The work­ing title of my new piece is “The City of Ernest” which, 15 pages in, is turn­ing out to be some­thing like a young adult novel. I say some­thing like a young adult novel because I hadn’t orig­i­nally intended it to be a YA. I don’t have much inter­est in writ­ing a YA. How­ever, the prob­lem is, that when your first per­son nar­ra­tor is a 19-year-old col­lege fresh­man, wor­ried about his best friend and his fam­ily and his place in the world, that is poten­tially what hap­pens, you’ve writ­ten a Young Adult novel by mistake.

Query: given that we’ve extended ado­les­cence and delayed the onset of adult­hood into the mid-to-late 20s,is it even pos­si­ble any­more to write a Bil­dungsro­man about about a 19 year old? In such con­di­tions, does not a story about a 19-year-old auto­mat­i­cally become a YA, which might be defined as a book pri­mar­ily of inter­est to read­ers in the 12-to-16 year old range?

Or am I too slip­pery by half in attempt­ing to excuse my descent into YA-dom?

Either way, I like the char­ac­ter very much, and am enjoy­ing writ­ing this. Espe­cially, because the per­son who read the first excerpt noted, “It’s very dif­fer­ent from what you usu­ally do.”

P.S. Writer’s block? What’s that?

Hi diddle-dee-dee, here’s a fel­low who has taken Dr. Johnson’s maxim to heart:

So, I researched it a bit and to make a long story short, one thing led to another and this month, it looks like I’ll clear some­where around $15,000 for my fic­tion titles.

[…]

Not being a writer myself (thank God for Word’s spell and gram­mar checker!), I relied heav­ily on my abil­ity to do mar­ket research and under­stand the Ama­zon ecosys­tem throughly (in terms of key­words). In my mind, this is def­i­nitely what has made me suc­cess­ful in this so far. Aside from that, I am an expert in cre­at­ing catchy titles, com­ing up with eye grab­bing cov­ers, writ­ing entic­ing descrip­tions and hook­ing folks when they “Look Inside” at the first 10 – 12% of my books. Of course, I do the very best job I can as a writer but I’m no Shake­speare. Luck­ily, it turns out that it doesn’t mat­ter at all.

My for­mula is simple.

Step 1 — Look at what is sell­ing.
Step 2 — Come up with my own spin/version of it and sell it.

That said, I don’t want to mis­lead any­one that is read­ing this… Behind the scenes, within that sim­plic­ity are muti­ple lay­ers of com­plex­ity that rep­re­sent my sys­tem. Noth­ing I do is acci­den­tal or “inspired”. I don’t write for inspi­ra­tion or passion.

I write for peo­ple and mar­kets. That’s it.

This excerpt, writ­ten by some­one going by the han­dle “Held for Ran­som”, is taken from a post­ing on the Fast Lane Forum, a web­fo­rum about a book called The Mil­lion­aire Fast­lane which is devoted to the ancient art of get rich quick. In other words, news of the self-published fic­tion bonanza has finally reached the realm of the inter­net huck­ster.

If you’ve got the time, you should read the whole long exchange of posts because it’s as good an expla­na­tion, given the cur­rent Amazon-o-centric sys­tem, of how to make a ton of money writ­ing genre crap, all while not espe­cially car­ing about writ­ing or read­ing books.

I was never a fic­tion reader. I’m still not. Hon­estly, I find most fic­tion read­ing to be sleep inducing…

I only started read­ing in the genre once I decided to write in it. I’m inves­ti­gat­ing a new genre at the moment and just repeat­ing the process all over. Not being a reader or a writer, much of this process was very tedious for me. But, as I con­tin­ued to get good results I just looked at it as kind of game. Every time I see some­thing I want to try, I just imag­ine myself as some sort of writ­ing chameleon. You know, just to see if I can do it.

Other than that, I really don’t know any other way to describe it. My feel­ings about read­ing fic­tion have not changed — if I’m not research­ing it, I’m not read­ing it.

It just bores me to tears man.

By the way, I cer­tainly don’t mean to offend fic­tion read­ers or writ­ers who love read­ing fic­tion. It’s just the way I am. As I’ve said since I first came into the forum, in my case I am run­ning a busi­ness that is all about iden­ti­fy­ing mar­ket needs and fill­ing them. In that respect, I’m really no dif­fer­ent than the guy doing import­ing or e-commerce or lead generation.

So, no dis­re­spect to writ­ers who love every­thing about the craft. It’s just not my cup of tea personally.

No dis­re­spect taken. Who doesn’t love a good Hor­a­tio Alger-style story of hard work rewarded? Just wait until you get to the part where he talks about how he thinks he can make $100,000 a month from this gig.

Oh, don’t look so shocked. It’s not like every word that pro­ceeded from the type­writer of Erle Stan­ley Gard­ner (whose daily writ­ing quota was 5,000 words) was bathed in love and swad­dled in art. In fact, what this fel­low here is doing isn’t so much dif­fer­ent from what James Pat­ter­son does, except that he has com­pletely dis­in­ter­me­di­ated the pub­lish­ing houses and gone straight to the readers.

By doing his own sophis­ti­cated mar­ket research, hir­ing his own copy­ed­i­tors, and mak­ing his own cov­ers using stock images, “Held for Ran­som” has turned him­self into a one-man pub­lish­ing empire. My only regret is that he refuses to share his pen name, pre­fer­ring to main­tain the veil of anonymity rather than let his devoted read­ers know that he’s only in it for the bucks.