Trout Nation Posts

You guys didn’t really think I would leave, for a week, right after Grey hit the stands, and NOT do a recap before I left? Are you high? Why did you fall for that?

So, while I’m in Gay, MI, which I have renamed it in honor of A Concerned Home Owner, relentlessly Gay, MI, please enjoy this recap until I return.

This way, my silence on the subject doesn’t lead people to believe that I’m actually dead.

Howdy, Trout Nation! Just a heads up that because I’m trying to finish up First Time and in preparation of my annual writing retreat to the U.P., I’m going on blog hiatus. If you’re new here this year, or in case you’ve forgotten, for the past three years I’ve headed into the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a group of writers, to share a cabin that has no phone, internet, or television, but a bangin’ electric sauna, for a whole week. We have all kinds of zany adventures (you can read about the single most important thing that happened on last year’s retreat here. And about how terrible my friends are here), but best of all, we write. Like crazy. I think I did 30,000 words in a week last time. This time, I’m aiming for 50,000.

Anyway, because getting ready for all this takes time, I won’t be making blog posts unless some extraordinary bullshit happens (and with Grey on the way, it’s entirely possible), and I’ll be scarce on social media (except for Tumblr, which sucks your life away like The Machine in The Princess Bride).

I’ll be back after June 28 with another recap of Grey. For now, enjoy your summer, and know that I’ll be writing about Neil and Sophie while I’m up north. I might even be able to share some when I return.

I’m supposed to be on a blogging hiatus. Is it really too much to ask that 50 Shades related foolishness just pause for a minute? Yet, like the cop sidekick in an action movie, I was so close to going home and saying goodbye to this dangerous life, and then I got shot.

Shot in the face with the most absurdly staged news story in the history of all time.

In a twist unlike any that has ever happened to any other hotly anticipated retelling of a blockbuster novel, Grey, the retold  50 Shades of Grey, has been stolen and is in grave danger of being leaked to the general public.

Oh, how terrible it must feel when one rewrites the first novel of their series from the hero’s perspective, only to find it has cruelly been leaked ahead of release day! Probably not as bad as someone plagiarizing your entire series, then turning around and putting out their own version of the spin-off novel you wrote and shelved because it was leaked to the public, and claiming that their novel was also leaked, because they don’t just want to rip off your intellectual property, they want to absorb your entire life and become you.

Something like that.

Now, I’m not saying this was James’s idea. But I am saying that a publicist is at work on this one. What are the odds, really, that:

• Stephenie Meyer publishes the Twilight series.
• Stephenie Meyer begins work on Midnight Sun.
• Midnight Sun is leaked online
• Stephenie Meyer shelves Midnight Sun indefinitely.

and then

• E.L. James is “inspired” by Twilight and writes 50 Shades of Grey.
• E.L. James announces the publication of Grey.
• Grey is allegedly stolen from the printers.

Obviously there’s no chance of Grey being shelved or even postponed because God is dead, just like I am on the inside. But I’m sorry, it’s just too coincidental that a series plagiarizing Twilight just so happens to have a companion novel told from the hero’s perspective a la Midnight Sun, and it also just so happens to get stolen and possibly leaked, especially when the printing company is apparently not having it, either:

A spokeswoman for CPI UK confirmed it is printing the 50 Shades of Grey companion novel Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian, but said: “I doubt it’s gone missing from one of our printworks seeing as I haven’t heard about it.”

Here’s hoping that James choses to rip off the rest of Meyers’s career arc, and vanish without fanfare.

Now it’s back to the hiatus hole for me.

By now, every single author with a summer release knows that their book is doomed to fall into the black hole that is Grey, E.L. James’s regurgitation of her blockbuster novel 50 Shades of Grey. A title like Grey is like an event horizon. It will suck everything into its gravity with no chance of escape. All other books will come to a standstill, approaching, but never reaching, the sales success they would have had if Grey hadn’t come crashing into the market. And it doesn’t just happen to small books. Big, splashy titles will be affected, and you’ll see regular NYT #1-ers failing to reach the spot.

In other words, fiction sales this summer are “fifty shades of fucked up.”

