Just in time for Halloween, I am giving away a FREE ebook copy of THE RED FANG, the first novel in the Before the Sun Rises series.
PLUS grab a free copy of the smash hit story “First Time Zombie Fucker”
Visit http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/nicolamatthews before this offer is gone.
“Fame Comes at a Price – Dealing With Fans is Hard Work”
I have often said “I don’t write for fortune, but definitely for fame.” I realize that my chances of getting that elusive big book deal is slim to none, and that even within the independently published author circles I can still be small potatoes compared to those who do this gig full-time. I have an ‘Evil Day Job’ that helps pay my bills. So for me, I don’t necessarily write for the money it might eventually bring me, but for the joy of having people not only read my creations, but for the millions (and growing) of readers that now know my name.
For many people out there who strived to eventually become famous, however, the sudden catapult into the limelight can be a very daunting place. Some people may have become famous by accident, or they may have not realized they would become famous quit so quickly. The harsh reality of fame is that you are going to come across more than your fair share of assholes, obsessed fans, and those people who may be slightly off their rocker. For many fans, the way that the famous person acts can strongly affect the way the fans feel towards that person.
Anne Rice, for example, seems to take much joy in conversing with her fans and makes herself available to them as often as possible, not only through book signings, but through her FaceBook page as well. I find it incredibly refreshing that she takes the time to not only post on her FB page, but to respond to fans and their posts as often as possible. Of course, when each of your posts can garner thousands of responses, reading each and every one of them, much less responding to each of them, would be a near impossible task. However, just knowing that she tries to interact with her fans on a personal level has earned her great respect from both me and many other avid readers and fans.
There have been times, though, that some of her actions have been questionable, such as when she brings to light a bad review that someone has given her. To be fair, she links to both good and bad reviews of her work, giving opportunity to fans to weigh in on both positive and negative opinions. I am not quite sure, however, that she realizes the power she holds when she links to such content. When you are virtually a household name, linking to some random blog article can cause great harm as well as make a previously unknown blog suddenly followed by hundreds. If, for some reason, Anne Rice were to find this article interesting enough to link to, I would not know whether to jump for joy or change my name. I guess that would all depend on whether or not she appreciated by own warped sense of respect, or thought I was trying to trash her reputation. In any event, before everyone breaks out the torches and pitch forks, let me go on record by stating I am a very big Anne Rice fan.
Of course, there are also those famous people who have used their fame to take advantage of their fans. While I am a huge Bret Michaels fan, giving him credit as my mentor and even going so far as to dedicate my last novel to him, I find it incredibly disturbing that he closed down his fan club to instead charge fans hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of dollars just to have the opportunity to meet him. While the business major in me applauds his efforts, the artist in me finds this practice to be completely disgusting. It is why I have so much respect for Anne Rice and why Bret has faded in my eyes over the past few years. It is also why I will once again state, “The day I charge my fans just to meet me will be the day I stop writing” While I don’t mind spending $20 on a poster of Bret and have him autograph it, I refuse to pay him for some imaginary “honor” his PR person came up with just to be graced by his presence. I love you, Bret, but get over yourself. And Anne, thank you for not being so full of shit and self-importance that you think your fans are now beneath you.
In addition, I find the famous person who strove so hard to get his name out there to suddenly start screaming, “I need my privacy!” to be an utter enigma. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why someone would put so much time, energy, and effort into getting their name and face known to millions across the country only to want to make their fans feel bad for trying to have something to do with them. Why strive for fame if you do not want to be bothered? It’s like working yourself to the bone for a decade trying to make your company a success only to bitch about that success once it has been achieved. If it is too much work and aggravation, why did you start on this journey in the first place?
I knew going into this whole writing gig that if I were to become well-known, there would no longer be any such thing as a private life. However, I think that the sudden dip into the spotlight catches a lot of people off guard. I feel that many, many people do not see what lies beyond those fifteen minutes of fame. They only see themselves at the moment when everyone knows them; they seldom look beyond that point to see that with fame comes millions of screaming fans who all want to be your friend, to get to know you, and to ask you tons, and I do mean tons, of utterly ridiculous questions. It can be quite overwhelming, so I can totally see why some people would want to move beyond that spotlight and fade away into the background once their fifteen minutes are up.
