30 years ago, in Orlando, there was a Hu Hot restaurant nearby. Great concept. You start with a bowl, fill it with meats, veggies, noodles or rice, the move to the sauce bar. There, you have 24 sauces arranged from mild to hot. Hand it to the grill masters and they cook it on a Mongolian grill. Then I got a new job and Hu Hot wasn’t around.
We moved to Colorado, and Colorado Springs is an hour and a half away, but in one of our forays. I saw a Hu Hot! After 4 years, my wife finally decided to humor me, and we went today.
Wow! My first bowl I stuck to the mild/sweet sauces. Sublime. My second trip up, some Szechwan Sunburn sauce and a couple of other mollifying sauces. Simply amazing. I may even get my wife to go back with me some time.
What does this have to do with reading?
Sometimes going back to a favorite book or play is a whole new experience. The second time through, you may pick up a completely different vibe.
I reread Our Town by Thornton Wilder recently. I’d been in the play 45 years ago, found it interesting, but didn’t understand why it won awards. This time I completely understood. For one thing, I have a different maturity level now, a lot more theatrical training, and a refined love of language.
I reread Moby Dick not too long ago, the novel hailed as the first “modern” novel. Far richer than my first read through. Not an easy read even now, but a great book nonetheless.
In the other direction, I reread Dune on a long flight. It did not hold up to my teenage assessment of it. It’d be great with a very deep edit…
I have a passion for new reads, but don’t be afraid to dust off an old favorite. You may find new wonder in it.
B&N Press, a good outlet for hardcovers, books you want for yourself but not publish, and… well, that’s about it, but IngramSpark has better hardcovers. I used to post books to B&N Press, but in 15 years of using them, I’ve made a grand total of 2 book sales, so I don’t bother anymore, but several of Prevail’s early books were posted there.
Today B&N Press notified me that ALL books need to be at least $14.99 retail price or they will go off sale. Supposedly due to higher printing costs and shipping costs (even though shipping is tacked on after you order). Printing cost have gone up, but some books just aren’t worth selling that high (when I get $10 royalty, it’s too high), and the cost of printing/royalty hasn’t changed.
Still, fine and good, you need to raise prices, I get it. BUT…
I have to change the price on each book individually. Again, not horrible, but the site takes a long time to respond, and that is horrible. I spent more than an hour changing prices of books that won’t sell, when they should have simply had an “Opt In” button that would change them all for you. As it is, when you open the price, it automatically changes it to $14.99, so you can’t tell me they can’t automatically adjust the prices wholesale.
I took my low-info book off sale (my personal book, not anyone else’s) because it seems a cheat at that inflated price.
The whole purpose of Prevail Press is to lower entry hurdles for authors and readers. We don’t overprice books, especially e-books. I know several indie authors who’s paperbacks are between $17 and $25 so they can get $8 to $15 royalties per book. That seems outlandish to me. I feel bad for the $12.99 books we charge. There’s a school of thought that says you can sell a thousand books to make two thousand dollars or you can you sell a book for two thousand dollars and just sell one. That only works to a point…
$3.99 Kindle versions keeps us off Over-Priced E-book sites, and we still get decent royalties per book.
Like I said, we try to make it easy for you to buy a book.
There are just some authors you wait on with bated breath. Not because they write a book you can wrestle with, or one of profound, deep, truth, but because it’s the perfect book fora lazy Sunday.
So, grab your hot chocolate, stoke up the fire (OK, I live in the mountains of Colorado, where it’s getting cold. If you live somewhere warmer, stoke up the AC), kick up your feet and turn the page.
Bonnie Manning Anderson has written her latest book, Down and Out and Ready for a Miracle, joining the ranks of Fannie Flagg and Erma Bombeck as a humorist with a bit of bite.
The truths revealed in this great book are not deep, or profound, they’re personal and if you’re slow, you’ll miss them, because their truths (funny, thank goodness) are about growing old, about hopelessness, and feeling like you can’t do anything right.
