How is everyone? How are you doing?
It hit 101 a few days ago, so I promise you, I am hiding inside, desperate to avoid heat stroke. We do not have central a/c (it's another year or three out), so I stay in certain zones where the window units can reach). This means my front parlor or my bedroom. Cooler temperatures are in the forecast, thank goodness! In fact, the last couple of days have been quite temperate. Happy days!
In any case, I was listening to the Kickstart Your Book Sales podcast the other day, and today (it's a long episode) and they are talking about author ecosystems. Now, if you are a reader, this might not interest you, but if you enjoy nerding out over different writerly things, then continue reading. And if not, just skip to the next section, because I am excited about something else, not just writer ecosystems.
Still here? Okay, so I don't have them all memorized, but a solid 40% of Indie authors are Deserts - they follow the trends, maximize their tropes, stick to a very specific trope, and write to market. If you have a subscription to Kindle Unlimited and see these authors there and nowhere else, most likely they are from the Desert ecosystem of writing. There are also Grassland, Tundra, and Aquatics.
And while it is incredibly nerdy of me, I was over the moon to learn that I was a Forest ecosystem. I cross genres, add Easter eggs to all of my work, bend tropes in all kinds of whacky ways, and I can't (and won't) write to market to save my life.
This description basically sums it all up:
Forests march to the beat of their interests and put their own unique spin on everything they do for their readers. They have a close relationship with their fans largely because they inject so much of their own personality into all their books. They could write a murder mystery, a sweet romance, or a cozy comedy and readers will gobble it up because it’s their unique take on a genre.
Yes, that's me!
It goes on further to say:
A forest’s motto is not, “if you like this, then you’ll like this.” Save that line for the Desert! Instead, it’s “if you like ME, then you’ll like this.” Forests do best when they lead with personality, and every pen name or product line is a way for them to express a different aspect of their personality.
This just perfectly sums up me and who I am and what I do. That's why I will suggest my sci-fi series on the heels of my dystopian books, and vice versa. It's why I add Easter eggs to literally everything I write.
So if you know me out in the wild, and I hand you a book and say, "Try it." Please do. Give it a few pages, maybe even a chapter. I can pretty much guarantee you will like it.
A Letter From a Reader
I woke up this morning to an email from a reader...
Dear Christine,
Firstly I have just finished reading the first four books in your G581 series and really enjoyed them. I am looking forward to reading the final book Zarmina’s World.
I must explain that I am a doctor, a General Practitioner and I really enjoy Science Fiction. But I do wish SF writers, not just you, would have someone like me pre-read to make sure medical facts are correct. In G581 the basis of the story is that a virus kills everyone whose blood type is not AB negative. Those with AB Negative blood type survive but are life long carriers and still infectious.
This being so, if two ABneg individuals “mate”, then there is a 50% chance any offspring will be ABneg, 25% Aneg and 25% Bneg. Thus inevitably we will have from this alone a 50% foetal death rate. However, unfortunately even without your AB Neg problem, the actual foetal death rate is thought to be about 30%. Most women often don’t realize they are pregnant. Thus going back to the G581 scenario, of the possible 50% survivable AB Neg offspring, we can add another 15% who will not reach term from whatever cause. Therefore at best, only 1 in 3 pregnancies will go to viability/term in your G581 scenario. Any survival figure lower than this will be excessive and caused by the virus.
Hopefully I didn’t blind you with Genetics 101 and medical facts. Keep writing. As I said at the beginning I really enjoyed your books.
The rule I have always tried to follow when writing science fiction, or really any fiction, is to try my best to not take too many leaps. I also did consult a virologist, a professor at the University of Washington before I wrote about the first G581 book. That said, I'm not a scientist, and I've made some serious leaps over the course of the (soon to be) five book series.
I loved getting this letter, though. You know why? Because even if he felt the science wasn't on point, the writing was engaging enough that he was willing to continue. For FOUR books, despite feeling that the science on the reproductive side was... iffy. Here is what I wrote back:
Thank you for writing me! I am glad you enjoyed the series and I hope my last book, Zarmina's World, will be enjoyable to you as well, even if there are scientific flaws. In fiction, we make jumps, and hope that they are realistic enough for the majority to suspend disbelief over the finer points of science. Warp drives, for example. I just went Star Trek and artificial gravity and tried not to obsess too much about communication lags. But then there was Cryo, another rabbithole.
