deeper than I was willing to go looking.)

Turns out that the link was to a free seminar on "How to use a book to generate new leads for your business." And considering I have no desire to be the head of an international magical Order, or a world renown fortune teller, completely useless to me. Maybe if I wanted to become an expert on mental illness, it might be helpful--but still the process of writing a book and using it as a business card to make money as an expert does not appeal to me.

I know that he was trying to be helpful, but "I am not a writer--I have no desire to be a writer--yet I am going to share advice anyways" just annoys me. I would like to think that my thirty-four years of dabbling in the business (I wrote my first dubious erotica story in 1984 and got paid a whole twenty-five dollars for it) has taught me something. But there are loads of well meaning friends and critics who tell me otherwise.

Please, for heaven's sake--please, don't give me market advice, if you are not a writer. It just annoys me, especially when it turns out to be the hook for a paid consulting service.

Concept art for the cover of Axe Murderer of Titan.

[*I am going to be using a new pen-name for this series--Michael Ramalia.]

Business advice from Winning the email lottery

I won the email freelotto lottery. Or so, I have been told...

...with about fifty emails.

Yes, it is a phishing campaign.

But it does remind me of some important internet business advice:

If you are going to use an automated email program, make sure that it does not send multiple emails to the same email address. And if you have multiple email mailing lists, figure out how to sync the lists.

Why?

Because if someone recieves the exact same email from a single or multiple senders, they are more likely to treat it as spam, even if their spam filters do not catch it.

And there you go, my winning prize in the email freelotto lottery, a crappy bit of internet business advice. Ain't you glad that I shared the winnings with you?

Advice from Laurell K. Hamilton

In the April 2008 issue of Writer’s Digest, there is an interview with Laurell K. Hamilton, creator of the Anita Blake, vampire slayer series. It is a quite interesting interview; I didn’t realize that she had been in a writing program and was kicked out for being a bad influence (basically she was writing genre fiction and her class mates started to follow her lead, rather than writing the stuff that the dean of the program thought should be written).

Laurell K. Hamilton, near the end of the interview (done by Maria Scheider) said something that I found to be very meaningful.

“Writers write. Put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis. Ray Bradbury said, ‘The muse cannot resist a working writer.’ I start off by writing why I can’t write. Type every reason you can’t write. Complain, bitch, whatever. Half a page to a page in, the muse says, ‘Well, if you’re going to be writing anyway, you can do better than this.’ Also, if you don’t protect your time, no one will. I wrote my first book two pages a day, five days a week.”

I think that it is good advice. I could be wrong. It may just look like useful advice because she mentions the muse. And that automatically gets my attention lately, considering that I am reading both (the) Iliad and Paradise Lost. Both Homer and John Milton mentioned the muse(s), having prayers to them. Their mention of the muses has started me researching a possible lecture on them for Bast Temple (Golden Dawn in Denver, Colorado).