02 Jan 2012, Posted by caburkes in Novels, Short Stories, 0 Comments Tagged ANYTHING, CSI, EVERYONE, Japan, MASSIVE, Shyster Club
Changing Up
I’ve been reading the Amanda Hocking Blog regularly since she was first reported getting a million dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press. That was almost last summer or fall. She’s still doing well and I’m very proud of her and her work. She’s very inspirational. The most important factor I’d like to admire, and it may sound rather bent, but she was rejected like the best of them repeatedly for … wow…maybe years until she started self publishing. She never gave up.
From reading her blog, I also get the impression she, like me, fairly had no other choice but NOT to give up. When writing or storytelling is something you do automatically, kind of like breathing, it’s hard to stop no matter how frustrated you become. And I’ve been frustrated for a very long time. But here I am…still writing.
I use to do a lot of writing that went against the grain of the market: people are selling vampire books, I’ll write something else. People are writing erotica, I won’t bother to touch it. Though i get MASSIVE points for building original characters and story concepts, again, these concepts are too early for people and I’ll see them repetaed in major motion pictures 4-5 years from my creation date. Very right… just too early.
It’s not that I can’t write vampire or erotica stuff. All I see is saturation.
But then again, my checking account is seeing a drought. Ha! ‘Drought’ is still too ‘wet’ of a word. I need something drier to describe my bank account. No, more than ‘desert’, too.
So, the change up happened weeks ago when I posted a free short story ‘CommonSense’ which was basically a counter-story. What’s a ‘counter-story’? Kind of a quasi-parody taking an existing film and re-plotting it with added characters to create an alternate point-of-view. I suppose you would also call it ‘fan fiction’ but I wouldn’t include exact characters in order to have much more flexibility with where I post and how I distribute the stories.
Well, it was a story i did within a week, created a cover and posted it as a free short story on a few places and now it’s being downloaded faster than what the 40 To Go teaser did in a few days. Between all the sites, at this rate, CommonSense will surpass anything I put up recently in video or otherwise. Well, not necessarily the erotica, Contact High. That’s been up for about two-three years and in various format and places it had well over 11,000 downloads.
People really love their erotica. Contact high was an experimental take on erotica without sex and apparently the emphasis on ‘passion’ worked well.
So instead of going against the grain, 2012 is about flowing with the tide and seeing how I fair. I can’t even observe the point of view that the numbers are high because it’s free. I can tell you this for a fact: no matter what it is if the marketing isn’t there and the story is bad, nobody will click ANYTHING and word of mouth comes to a stand still. I was putting out a few short stories for free to get the temperature of the fan base I had after Butta and the Tower of Bling and kind of see if i was still relevant or even talented enough to keep peoples attention.
Turns out, the free samples is working and I’m in a good position officially to put out the revised Butta Book really soon. Especially now that EVERYONE has suddenly started writing about kick-ass women lead characters in thrillers. When did I Butta‘ first come out? 2007? Reviews were great but I still had a lot of naysayers telling me it’s not what the market wants, rejections from agents and publishers and people telling me all sorts of crap. Okay, sold only 2155 copies worldwide (France Australia and Japan buyers by the way) and flash forward to 2012 and we’ve seen Columbiana, Tower Heist, Salt and a host of urban novels that veered from sex and drugs to actual storytelling with mainstream themes and …good heavens … a female action/adventure lead character.
Yep, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011,, 2012 …Let’s see that’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … Yep! Five years right on the dot.
If you don’t believe me, ask the writers at CSI where they got the idea for this episode and research Shyster Club:
Ahhh…but I don’t want to be an old man waving my cane complaining about how wronged I’ve been (see blog entry 40 To Go and Angry). What I need to do is shut up and keep writing….like Amanda Hocking.
After I take a nap, I’ll start (then finish) the CommonSense #2 story and finish the touch-ups on the Butta eBook.
Corey A. Burkes Author/CEODesktopEpics Entertainment
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