So, if Grey is expected to sell out its unheard of print run (1.25 million copies in its first printing), why does it need to be prominently advertised on other titles? Oh, for example…

If you can’t see the graphic, it’s a screen shot of the Amazon page for my book, The Boss (which is free and, from what I understand, pretty fantastic, so check it out if you want). Before the reader browsing through the page can even reach the book’s description, there’s an add imploring the consumer to visit the Kindle store page for Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, and providing links to “More ‘Fifty Shades’ titles.”

In other words, “Before you have a chance to read about this book you were interested in a minute ago, might we redirect you to this other one, instead?”

Besides the fact that this creepily implies a similarity between the two titles (or the author’s tacit approval of the franchise), it’s a low blow to authors who just want to break even. My books are fairly successful, and share something of a crossover audience with the Fifty series. But tons of other authors have seen this ad pop up on their pages, too. The titles don’t even need to have anything in common with Grey; while my book is seemingly a shoe-in for readers who like BDSM billionaire soap operas, one author reported seeing it on her “very, very, very gay” all-male menage book. One saw it on her erotic thriller’s page. If your book is erotic romance or erotica of any flavor, it appears to wear the Grey badge of awful.

So, what gives, Amazon? Grey is already #1 in both the Kindle store and among regular books. It is a part of the bestselling fiction series of all time. It has a first print run of 1.25 million copies. Does it really, truly need sales so bad as to potentially drive them away from authors who sell less? One author who found her product page bearing the advertisement reported that she “barely broke” a thousand dollars in profit last year, a far cry from the $95 million James made in 2013. The ad showed up on the product page for one author who reports selling approximately 120 ebooks per year. 120. What compels the logic that E.L. James desperately needs those 120 readers to see her title and potentially drive readers from that 120 copy selling author to Grey? And that author has no hope of seeing her book placed prominently on the Grey product page.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, Vintage Press, James’s publisher, doesn’t feel the book needs any advertisement at all:

When asked why Vintage announced the book just two weeks before its on sale date, Bogaards said, it’s what E.L. James, nee Erika Mitchell, wanted. “Erika wanted this to be a surprise for her readers, and the only amplification that was necessary on our end was to point press to her tweet [about the publication], which we did.”

So, if a simple tweet will suffice to drive the sales of this book (and it absolutely will and has), I have to ask…why would anyone go the extra mile to potentially squash the sales of other authors? Maybe I’m just not retail savvy enough to understand it. Either Amazon is behind the campaign (possible) or Vintage Press has sprung for the placement (more possible). Either way, the retail behemoth has to understand that Grey is guaranteed money in their pockets with or without this advertisment, so it doesn’t make sense to undercut sales of other titles.

 

I guess the lesson we can all learn from this is that there is no coattail so small that E.L. James’s masterwork cannot ride it.

50 Shades of Grey is the Hotel California of books. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Stopping just short of actually peeling Stephenie Meyer like an orange and making a Silence of The Lambs suit out of her, E.L. James has decided that what the world needs, what we really, really need, is for her to crash her new title, Grey, a retelling of 50 Shades of Grey, from Christian’s POV.

I hope this is a fan-made graphic and not the actual cover to the follow up of a billion-dollar trilogy, because I expect to see this kind of thing pop up on a stock cover site.

But I know what a lot of you are thinking, because I fell asleep on my phone last night and woke up this morning to a vibrator going off underneath my neck. So the answer is, yes.

Yes. I am going to recap it.

Grey comes out on June 18th. I’ll be leaving for my annual trip to the U.P., where I will begin writing The Baby, so I won’t be able to begin recaps on Grey until after that. So Grey recaps will start on June 29th.

Romance Ink sent out this email today that may be of interest to people wanting to attend Authors After Dark in Atlanta this year!

Hello everyone!

We at Authors After Dark were made aware of a SERIOUS problem for readers for the 2015 year. Apparently the SOUTH starts school early—- Like end of July and early August, and we had NO IDEA! (please forgive us, the Con director is from NY and the staff are all from the northern states, and school doesn’t start there for the most part till after Labor Day.)

So this, is a problem for a LOT of south dwelling readers who are desperate to attend, but have put off getting their tickets because they were trying to make the event work.

