Tag: My Fiction

Keeping My Options Open

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One of my oldest friends has been advising me on the possibility of making a film treatment out of my book and sending it to Hollywood to become the next “Project Hail Mary.”  What immediately came to my mind was Hollywood taking the story and making the evil president, Donald Trump and making Bogey a leftist trans-woman.  Yikes!

But what was surprising is that there is actually an AI capable of taking my story and converting it directly into a film treatment.  And it has an enormous capability to annotate the details necessary for actually filming the thing.  There are notes on casting each of the characters (appearance, age, personality, voice), locations, special effects, visual effects, weapons, special personnel (e.g., armorer), special equipment, weapons, etc.

And then it used the dialog from the book and adapted it for the screen; shortened and elided from it to bring the screen time into a realistic movie length.

Now I haven’t finished going through this document but so far what I’ve seen seems very interesting.  It’s basically my book.  And that’s exciting.  I was assuming the story would be too long for a movie without very serious pruning of scenes that I’m attached to.  But we’ll see.

Now, I’m aware that Hollywood doesn’t make movies from books that don’t sell millions of copies.  They’re looking for a built-in fan base for their product.  So, no studio in their right minds would take a chance on spending potentially hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown story.  But it’s always fun to dream about these things.

And that brings me to Andy Weir’s story.  He self-published “The Martian” on Amazon and only eventually got a book deal when he had already built up an audience for it on his own.  And now he has two hit movies made from his books.  Think about that.  Someone who couldn’t get a publishing contract ends up with a smash hit movie that everyone in Hollywood probably hates because it has a white guy as its hero and he doesn’t have the usual diversity cast to allow the movie to be an Oscar contender.  They broke all of Hollywood’s rules to make this movie by not having a girl-boss as the hero surrounded by the usual multi-cultural struggle session ensemble.  It just brings tears to my eyes.

Chances are I won’t be duplicating Weir’s experience.  My book is not an uplifting tale of human endeavor.  Mine is a tale of revenge and destruction.  I openly attack the Left and my heroes are identifiable people on the Right.  So, no.  I won’t be getting a Hollywood deal.  Ever!

But despite all that I’m excited about what is now happening in Hollywood.  The Ellisons bought Paramount and have now shut down the travesty that was Star Trek – Star Fleet Academy.  They’re buying Warner Brothers and they’ll probably shut down the people making terrible stuff like “Supergirl” that’s coming out soon.  And now we see Amazon/MGM making stuff like “Project Hail Mary (PHM).”  That’s a pretty good chunk of Hollywood already.  And with PHM looking like it’s going to break the $600 million mark and become a big moneymaker, even places like Netflix and Disney will say to themselves, “Hey, why can’t we get into some of that “normal film-making” that those other guys are doing and make money for a change?  Let’s call that photog guy and get an option on, “The Sniper” before the Ellisons scoop it up.”

Or something like that!

Thinking of Humor

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If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten.  And that is counting sarcasm as humor.  I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual.  With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor.  But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.

But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories.  To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest.  And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.”  And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy.  I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown.  In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic.  He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone.  This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up.  But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself.  He was a slave to his craft.

Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up.  I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far.  As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool.  This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies.  For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome.  So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill.  And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man.  So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes.  Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures.  And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved.  It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.

Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story.  But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea.  Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting.  I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real.  Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.

The Psychology of the Individual and What Not

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So now I have to start writing book two of my series.  And boy, that’s a wide-open operation.  You see I wrote the book based on the idea of a father’s revenge.  And all the stuff that grew out of that was seat of the pants writing that came to me as things that would make the story more fun.  I invented Connors to give Bogey a powerful friend who owed him.  I invented Cutter to facilitate the impossible task of Bogey being invisible to the surveillance state.  I invented Chastain to have a conflicted antagonist to provide resistance to the protagonist but also acknowledge the justice of his cause.  All of these major characters and the plot elements they involve just grew out of the desire to tell Bogey’s story in an interesting and dramatic way.  But Bogey’s crusade is over.  He won.  He steps out of the center stage.  Now what?

It’s not an easy question to answer because I need a direction to go.  Certain things are now baked in.  The United States government nuked some of its own citizens.  A shadowy tech giant took down Washington DC with a technology nobody (including me!) truly understands.  This weakened United States is struggling to hold onto the allegiance of many states that have seen its unjust criminal actions exposed and want to free themselves from its tyrannical control.  That’s a lot of stuff going on.  It’s like the cue ball hitting the racked balls on the nose and scattering them across the table.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put things back together again.  So, we have to dodge around the flying wreckage and wait for the ricochets to subside before planning the next move.  Of course, I could cheat and place the next story five, ten or even twenty years into the future and announce some faits accomplis as ancient history.  And I know that is the lazy way out but, after all, I am an extremely lazy man.