In any case, YES, the reproductive rate would be absolutely abysmal. I had this firmly in mind, as I wrote G581: Earth. Fetal death would be a huge problem, and I felt it literally threatened the future of humanity. Of course, sending an asteroid their way threatened them an eensy teensy bit more, but the nanite therapy (again, suspend disbelief) that Lonnie and Toya on Mars (along with Tobias on Earth) develop fixes both the infectious issue and the reproductive issue. This will be discussed to some extent in ZW (thanks for the reminder as I'm deep in outlining right now).
The whole idea of pseudorabies and the herpes virus affecting reproductive rates, by the way, is thanks to a virologist I consulted with. One of my high school teacher's brother is a professor at Washington State.
Thank you again for your words of support. I love hearing from readers. It is rare, and always appreciated.
To me, even if a reader takes issue with a factoid there in the book, they have kept reading. That's success to me. Because the rest of the story is engaging enough. Better even, that they reached out to say something.
Writing often feels like I'm standing alone in the middle of a big field, telling a story in my loudest, clearest voice. So when a reader walks up, and wants to talk to me about a character, or even a plot hole, I'm here for it. Talk to me, seriously, please do, about these characters. It is perfectly acceptable to walk up to me, or message me, and say, "So, this Wes character in War's End is a complete dick." To which I will likely reply, "He sure is, but have you read his redemption arc in Tales of the Collapse or toward the end of Book 2?"
Or as one reader once messaged me and said, "I'm reading Fate's Highway, and I really hate Dean Edmonds, I skipped forward a chapter or two and he's still alive, why?" To which I replied, "Keep going." Later, she wrote, "Damn it, I really wanted to hate him, and now I'm crying."
My takeaway? I've done my job.
Connection - In So Many Forms
I spend hours alone in my head, and in my home office. The hubs often works from home, but he is upstairs on the second floor. The teen is in college, and often home by noon, but he also hides out in his boy cave most of the day (it seems we are all a little introverted around here!).
I mention this because, again, writing is such a solitary profession. However, I have been putting work into fostering friendships, attending oral storytelling events, and I play on three different pool league teams. I also have a little book that sits on the bookshelf in our Airbnb and asks folks to tell me about their favorite books, what they liked about the book, and how it made them feel. And when I notice the book has been moved, I check it, and I love the responses.
Introverts like me, we need connection too. It just needs to be on our terms, mostly at a distance, lol. In any case, I thought you would enjoy the photos below.
Translations...
Finally, AI is capable of actually decent translations. This is very, VERY exciting for me. As I have mentioned before, I want my words available to as many people as possible, in the formats they want to have. This means...
ebooks (wide, not just through Amazon Kindle)
paperbacks
hardcovers (for libraries, whose patrons can be harder on books)
large print (also for libraries, but I occasionally sell them on Amazon too)
audiobooks (I'm working on them, I swear I am!)
foreign languages (Spanish, German, French, Italian)
But being able to afford for someone to translate my books has been rather out of my range. Foreign translation can cost upwards of .35 to .50 cents per word. To give you an idea of how expensive that would be, most of my books at typically around 90,000 words, so just at the lower end, that's $31,500. For one book. Some translators are much cheaper, depending on supply and demand and the language in question. But even 1/3 of that amount, even 1/6 of it, is pretty much impossible for me. I simply don't make that kind of money.
Fast forward to learning that Claude Sonnet and ChatGPT 4 are finally at a stage of usability, and accuracy, that means translation might actually be possible. I'm still having to invest a pretty penny. I need a proofreader who can read the AI translated text and correct any of the errors, because it is still an accuracy rate of 95-97% and that's a wee bit too much for me to be okay with. Thankfully, a proofreader through Fiverr costs around two cents per word, and that I can afford on the smaller books!
Sooo...I'm doing a test run using Get Organized, Stay Organized and also Short-Term Rental Success and translating them into Spanish. ¡Deséame suerte!
Comments