Michaelbrent Collings is a friend and author that I’ve mentioned a lot, and we’ve talked about him on WriterDojo a few times. He’s a horror author, has done screenplays, and most importantly for the topic at hand, makes his living as an indy author, and has done so for a lot of years.

He’s put together an online course for aspiring authors and people trying to make it in the business. Check it out and see if you’re interested. He even put together The Special Larry Portal for my fans, which he made as ridiculous as you can imagine considering my and your reputation. 😀

https://www.bestsellerlife.com/larry-correia-is-partnering-with-bestseller-life-

Normally I don’t plug things like this but I’ve known Michaelbrent for a lot of years, and we’ve done a ton of events and panels together, where he is always the other guy with good practical business advice, without all the flowery fluff and artistic mumbo jumbo designed to make writers sound cooler than we actually are. The dude treats it like a real job, which I respect.

I watched a bunch of these segments, and all the advice he was giving was solid and spot on. So take a look and I hope this might be of use to some of you.

Rescued from Larry’s page on the Book of Faces -Jack

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Just a random rambling thought from a writer about our characters.

Recently I saw my work getting compared to another author, who in proper literati snooty circles, is supposed to be so much better than me (he shall go unnamed, because this isn’t really about him, I’ve got nothing against the dude, and in fact thinking about it this could apply to a whole bunch of different authors too). We’re both fairly well known, only he’s got way more “prestige” (and marketing budget!), and both of our books get mentioned on the internet a lot, but I always get dismissed as the right wing, explosions and monsters and guns, pulpy guy. The other guy is always a *real* writer.

But then I noticed something else. In all those discussions, when talking about the *real* writer, nobody, none of his fans or readers, ever mention any of his characters’ names.

Never.

Meanwhile, any discussion of my stuff, the fans and readers are talking about Owen, Jake, Faye, Ashok, etc. They name character names.

Always.  

Not only do I not see people name any of the character names from those Great Works Of Literature, I kind of doubt that very many of his fans could even remember their names if they tried.

My stuff? Fans talk about the secondary characters by name, ten or fifteen years after the book came out, like they are real people they know. Most of my readers remember names like Milo, Dorcus, Gutch, Skippy, Ed, Gretchen, Melvin, or G-Nome, or they were secondary characters at first but you guys liked them so much they turned into main characters, like Earl, Franks, or Toru. Even in my lesser known works, I still see fans mentioning names like Cleasby or Lorenzo.

When people talk about my books they’ve read, even if the subject is something else, it is always ultimately about how the characters relate to that subject. And then you guys go nuts trying to cast them, because they’re vivid in your head.

Now to be fair to George Martin, who I think is a lazy sack of sloth, he’s good at creating memorable characters. When you see his books discussed, even for those of us who only read the first one and then got bored and didn’t read the rest, we know the character names of all the main characters in the series because when his fans talk about the books, they discuss the characters. There are lots of books I’ve never read, where I can tell you at least the main character’s name (and probably some secondarys) just off of the conversations I’ve seen on the internet.

With Rothfuss, you hear his main character name a lot (Kvote or something) so I know that’s the main dude even though I’ve never read either book. Couldn’t tell you any other ones.

I couldn’t tell you a single name from any John Scalzi or NK Jemesin novel based on that same criteria, even though you see discussions about their books online.

Jim Butcher is good at this. Even if you’ve never read any of his books, everybody who is into books and online with book reading friends knows who Harry Dresden is. Now obviously naming your series after the main character is cheating. 😀 But you get you point. Even if you’ve never read Jim’s stuff, you’ve seen names like Michael Carpenter or Bob show up in fan conversations enough that even if you’ve not read the series, you’ve got the general idea.

I’ve not read many of Brandon Sanderson’s more recent books, but when I see conversations about his work, every single time, fans are naming character names. I have no idea of the context, but his fans clearly do, and they talk like those characters are people they’ve met in real life.

Steve and I have talked about this on the show, but some books aren’t really character based. They are idea based or setting based, and the characters are just kinda there so the idea can proceed. Personally I find that sort of thing boring, and the idea/setting only becomes interesting if I care about the people who inhabit it.

In the case of the online comparison that got me to thinking about this, the *real* writer’s got some GREAT VISION the book is about, but it’s populated with cardboard people the readers will forget about fifteen minutes after they’re done. While the pulp hack knuckle-dragger also has nifty ideas, but then populates it with people the reader files away in their memory as if they’re actual humans they know.

