Of Butchery and Meta Data

by wlancehunt in Books, Chicago, fantasy, Marketing, Personal Narrative, Writing Now

Jonathan here again, lead singer of Mercurial Visions and Merciful Release. (From the pages of A Perfect Blindness.) Lance begs your forgiveness for being absent this month.

He’s rather caught up with some of the same problems he had writing me, Scott, Jennifer, and company into existence. He thought he knew what he was writing about when he started. He had plans. Lots of ideas. Then he started writing and, well, we all know what happens to plans when they hit reality.

Why Me

Now, he finally discovered the root of the problem when trying to promote me and my world. He thinks. And is busy rectifying that. So tapped me to write this explaination.

What Lance Thought

See, he wrote it as an homage to a place and time—Chicago’s Northside music scene in the late 80s and early 90s. That pre-Internet magazine era that gave birth to the supermodel. He also wanted to show how scrubby failures like me and my friends can tell big stories about human life.

Ouch. Man, writing that doesn’t feel quite so hot.

But what the hell can I say about the motivation behind creative impulses? I botched them up bad in my life. I, at least, figured that out, unlike Scott.

What About His Current Novel?

What does have have to do with his new novel, you ask. A lot. So, hang around just a bit longer. First his older novel.

When Lance told Amazon what kind of book A Perfect Blindness was, he chose what he thought the novel was about—Rock and Roll. Set in the late 80s. Chicago. The whole music scene back going on forty years ago.

Old Ideas Meet A Promotion

But sales were nada. Until he ran a promotion. Hit #1 in three Amazon categories and #4 in a fourth, and rocketed up to one of the top 700 books being grabbed across all of Amazon.

Clearly, he needed to promote more. So, he tried ads. Got lots of impressions, but few clicks and even fewer buys. That didn’t make much sense on the heels of being on top in so many categories. Something was wrong.

With a bit of research, he found out almost no one searches for novels about Rock and Roll, Chicago, or Nightclubs in Amazon’s search engine. As in fewer than 100 a month. As for historical fiction, that’s mostly Vietnam and older. Basically, he had told Amazon to try selling it to, well, almost no one.

Well, Damn. What’s a Writer to do?

Look at all the reviews the book I live in has gotten and see what he finds there.

He found plenty of references to surprises, shocks, twists, and endings that readers hadn’t seen coming. That suggests a very different kind of book. One with

· Unreliable narrators (check).

· People keeping secrets (check).

· Deadly consequences from same secrets (check).

· Deeply atmospheric (check).

New DNA

Adding all of those up, he got a book sharing a lot of DNA with Psychological Thrillers.

Not only that, the book also abounds with broken love affairs, toxic relationships, and other not happily ever after situations. (I did tell Amy there was never really any chance for us on the first page.)

By kicking around romance groups, Lance discovered an obscure subgenre: Toxic Romance. When not being together can be the happiest ending. (check with an exclamation point)

Basically, he wrote a book rather different from what he had started out trying to write. A kind of book that might actually have lots of people looking for.

Changes to the Backend

A couple of weeks back, he made changes to the metadata, correcting who Amazon should be showing the book to—the categories and keywords. Updates below:

Keywords:

Totally addictive storytelling
Kindle Psychological thriller
Unlimited ebook with twists and surprises
Literary historical fiction rich with detail
New adult fiction living in the city
Character hiding a secret
Novels with characters that feel like real life

Too early to tell what this will do, but by June, Lance should be able to tell you something. (By the way, Toxic Romance isn’t a selectable category, nor do those words generate many searches. Just one of those oddball things about literary tastes vs. Amazon.)

What’s This Got to Do with Walking the Darkmaker’s Way?

Yo, Jonathan, you said this had to do with Lance’s Work in Progress, Walking the Darkmaker’s Way. What’s this metadata stuff got to do with that?

Just about everything.

Started as a Novella

He started writing WtDMW with an outline for a short fantasy thriller of about 60 pages, with a list of specific ideas to keep him on track. What happened?

Several Novels, probably

He’s got a different book altogether. A full sized novel, with enough left over for two or three more novels. And it’s a bit of a mess with too many ideas and lurking themes. In other words, he started with one idea, but it kicked his ass and just took over. Sound familiar?

Has He Learned Anything?

Oh, that he has. This time, he’s not going to force it into the box he was imagining for it. Rather, he’s open to discovering what it has become. And embracing that. (Certainly, it plays with the same themes of identity and leans psychological. That’s something that’s baked into his creative nature, I think. It’s hell on us characters, I have to tell you.)

So, he’s asking for some patience as he works through those realizations. And a second one, which is most responsible for holding up finishing new works—an obsession with polishing up all text, including stuff that ends up getting cut.

Every morning now, before he writes, he steels himself to act as a butcher, killing lots of beautifully written sentences, paragraphs, hell, whole scenes, as he tells me. He’s now focusing on getting the book finished, ugly sentences an all, so he can see what belongs. That done, he’ll make THOSE words pretty.

I’m sure he’ll be telling you more about that soon.

Lance thanks you for reading, as do I.