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TMI for Authors? Maybe.

New technology delivers instant answers. Google knows how many people live in International Falls, MN (6376 in 2011). IMBD know who played Nick the Bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life (Sheldon Leonard). There are more recipes for chocolate cake out there than anyone can eat in a lifetime.

Authors have benefited from the advent of the Information Age. Sales figures are available in near real time. To be properly impressed by this, you have to understand the previous system. In that one, a bookstore bought a book and, sometime in the next ninety days, paid for that book and it registered as a true sale. The store could also return the book for credit, even before the ninety days are up, which allowed the wonderful experience of negative sales figures. These figures were tallied and given to the author in a quarterly report along, in a good quarter, with a royalty check. Using these sales reports to describe real time sales was about as effective as using Neolithic cave paintings to determine current weather.

Now Book Scan tells you daily sales, and even charts them. Novel Rank gives you a close sales approximation for Amazon. (How cool to see “Last sale: 0 hours.”) Amazon updates Kindle sales figures and every book’s ranking throughout the day. I’m certain there are even more systems available to publishers, but these are the ones even self-published authors have access to.

Great progress, right? Hell no. Writing is a profession rife with rejection. Agents reject your queries. Magazines reject your flash fiction. Editors reject your novels. If by some miracle of talent and timing, you survive that gauntlet, you still have the chance to be rejected by readers. In the old days you could be bummed out once, then have ninety days to rebuild your sense of self-worth before the enduring another kick to the head. Now you can find out how few people appreciate your hard work every sixty minutes. That doesn’t leave a lot of recharge time. Watching a slow selling book every hour is like playing every game of keno at Harrah’s dawn to dusk without winning.

Sales wax and wane. They also usually miss expectations, mostly because we set expectations high. (Even bestselling authors probably look at sales and say, “What, only 28,000 copies sold this week?”) Chill about the numbers, and confine yourself to one update a week. The summary reveals more than the fluctuating individual days do, anyway.

Spend your time writing. After all, which feels better, reading that your book moved up two in the Amazon ranking, or reading your newly-minted descriptive paragraph that paints a perfect picture? The creative process is what keeps us motivated. The thrill of summoning a story out of thin air lasts longer and runs stronger than the one any sales figures can summon.

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Characters to Care About

Last week, I came across an excellent example of poor character creation, and its impact.

GrimmBy the nature of our lifestyles, my wife and I DVR a lot and then get caught up later, so forgive me for being behind the curve on this. We were just getting caught up on Grimm, a show about a cop with unique talents who hunts criminal human/animal hybrids. In this episode, a new character was introduced, a young woman who also had his special ability.

Half an hour in, the character had demonstrated that she was rude, unappreciative, combative and self-centered. I said to my wife, “I already hate this new character.” To my surprise, she answered, “I agree. We can stop watching this anytime you want.” She hated her enough to switch the program off.

We’re big Grimm fans, but both of us were ready to bail on the show because of this new addition to the cast. That’s exactly the opposite of the response a writer shoots for. Obviously, this character was being set up for some change arc across episodes, but I didn’t care to see it. The cops filled me in on her foster care childhood and I’d seen her attacked by the bad guys, yet I had no compassion for her. Why? Because while she’d been in sympathetic circumstances, she’d displayed no sympathetic qualities. A character has to do at least one small thing like wash the dishes or rescue a cat from a tree so viewers can see there’s a real human being inside her that deserves their emotional energy.

I think her impact on the other characters in the show made it even worse. Nick, our hero cop, and his girlfriend take her in, then Nick takes her to a crime scene (credibility stretched past breaking) where she nearly reveals his secret gift. In a lame bit of dialogue, Nick addresses her by her given name and she responds that most people call her Trouble. So Nick calls her that from then on. It sounds stupid every time he says it, and no caring person would reinforce another’s low self-esteem with such a nickname. So not only was the character unlikable, she had a negative impact on how we saw the characters we do like, onscreen friends we are emotionally invested in.

We skipped the rest of that episode, and the next one, praying that either Trouble would die or hurry-the-hell-up and finish her transformation, an event we couldn’t care less about witnessing. Her part in the season finale looked like she’d made it.

The TV series didn’t lose us for good, mostly because my wife is a Monroe/Rosalie devotee. But in a book, this kind of mistake would be fatal. The cover would close, never be reopened, and the reader would send out warning flares for the rest of the world to stay far away. So keep in mind that that character who goes from flawed to fabulous, or that villain who goes from evil to excellent, needs a little something for us to hook onto early, something to foreshadow their potential, to make us root for the underdog part of their personality to win out.