My Quest to Quit Writing Always Fails

So I went to sleep yesterday lamenting that I couldn’t figure a way out of what my subconscious told me, “Hey! It’s time to rewrite.” Oh joys, I hate you. As usual, the old subconscious punished me by sending me a weird dream that I wish I could remember all of because it was like a 1920′s hardboiled detective thing only with Giant Monsters in it. There was a whale-looking thing that was flying with two tails. Made Godzilla and the Kaiju team look normal. All the usual characters were there as well. You had the fair maid, the scientist/skeptic, and then the helpless bystanders.

Yeah, my subconscious punishes me for not writing. Why can’t I quit writing? Because my subconscious thinks it is Picasso and me, my conscious thinks it is a nutball that needs to shut up once in a while. Why can’t I just put the creative side and the intuitive side on hold once in a while and shut up? I guess because at some point when I do that my subconscious always finds a way to win the battle. It either sends a cool dream or when I ignore it I suddenly find myself doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and blinking at myself.

When I don’t write I talk to myself a lot, stare at people and wonder what their life story is, often inserting the absurd into the mix. My mind wanders over their life story and I want to craft something from the fact that their shoelaces are untied this very moment.

Maybe once you are a writer you always are? Or maybe that’s just me. Stories have been part of my life and coping mechanism for so long that I often find myself thinking two thoughts at the same time–one about my story in the background and in the foreground I have whatever I’m talking about to the other person. Probably makes me look very unengaged. Maybe it’s the lack of proper sleep since the bed bugs, but I think it’s also a lifetime of loving stories so much that they permeate my every day existence.

Anyway, Subconscious, if you’re listening: I hate you, even if you know better than I do.

DIY SP Sites–Improve the User Experience

The top two problems is that often there is a POD at the end of the rainbow and that the site is full of schmoozing rather than slush beating.

What do agents say time and again about slush piles and beating them. It’s the QUALITY of the writing that will beat the pile. The problem with such websites as this is that it tries to show how good of a social networker someone is rather than how good they are at writing–and that’s where you have the major issues.

It used to be believed that User experience was some kind of fairy magical mushroom dance where you could get anyone to come to your business, online site, or community (though there have been nay sayers for that idea for a while, businesses didn’t catch up.) It is no longer “You will build it and they will come.” It’s more, “You will build it, advertise to the proper segment of the population, and foster a community that you want to stay and they will come.”

User Experience is no different from Customer Service, only that you are looking at the shape of the community and they type of community you would like to build rather than trying to cater to the old Grandmother who really doesn’t care about a 2G processor in a fancy phone.

You want to create a community that actually sifts slush like your best bored intern? This is how I would do it (and I’ve been in various communities since 1998.)

The biggest factor is that people hate the schmoozing on the websites, which doesn’t talk about writing talent, but talks about the social ability to network–fine, you want that in an author, but how come the stories have all those errors? Spend that time elsewhere–with a publicist. Set up a Publicist website for that.

Anti-schmoozing:

The easiest way is to set up a series of checks and balances. Users will check and do informal social discipline on other users, especially if encouraged to do so. Also, if you widen the net of users, then you are more likely to get better and more consistent reviews. Here is my best bets for achieving this.

• Author Approval of critiques (Split to fair and unfair)
• Passing user useful/insightful rather by users in a star rating on the review. *important* do not give a visual reward for rating the the reviews. If you are going to make it visible, only give a rep for those books the publisher actually picks up and publishes (which helps keep the publisher in check as well.)
• Attract readers, not just writers.
• No talent spotting section like Authonomy–leave that to the editors if you must have it.
• Critiques also give a star rating.
• Critiques break down by chapter.
• Critiques break down to overall story based on chapter ratings by the readers.
• Critiques within them can rate grammar, story and style.
• Critiques allow for line by line edits.
• Critiques have a “I stopped here button.”
• Limit the amount of 5 star rating in a reading period–you as a publisher cannot hope to publish all books ever–put the same limitations on readers so they are forced to stop on quality, rather than story swapping ability.
• Put in a minimum word count for the reviews.
• You can also consider a schmoozer rating where users police other users on the amount of trading for the sake of it that people do. Or at least a reputation rating. (Which could break down if you like.)
• Reward randomly on the amount of good and quality reviews that a person gets that’s *not visible*.
• Limit the accounts to either writer or reader and if you are caught puppeting, you are banned. Writers can post and review. Readers can just review, but they get a discount on books after X amount of insightful reviews (which isn’t by author rating, but say by if one of the books they choose in a given period is picked up by an editor–which puts it outside of the community control.)

I believe you can police your users by putting in a user experience that says “Police them.” The average intern is told that they are not supposed to pass on things that are not of quality–use the users in the same way–they cannot pass onto the editor crappy material, because if they do, they get a penalty. If they do well, they get a reward.

Attract the Average Reader

Now, the question is how do you attract the average reader? You need to do what you do in any business: Incentives. The majority of people on good reads are readers, not writers, you can do tie ins with Goodreads, for example or other sites, offer a pittance of a discount to acclaimed readers to visit the website. When you do that, it also has the side effect of less schmoozing, because the writer is forced into quality rather than social networking–they not longer can win on swaps, they have to win on sheer quality. And since the amount of “5 star ratings” is now limited, they really have to fight for it–they could schmooze and try to faction, but then there is a social factor to tell them not to do that (the schmoozing rating, which could act as a reputation.) They are then, forced to really work on the quality of the writing–so by the time they get to the top of the pile, they really have to know their writing stuff.

The other problem people have is their immediate distrust of the publisher that they actually will publish anything as promised. So I would propose putting on the *front* of the website the author, name of the book and release date. Link to an amazon/Barnes and Noble Page. This makes the publisher look honest. Swear to no PODs, and it will work out fine. (Plus you can make a back end for this that makes it easy.)

I doubt a model like this will really happen since most of the big six are clueless about sociology or cultural anthropology to pre-think websites like this, but this would be how I would think it through. I still want an online bookstore that functions like browsing in a bookstore. If bricks and mortar are going out of business, then help me buy new authors you want to commit to by making a visual form of a bookstore online.