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Fiction Groupie currently has a great post up, modestly titled “The Ten Commandments of the Successful Author.” They are blunt, funny, and right on the nose — most of it you already know, but it never hurts to hear it again. I’m just gonna share one of them with you here:

“6. Covet your neighbor’s success.

A dose of envy does a writer good.There are all these posts out there about writer envy and jealousy telling you how you shouldn’t waste time being envious of other writers and what they have, their level of success, etc.  Yes, that’s true. If you spend all your time burning green, you won’t get anything else done. BUT, a little bit of this can be helpful. So and so got an agent and you haven’t yet? Your crit partner hit the bestseller list but you can’t seem to? Feel that envy and USE it. Use it as kindling under your butt and light a fire to keep going, to get what you want, to grab that success too. Envy with motivation can be very productive. Envy with whining and no action is what you need to avoid.”

– Fiction Groupie : The Ten Commandments of the Successful Author.

The whole list is definitely worth reading — maybe worth printing out and hanging up over your desk.  Go check them out.

…. Holy yikes.  Just saw this posted at Making Light:

“S.K.S. Perry is a Canadian writer. He had a hard time getting an agent interested in his novel, Darkside, so he posted it on his web page.

A couple of weeks ago someone suggested that he put it on Kindle as an e-book. He thought that was an excellent idea. Someone else agreed: To his surprise he found that person already had. He posted about this on his LiveJournal on March 30 (two days ago), and since then has found that Amazon doesn’t care.”

— Making Light: Fence Your Stolen Content at Amazon.com.

The situation has gotten both better and worse since Making Light posted about it — Perry writes:

“First the good news: I received offical notice from Amazon’s Copyright Agent today that they were taking down the stolen version of Darkside.

Now the bad new: they took all the reviews you nice folks wrote about how that copy was stolen, and applied them to the legitimate copy!”

Good Lord, what a nightmare. These are clearly the early days of self-publishing, and there are definitely some growing pains and kinks to be worked out.  I hope Amazon can figure out how to get some better copyright safeguards in place pretty quickly, and I really hope they get Perry’s specific situation sorted out even sooner.  My heart really goes out to him.

Graham Edwards brings up a point I’ve wondered myself many, many times:

Movie directors – if they so desire – are allowed to tackle a range of genres. In the course of his career, Steven Spielberg’s bounces from The Sugarland Express to ET to Schindler’s List to Saving Private Ryan and beyond. Danny Boyle’s practically made a career of picking a different genre for every film he makes.

But what about writers?

Okay, let’s pick a few big names. Terry Pratchett? Oh yes, he writes fantasy – the funny kind to be precise. James Patterson goes for crime thrillers. And that nice Philippa Gregory does historical. Their names might just as well be genre tags. The fact that they’ve all have had work published outside their respective pigeonholes has no effect [.... ]

So what’s the problem here? Is it the authors who get stuck in a rut or the readers who put them there? Is it the publishers needing handy and reliable blurb, or the merchants needing books that fit under their equally handy and reliable categories? Is it all, god forbid, driven by focus groups?

— Why don’t authors switch genre? | Graham Edwards Online.

He does mention several authors who manage to write one type of book under one name, and another type under a pseudonym; he doesn’t mention any of the rare few who, like John Shirley, have managed to build a name for themselves in one genre and then switch gears and successfully build a new reputation in another.

I wonder about this phenomenon myself, quite a lot.  I’ve definitely tried to position myself as “a horror writer,” and will probably continue to do so — but I do come up with ideas for stories and novels (and webseries) that are definitely science fiction, and not horror at all.  Should I adopt a pseudonym for those?  Would readers who enjoy my horror work be confused or turned off by finding work from me outside of the genre?

I also wonder if the current self-publishing revolution will change this at all.  Surely without publishers and agents telling them they have to stick to a consistent brand identity, more writers will start to choose to play in other sandboxes whenever the feel like it.  The question is whether or not readers will follow them there.

Ahhh, April Fool’s Day — it’s not just a really bad horror movie, it’s also my favorite holiday. Like all writers, I am, of course, an excellent liar, and this is the one day every year I have the excuse to indulge that ability

I didn’t post anything here for it — I ended up deciding that, since this blog is still a new and fledgling venture, and I’m still building up a relationship of trust with you, Dear Reader, you were safe from any such shenanigans.  This time.

Besides, I was busy pranking Doctor Who fandom with this fake news report: “No Neil Gaiman Episode for Season Six,” custom-designed to provoke cries of nerd-outrage everywhere.  My most elaborate preparations for an April Fool’s joke yet — I created an entire fake news site from scratch just to give that one article credibility.

Some of my other favorite pranks I saw last Friday were John Scalzi’s “Unveiling My Secret Fantasy Project,” and Smashwords’ announcement that they were acquiring Amazon. Did you see any good ones?

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