 

“And these are the last words I have to say
It’s always hard to say goodbye
But now it’s time to put this book away” -Billy Joel, “Famous Last Words”

When I was at the lowest point in my career, on food stamps, depressed, suicidal, I got a phone call from my agent. She had a line on some work-for-hire, and she asked if I would be interested in it. It wasn’t going to pay great, but it would pay for Christmas presents, at least. I told her I would talk to the guy looking for a writer, and tried not to get my hopes up.

That guy, Nick Harris, called me a few days later. He sounded like the narrator from those old Paddington Bear shows. He had an idea, and it sounded brilliant. Hamlet and Romeo as ghostbuster-type characters. Once I hung up, I realized how ridiculous that idea sounded, I think his accent just made it sound really smart. But he was enthusiastic about working with me, we seemed to be on the same page in terms of how we developed ideas, and he believed I was capable of bringing his idea to life.

Over the span of a few months, with the input of my agent, Miriam Kriss, we shaped that original idea into the book Such Sweet Sorrow. And over those months, I had one of the worst mental health crashes of my life. And I got a call from Nick, making sure I was okay, telling me not to stress about the project, that my health was more important, and he would still be ready to work with me once I was better.

We did work together more. First, on the sequel to Such Sweet Sorrow, then on a few television ideas. For the first time in a long, long time, someone actually believed in my abilities and didn’t see me as a failure. And I wasn’t the only person he showed this kind of enthusiastic faith to. He believed in all sorts of writers he worked with, and all sorts of projects. He seemed to just love to create, and genuinely admired people who had that in common. Another person who worked with him said she felt he created opportunities where there were obstacles. That might be the best explanation of what it was like to work with Nick.

I found out on Friday that Nick passed away. I knew he had cancer, but every time we communicated at all, he would insist that nothing had changed, he was just going to have some chemo, he would be back in the office in a week. It was always “in a week.” The last time he told me that was in February, when I told him I thought it wasn’t a great idea to start a graphic novel project right now. I didn’t want to create another project when he had other things to worry about. I figured we would just work on it when the whole cancer thing was over. It never once occurred to me that that there was another possible outcome to cancer being “over,” mostly because he was so cheerful about downplaying it. Like he had the flu or something.

It’s a bummer, when someone you’ve worked with building a whole fictional world is gone, and you’re the only person left who really knows it from the inside. Combining our ideas was exciting and fun, even when we disagreed on stuff. Going back to edit the sequel is going to be like going back to an empty room. It’s incredibly hard to believe I’m never going to get another phone call with a borderline insane idea on the other end of the line. Or that I’ll never stay up all night working on something, only to send it to him and have him suggest we scrap the whole thing and work on this other thing instead, and can I get it finished by tomorrow? Or show him something I think is crap, only to have him tell me how amazing it is. He believed in me and my abilities when a lot of people didn’t, and I never told him how much that means to me.

You know, writing is a business, and I say that over and over again, but in this business, we’re all idiots if we think we don’t affect each others’ lives when we develop these connections. Fiction is personal. It takes trust and faith to share your work with someone else, and to believe that they’re going to respect you creatively. So, all of my writer friends, my editors, bloggers I know, readers, everybody who had touched me through writing, I just really appreciate you. And I don’t want to pass up the chance to tell you that. So, since I didn’t get a chance to tell him how much that connection matters to me, I’m telling you, before I have to say goodbye to any other amazing people without having the chance to say it: I appreciate you.

Nick Harris supported the charity The Rape Foundation, so I’m leaving the link here for donation-minded folks.

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone really doesn’t want to do this episode, in a very real, very visceral way. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
21. The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
22. Smoking is evil.
23. Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
24. How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 

Okay! So everyone has been asking, and now I’m telling you: The Baby will be out on November 10, 2015.

Now, for news about First Time! We have a cover:

 

The book will be out August 4, 2015, and it’s available for pre-order from the following retailers:

First Time (Ian’s Story)

Barnes & Noble • iBooks • Smashwords

First Time (Penny’s Story)

Barnes & Noble • iBooks • Smashwords

Pre-orders for Kobo and Amazon are still coming (Amazon has different requirements for pre-orders, otherwise I’d have it up now), and Penny’s book will be on Barnes & Noble soon!

We’re all in agreement that some people out there are terrible, right? Well, here is a list of the most memorable terrible people that I met working retail.