But all of that is still only the window dressing of the story.  Hanging together a future history is relatively easy.  What I really need is another character with as compelling a problem as Bogey had with his son.  But really the two elements are linked.  Bogey’s problem grew out of the injustice of the society he lived in and his war against this injustice gives the story its trigger but the larger effect also has to be an interesting story too.  So, I need another personal story wrapped up in the tumult I have set loose on my imaginary world.  So, what I’m looking for is a personal story that is tied up in the larger actions that I’ve unleashed and that takes the world in a direction I think will be interesting and lead to further stories and actions beyond.  The only problem is where to start.  Hmmm.

“I fear I have nothing to suggest at the moment, sir.”

“Come, come, Jeeves!” 

“I fear not, sir. Possibly after I have seen the lady—-“

“You mean, you want to study the psychology of the individual and what

not?”

“Precisely, sir.”

Various Public Relations

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So, Tuesday I have a meeting with my marketer to see how I can achieve more of my goals for the launch.  The book seems to be sustaining sales but I’m not satisfied with the visibility with respect to reviews and general profile.  As I’ve mentioned I’m going to find out just how large a giveaway I can expect to perform.  Now, I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all.  After all, as a tactic giving something away for free seems to be defeating the purpose of sales.  But my whole reason for writing this book, is to get other people to read it too.  And if you’re competing with literally millions of other books and some of them have multi-billion-dollar companies marketing them then it may take extreme methods to break out of obscurity and catch the public’s eye.  And then again, I may just be kidding myself.  But I think I’m very close to making a decision on the path forward.

And there’s not much time left before I’ll be overtaken by other responsibilities and projects.  First Selectman Cthulhu has selected me as his personal spokesman with responsibilities for communicating his agenda to both the human population of Dunwich and also the trans-dimensional realm of the Great Old Ones.  That’s right I’ll be updating his LinkedIn and TikTok pages.  Currently he’s asked me to edit out the use of words like crush, dismember, maim and devour in his recent communications.  He’s up for re-election and he needs to finesse his image quite a bit.  I’ve suggested he watch several of the recent Godzilla movies and figure out how to mimic the joie de vivre of that radioactive reptile who has managed to cultivate a laid back and avuncular style in the last few years.  I told him he might want to think about a facelift.  But then he reminded me that technically he really doesn’t have a face.  It’s more of a foot with eyes, mouth and tentacles.  Well, a rose by any other name.

On the home front, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard have returned to dismal puddle and seemed very satisfied with whatever slop has run into the swamp.  Also, a pair of wood ducks have also appeared but I notice they are much more skittish than the mallards.  Well, it takes all kinds.  So far, we haven’t seen any ducklings.  Time will tell.

And I’ve cut down all of the raspberry canes and put about five pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer on the bed in anticipation of a bumper crop this year.  I’m hoping it will expand significantly beyond the current patch and eventually triple into the whole garden.  This is a matter of turning necessity into a virtue since nothing else seems to flourish besides raspberries in that soggy area.

The southern ice sheet has retreated back to the massive driveway pile which is now only three feet high.  At the current rate of retreat, I calculate it will disappear completely by Memorial Day.  At which point the last of it will end up in my drink cooler for that barbecue event.

Well, things are moving apace.  Excelsior!

OCF E-Book Giveaway of “The Sniper”

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Today I sold my 150th copy of “The Sniper” on Amazon and I’m looking to get more reviews and ratings.  So to increase the availability of the book I’m looking to send complimentary (free) e-book copies to folks here on the website who want one.

Just e-mail me here and I’ll send one back to that e-mail address.  Feel free to be honest with your review.  It’s better to get honest criticism than fake praise.

It Could Be Huge

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Just as I planned, we ate a late and leisurely breakfast today.  It was as warm and sunny as forecast.  Walking out in the sun by a frozen lake was very enjoyable and I even took a few photos just to prove I still remember how.  Then Camera Girl and I drove over to the big city (ha!) and had some Thai food.  Splendiferous.

I went over the communication I received from my book marketer and set up what I hope is a productive post-launch meeting where I can finalize a plan to finish off the launch with a large number of readers getting their hands on the book in the next week or so.

Apparently, there is a website called BookFunnel that will allow me to run a giveaway in exchange for the customer’s e-mail address.  This will facilitate follow-on advertising of my sequel books and other writing projects.  In conjunction with this the marketer thinks I should produce a follow-on epilog or teaser to entice the readers to sign up for some program of material that I will produce in the future.  All very interesting, but what I’m also interested in finding out is whether the traction I created with the launch is indicative of a book and sequels that will be popular or not very popular.  I basically don’t have any real knowledge about what a popular book start-up looks like.