*another one from the Book of Faces, moved here for discussion. -Jack

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Pro Tip: If you see a gun discussion on the internet, and you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, just chill and read, or comment truthfully. Don’t lie, wildly exaggerate, or just make shit up… Because everybody can tell, it is super obvious, you’re not fooling anyone, and it’s just pathetic. It’s funny when it’s coming from a young dude who’s dumb and cocky, but it’s just sad from somebody old enough to know better.

This advice is because I saw a post on a friend’s page, today who is a professional gun builder and worked in the industry in various capacities for probably three decades now, and some dude was telling him about how he routinely and easily uses his Yugo AK to hit soup cans at 200 yards… with iron sights. “it’s called practice dude”.

Now, is this doable? Sure. Just not on demand repeatable, because that soup can (why is it always a soup can or soda can with these guys?) is probably less than half the size of what even an exceptional example of that gun with the best possible 7.62×39 ammo is capable of hitting on its best day, and that front sight is covering up an area about 10x the size of the target at that range.

So it’s not bloody likely, internet rando, regardless of how many tens of thousands of rounds of ammo you swear you’ve put through it, (flawlessly, of course, as all cheap guns on the internet run Just As Good as more expensive guns).

Which brings us to part two of this specific subcategory of nonsense. The inflated round counts. My Brand Y is just as good as your Brand X and I’ve put TEN THOUSAND ROUNDS through it!

Because only on the internet do people buy $300 pistols or $600 rifles, and then put $3000 or $8000 worth of ammo through them. That’s super common behavior apparently.

In actuality guys who do actually shoot a lot know our approximate round counts, and some of us even keep exact log books (I don’t, I’m lazy, I just go by how many cases it is on), because that tells us when we need to do what kind of maintenance (it is amazing how all those 50k XDs on the internet never need new springs) and unless you’re shooting competition seriously, coin chasing, or a training junkie, you’re probably not putting up five figure round counts through a single gun. And most of us who do that stuff for fun, will have multiple different guns and back up guns that match the first one for when it breaks.

Really, most $300 pistols and $600 rifles could spontaneously combust once they hit 500 rounds, and 95% of the people who buy them would never know, because they never hit that round count. Move that to 1000 rounds and it would be like 99%.

The next reason this bullshit doesn’t fly anymore, is we’ve all got cameras on our phones, yet these guys never have videos of their super amazing feats.

My page is full of videos of me doing different drills and challenges. Some come out great. Some I come up lacking. But I post those too, because it’s still educational. There’s plenty of video evidence that I can shoot about as good as I claim that I can shoot. But these dudes who make the internet claims? There’s never video of them, go figure. They must be very private or something.

A little while back I saw where a newb put up a picture of his 10 yard pistol target, and it looked about like what you’d expect a newb’s 10 yard pistol target to look like. No shame in that. We all started somewhere. But along comes some random internet asshole, saying that’s trash, and how he could totally shoot a ten shot group that could be covered by a QUARTER, at 25 yards, FREEHAND, on demand, every time, using his Smith & Wesson Model 36… I shit you not.

And I was like, lol, the fuck you can. 😀 But the dude doubled down. So I said video, or it didn’t happen. Because either you’re a fucking dork ass liar, or congratulations, you are quite possibly one of the greatest shooters on Earth ever in all of human history. And I told him get me that video, and I’ll be happy to introduce him to the marketing people at various companies who would be ecstatic to sponsor him and shower him in free guns and ammo. But sadly his camera was broken or something. Oh well.

I’m pretty decent. I know I’m way better than average. I’ve got to shoot with guys who are actual master and grandmaster level shooters, so I know what really good looks like. We’ve all got actual scored targets, known distances, and shot timers, so what we can do is documented. Yet we’re all shit compared to these random guys on the internet. It’s a miracle such talent goes unnoticed!

Seriously guys, this isn’t the dawn of the internet gun forums anymore. Everyone is onto your bullshit. Shooters in general have gotten more experienced. The bell curve has shifted. Odds are there are several people reading your bullshit, who can easily outshoot you, and have forgotten more than you know. You can’t snow them. Stop trying. It’s just sad.

https://www.baen.com/monster-hunter-memoirs-fever-1.html

Fever is the new MHI novel by me and Jason Cordova, set in 1970s California. An eARC is the Electronic Advanced Reader Copy, which is the not final version that goes out early to reviewers. Baen recognizes that some fans don’t like to wait for the official release (October in this case) so they make those advance copies available for sale.