Jacko, homeless, hapless, and helpless, feels awfully familiar. So does Oscar. You’ll discover that Bonnie writes about her family, pushing them past the point of absurdity, yet her family feels a lot like mine…
Maybe those truths are a bit more profound that I thought.
It’s available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats. Check it out!
Announcing the launch of another Prevail Press book, that also happens to be mine. 🙂
The final installment of the Hammer Springs series finds Sam dealing with tragedy, confusion, friendship, and love as he comes to grips with his own entry to the Partial People Society.
Let me tell you a story that happened last weekend. A reader of my first book in the series said, “You should market these to adults and especially seniors. I just love it; it took me back to my childhood.”
Pick yours up today!
You may be thinking, “that doesn’t look like the other covers in the series at all!” You’d be right. However, in upgrading my C: drive, I somehow managed to delete more than 800gb on my E: drive, where everything, including photos and book covers, were stored. Whoops! But I like this one better, to be honest, with the partial eclipse of the sun being a subtle pointer to the title.
It’s a bit longer than the other books—I had a choice, spit it into two books with added story, or let it be long. You see my decision. A tad more expensive in the paperback version, same price in the Kindle version.
Sometimes, series just happen. You’re toodling along, writing your novel and realize you’ve got more than 100,000 words. Unless you’re a bestselling author, that’s too long for a book. Now you’ve got a decision to make. Slash your word count or start a series?
Not THAT kind of series!
I suspect outliners don’t have that problem, but we explorers do (my term for pantsers).
Series are good! Unless you’re that guy that points out the problems with series. The first book doesn’t have to be good, it has to be great for readers to want to pick up the second book and that has to be even greater for the third book to be picked up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, needs must, and all that.
The trick is having enough stories to break it into a series.
My series, Hammer Springs, started as a single book (which became the third book in the four books series, which may now become a five book series.)
The first book was about a tragic love story. The second about racism in a small town, the third about two bored kids who build a hurricane car and use it, the fourth book was a love story, but now it’s too long, so maybe the fourth book is about a mayoral election and grieving, pushing the love story to the fifth book.
Some may say I’m an undisciplined writer, to which I say I’m undisciplined in just about everything… why should this be different? More generous people say I just have too much story in my head. That would be nice, it would explain why I have too little memory retention these days. Any excuse would be nice.
Here’s the thing about a series. You end up loving your characters, more so than in a single novel, because you’re developing them (or they’re developing themselves) for a greater span of their lives. They become real to you.
Funny story. Hammer Springs is a fictional place. I know this. However, when I was trying to figure out where to put GCU and The Colony, after searching about the Gulf coast, I needed to reorient myself to the town, so I map quested Hammer Springs. Oh yeah, it isn’t real.
Another funny story. Hammer Springs was supposed to be Brooksville, FL, which has an ugly racial background. I intended to get over and visit Brooksville, take reference photos and get to know the place. COVID hit, traveling was down, and we moved to the middle of the country. Never got to see Brooksville, so made up Hammer Springs. I highly recommend inventing towns if there are going to be negative casts to your story.
Third funny story. I did research on small town racism in the 40s and 50s. You’d think it would be a homogenous thing, but it wasn’t at all. Some small towns were deadly to Black people, others just segregated, and a few mostly skipped racism altogether. That meant Hammer Springs didn’t have to be a horrible place. Very little physical abuse, mostly segregation and a stick-to-your-place-we’ll-stick-to-ours kinda thing. Doesn’t mean violence doesn’t happen, nor that mental and emotional abuse doesn’t happen, or that racism in any form is intolerable, but I didn’t have to get uglier than I wanted to.
I figure my few dedicated readers will pick them all up. That’s enough. If I did this for money, I’d have died from malnutrition decades ago.
So, what’s too long and what’s too short for a novel? For adult readers, 60 to 80 thousand words are the goal. You can undercut that quite a bit and make it a 20 to 40 thousand word novella. The Stephen King’s of the word can get away with triple digit books, but printing costs get high over 80k, so keep ’em around there. If you go longer, slash or series, your choice.
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