I’ve sold a little over a hundred and twenty copies to date and that doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming response by the book buying public.  I was hoping for more like a hundred and twenty million copies or even a hundred and twenty thousand copies.  I’ve had to cancel my rental of MetLife Stadium for my book signing event.  Instead, I’ve taped together three or four of the boxes that Camera Girl gets her dog food bags delivered in and set them up in the lower driveway.  I hope it doesn’t rain soon.  That tape’s not so strong.  I’ll be giving away free key chains with the name of my local mechanic on them.  He had them out on the counter and I thought he wouldn’t mind if I took a few (or all) of them.  I don’t think he bought one of my books so I think it’ll be alright.

For my next book, maybe I’ll attempt to reach viral status using a best-seller adjacent name.  In other words, I’ll make it sound like some other popular work.  For instance, “Reacher” is a very commercially lucrative series.  So maybe I could have a series with a character named “Reached.”  He could be like Reacher only in the past tense.  So instead of being enormously large and strong I’ll make my character big but kind of old and worn out.  Sort of like Reacher in thirty years.  And he could fight crime but only in retirement villages and old age homes.  And his tag line will be, “What did you say?  Speak up you young punk!”  I think it could be huge.

A Big Crazy Idea

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I have this crazy idea.  I want to get my book into the hands of an enormous number of people.  I heard of a guy whose book was given out to a hundred thousand people by some corporation for some reason unknown to me.  And after that it became very popular and sold millions of copies.  Now obviously that’s a crazy thing.  I think this was a hundred thousand physical copies not e-books.  Why a corporation would pay for a hundred thousand copies of a book to then give them away doesn’t make any sense unless it’s the Gideons giving away the Bible at hotels.

But for whatever reason it intrigues me.  Now theoretically I can give away a hundred thousand copies of my e-book by emailing them.  Of course, an e-mail provider will charge some fee for that much bandwidth.  But in terms of the files they’re free.  The trick would be to interest a hundred thousand people to request the book and actually read it.  There are book sale sites (e.g., Smashwords) that allow you to lower the sale price to zero.  But the trick would be to attract the right audience for the book.

I admit it’s kind of a goofy idea.  The whole reason for writing a book is to get people to pay you money for the privilege of reading it.  This stands that concept on its head.  But I think it’d get more satisfaction from knowing that a huge number of people had read my story than having a few hundred pay me for buying it.

I have a lot more research to do to figure out all the details of how doing something like this would work.  I want to target a right-leaning audience and so I’m looking at advertising on one of the right-leaning sites like Red State or something like it.  But one of the things is making sure it doesn’t cost me too much money.  After all I’m not a trillionaire.  I’m just a regular old multi-billionaire you know.

My book sales on Amazon reached one hundred tonight.  Maybe that was what triggered this megalomania.  After all it’s only a few orders of magnitude between a hundred and a hundred thousand.  What’s that between friends after all?  But I have learned a little bit about how difficult it is to reach across the “digital barrier” and communicate with the mass of humanity out there.  It requires you to master the secrets of the “algorithm” and “search engine optimization.”  Either that or you have to shell out a lot of dough.

But I’ll have to say it must have been more fun in the old days when a writer could sell a short story to Analog for a few hundred bucks and have a hundred thousand people read that story and give their feedback in just days or weeks.  I know there are now digital equivalents.  There’s a site called Royal Road where free content is uploaded and people vote with their eyeballs.  And maybe I’ll go that route.  Of course, I understand that most of the content is sort of video game fan fiction which is completely impenetrable to me.  And maybe an audience for my stuff would never show up there.  But I should look into it.  Well anyway, enough about this.  I’ll figure it out and see if it can be done and if it’s worth it to me or not.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of a great literary artist.  Oh, the pain, the pain.

03MAR2026 – Sales Update and Begathon

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Update:

Yesterday’s total was 18 books and my book ranking has also improved markedly.  Overall rank now close to 20,000 and categories in the top 100s!  Look out Tom Clancy (or whoever the new alive guy is).

Well, things are looking up.  So far today, I’ve sold ten copies and pretty soon I’ll reach a hundred sales.  Cool!

And I broke through the 40,000 overall rank in Kindle Store and the 200’s in some major categories (see below)

And so now that some momentum is building up I’d like to make one last plea (on bended knee mind you) for anyone who liked the book to put a good review up on Amazon.  You can use any name you like and you don’t even need to have bought the book.  Just tell the world why you liked it and help me become independently wealthy ( or at least cheer up a poor hard-working author.

Thank you for your attention.