Sometimes there’s editorial differences between the eARCs and the final, but honestly my manuscripts are really clean, so copy editing goes fast, and there’s rarely any differences between the two for my stuff. Take that for what it’s worth.

I’m really happy with this one. It was fun working with Jason, and our main character is way different than the MC of the previous memoirs. That’s the awesome thing about the Monster Hunter universe. It’s wide enough there’s a whole lot of different stories that can be told. I hope you like it.

*another one I pulled from the Book of Faces for your enjoyment- Jack

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I get a mention in this article about how Star Wars novels sales have tanked (Link) and they even put up a picture of Tower of Silence.

This is an interesting topic to me as a writer, and a former accountant. In accounting we have a thing called Good Will. That’s an intangible asset. Take a company with a super well established name and track record. There’s no physical asset for the name, Coke a Cola or McDonald’s, but there’s an asset value for how incredibly well known those are, and that needs to get accounted for in the valuation. Companies like that aren’t valuable just because they own stores or factories or lots of inventory, but because everybody knows who they are. Basically Good Will exists because customers know who you are, what you do, and generally like that. With big corporations, Good Will is worth billions.

Good Will goes down when companies turn off those customers, or the name starts to have negative connotations and they become less valuable (Anhauser Busch for a recent example).

The Star Wars novels are a perfect example of this. That was once the biggest and most beloved IP on Earth. Novels in that setting should be a license to print money. The Good Will was off the charts. A reboot was a chance to kinda forget the worst of previous products, and come out the gate strong with quality products. In a sane world, the novels of an IP that big should crush the rest of us by orders of magnitude, just off of name recognition and customers being inclined toward checking out products from that brand.

Nope. They went the opposite direction.

I remember when they announced the reboot of Star Wars novels, coinciding with the new movies (which also flushed Good Will down the toilet).

I was having a conversation with another author around this time, who is more famous and successful than I am, who said that if this was 20 years ago, guys like me and him would have been the first authors they’d call. Authors with good, solid, established track records for action and adventure, with ensemble casts of interesting and memorable characters, who can do big set piece action sequences regardless of the setting or circumstances. Kind of like how the last time around they got dudes like Zahn and Stackpole.

Instead they picked pretentious dolt Chuck Wendig. Of course his books were shit. This didn’t come as a surprise to anybody who was vaguely familiar with Chuck Wendig. He’s a wannabe literati who writes one How To Be A Writer book to sell to gullible suckers for every actual novel he produces. He’s one of those dipshits who thinks he’s clever, mistakes snark for depth.

Now, Disney wasn’t totally stupid, and they brought back Tim Zahn, who is a pro’s pro. That dude knows how to tell a story, and he gets the fans. Dorks like Wendig think they’re better than the fans. Zahn is an actual Star Wars fan.

I told the other more famous writer that I’d be great from a technical/story aspect, but a  bad business pick, because I’m too personally controversial to write for an IP that broad (another reason Wendig was a bad pick, because he’s as opinionated as me, only his politics are stupid) however I could name a couple dozen other authors with track records writing their own stuff that demonstrate they’d be ideal to write Star Wars stories, who aren’t personally controversial. Some of these are obvious no brainer picks for Disney… so of course none of those got called. 😀

I’d never heard of most of the ones they’d picked, which says a lot about that whole established track record thing. A couple it appears they were picked because they checked proper social justice boxes, and I’ve got a sneaky suspicion the Disney selection process consisted of finding one outspoken dumbass lefty writer on the con circuit, and then getting introduced to all that writer’s circle of friends.

Part of Good Will is that the customers expect certain kinds of action from certain kinds of companies. If Star Wars novels don’t feel like Star Wars, bad. It’s like if your blue collar, frat boy, cheap beer company goes off in a wildly incongruous direction, Good Will squandered.

Relatively speaking, Star Wars novels still sell quite a few copies… when compared to us normies who don’t have the biggest IP in history and a zillion dollar megacorporation’s marketing powers. For most authors, 30k copies is awesome. 100k copies is bad ass. However, for Motherfucking STAR WARS… that’s utter shit.  Star Wars should obliterate that.

I’ve seen Wendig brag about how he’s a super dooper bestseller… dude… it was Star Wars… every reader in the world was curious. That first reboot book could have been written by a piece of steamed broccoli and it
A. would have sold just as well.
B. had a more coherent plot and better writing.  
The drop off afterwards is the really telling thing, as fans went what is this shit? Good Will squandered.

I stand in awe at how incredibly terrible Disney is at this. In the hands of somebody even sorta professional, these books should be a license to print money.