Jake Barter

More Marketing Stuff

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So, I spent some time yesterday and today sending a few complimentary copies of the book to reviewers and adjusting the Amazon Ads to concentrate on the “targets” that have produced sales.  So far it looks like the ads that work best are where Amazon selects viewers that have done a search for another product that is either “similar” to my book or “complementary” to it and place my ad somewhere on that search result page.  How Amazon gauges similarity and complementarity is of course the black box.

These targets that they decide on work better than matching my book to searches that contain keywords that my book has been matched with like “techno-thriller” or “vigilante justice” or “suspense thriller.”  These also work but at a lower rate.  So, what seems to be the case is that Amazon seems to know what they’re doing better than anybody else.  And I guess that makes sense.  The algorithm is the wizard behind the curtain but apparently, he’s not some medicine show tramp whose balloon was blown off course.  He’s the real deal.

So now that I’m running the marketing show I’m excited again and waiting for that magic moment when the algorithm decides that I’m ready for prime time and blankets the Amazon universe with free advertisements for my magnum opus.  And every time you open up an email from Amazon, my book will stare back at you in all its black and white splendor.  And once the ten millionth copy is sold, President Trump will invite me to the Oval Office and present me with the Trump/Kennedy Center Medal for the Most Beautiful Literature.  And I’ll autograph a copy of the book for him.  It’ll read, “To DJT, from one native New Yorker, to another.  You, kooky nut, you.  Don’t ever change.  Jake Barter”

But I digress (or hallucinate).  Of late I’ve read just how much AI novel writing has become sort of a catastrophe.  Apparently, there is a sizable segment of the book reading audience that is perfectly satisfied with AI slop.  And I don’t think this is shocking.  Think of what now passes for entertainment on broadcast television.  It’s already down to the level of mindless machine output.  I guess the question will be whether there will be a reaction to this, with a flight to quality occurring.  Even leaving my own personal writing out of this, I’d hate to think that literature will completely disappear from the face of the Earth in favor of subhuman cargo-cult knock-offs.

Well, I guess there can be all kinds of entertainment products out there.  After all, a big part of marketing is identifying a niche that isn’t being serviced optimally.  But it does make me wonder what that niche is for me.  Disgruntled right-wing old guys?  Well, why not.  Talk about a despised minority.  We’re positively reviled by everyone out there.  But I am hoping for a larger audience.  I have a small test audience of women who won the Goodreads giveaway.  I’m hoping for some feedback from them pretty soon.  I’ll compare them to the few women that have already read the book in my circle of friends.  It might be interesting

One Month In

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So today was the last day of my marketer’s book launch service.  And as of now we sold sixty books.  Thirty-four were e-books and twenty-six were paperbacks.  And today I noticed that one sale (an e-book) was sold in Germany.  Well, well.

Owing to the fact that book sales have not topped one million copies, as of yet, I’ve decided to turn the whole thing into a network marketing exercise.  I intend to find ten people and have each of them buy ten copies and then each force ten people to each buy ten copies and then so on and so forth until by level ten we have ten billion copies sold!  By the way that math may be off a little but you get the idea.  After all if it worked for Amway and Communism how can it possibly fail?  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?  All I have to do is buy a white board and some dry erase products and maybe combine this with a Tupperware item or two and before you know it I’ll be a huge success.

All in all, it’s been very educational.  I guess the takeaway is that price-point and ads on Amazon are what sell books.  As soon as I dropped the price of the e-book from $5.99 to $2.99 there was an immediate surge in sales.  Since I have very few reviews, I’ve decided to drop the price of the e-book to $0.99 and try to get a bunch of sales right away in the hopes that it will generate some reviews.  Of course, that’s just my idea but it seems to make sense to me.

The marketer has additional services to extend the launch but I’ve decided to try it myself.  Now that I’m running the campaign on my own, I’ll depend on Amazon’s automatic key word selection to attract the attention of the techno-thriller/vigilante justice readers out there.  It should be very interesting to see how this change affects sales.

I will say that becoming a “best selling author” is harder than I imagined.  I assumed that with my incredible writing skills the publishers and the reading public would beat a path to my door and shower me with riches.  So far, no path.  So far, more like a trickle of riches.  But I am undismayed.  My acquaintances who’ve read the book report enjoying it a lot.  Now of course they may be just saying nice things because they like me.  But I will say it is very nice to receive accolades even from friends.  If instead they had told me, it was awful I think I’d be pretty discouraged.  So currently I’m buoyed by the minor success I’ve enjoyed and hopeful that with further exposure the book will find an audience (possibly in Germany!).

So, let’s just see how the next stage in this odyssey goes.  As always feel free to add a review to Amazon and hopefully the word will get out that a new classic has appeared on the horizon for discerning readers.