So for all those out there who are searching for your fifteen minutes of fame, and those who may have already found it and maybe suffering from whiplash, you need to remember to be very tactful when dealing with fans. You have to keep in mind that those people made you; they can just as easily break you. Trying to alienate them, force them to leave you alone, insult them, or make them feel as if you are better than them can not only piss them off, but if you piss enough of them off at once, they can turn their back on you. Even those who found fame and wants to leave the limelight for a quite life still craves the fame every now and again; how would you feel if you suddenly discovered yourself no longer being held up on the pedestal by millions of fans as you once were, but now find yourself loathed and hated by those herds you so carelessly insulted?
Fame, as well as fans, is fickle. I have tried very hard over the years to interact with as many readers as possible. I have been stalked, harassed, had to change my blog and screen name on more than one occasion, and been proposed to by hundreds of people as well as asked by thousands of men to do some very naughty acts. But I get it; I know that being a writer of the erotic will garnish me much attention, both good and bad. What sets me apart, and shows others what type of person I really am, is how I act, and react, to this attention. So to my fellow writers I say, be careful what you wish for, and be tactful when your wish is fulfilled. And to my readers I say, bring on the questions. No one understands the power of words quite like a writer.
If you are serious about being a published author, and it is not something you do just for fun or for some silly validation on a random site, at some point you will realize you are ten times, twenty times, maybe even one hundred times the writer of any of the ‘greats’ on any given writing site. When that day comes, you will also realize it is time to cut your losses and say your farewells.
Over the past two years I have posted two stories on XN, and one of those two was a re-post of a story I had removed because it was being plagiarized all over the internet. I had no intentions of posting it back to XN, but after being begged to enter one of the forum’s many, many, writer’s challenges, and after receiving dozens of messages from readers wanting to know what happened to the original posting, I yielded to the demands and not only entered the CAW challenge (something I still regret), but also re-posted the story to the site. After months of endless drama of fans pitching fits after I, a published author, didn’t win the silly challenge, and listening to the Powers that Be insist entirely too many times that it was just coincidence that every time I received one vote ,one of the other writers would receive two votes from accounts that had just magically appeared out of thin air that same day, I rolled my eyes and went back to writing and promoting my latest novel to hit publication.
Sometime later, and at this point I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was weeks or months later, I made the apparent mistake of standing up for a fellow author who showed a lot of real potential in his art of the written word. We both knew that the CAW’s were rigged, had discussed it in great length through emails over the last year, and wondered how on earth the other members of the site could turn a blind eye to the blatant favoritism that went on in the forum. We knew the other members weren’t that daft; they clearly saw it going on. But those who saw it and stood up to it quickly learned that they had a moving target planted squarely on their chest, and if they did not do something that could easily get them banned no questions asked, it wasn’t long before half the forum had turned against them as well. It was a similar scenario that had others soon turning on my fellow author whom I considered a friend, and when I dared to stand up for him, that target was soon aimed squarely at me. The cherry on top of the pile of shit that is the XN forum came when a wannabe writer who suffers greatly from diarrhea of the keyboard claimed to have run me off the board because she had given me a cyber tongue-lashing. In all honesty, I don’t think anyone on the forum realized she was trying to be mean because the idiot can’t seem to remember the number one rule for writing: KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID!
After all of this I pretty much washed my hands of the site. I was sick of those damn CAW challenges taking over the entire forum for weeks on end. I was sick of seeing ‘writers’ who only write for fun constantly gushing on and on about how great this ‘writer’ was or how great that ‘writer’s’ latest story had turned out. I was sick of seeing the same three people win the CAW challenges time after time. I was tired of all the self-congratulations that were flying around. I was sick of beating my head against my desk wondering how on earth apparently intelligent people could possibly think some of that junk was actually worthy of an award.
For roughly the last year or so I have been slowly weaning myself off of the site. I never go over to the story side except to check on comments, and I am going entire weeks without so much as surfing over to the forum. I used to lurk on the site, just reading the threads and continuing to shake my head at the stupidity that abounds there. For several months things were quiet, and I had given serious thought about maybe coming back and start to post a few of the short stories I have been working on for a new anthology that I plan to release next year. And then this thread caught my eyes:
“For Future CAW Challenges …comments/discussions”
It started out innocently enough with writers and readers discussing what they liked about the writing challenge, what they didn’t like about it, what they thought needed improving, what rules needed to be changed or amendments added. It was open discussions, people giving honest opinions about what is honestly not working, is not going to work, or what could make it better. What do you expect? Any time you create something like an open writing challenge and then invite others to participate, you are going to get people who will want to improve it, who will come up with better ideas than the originator, people who will continually strive to improve upon it and make it more enjoyable for all those who participate. That’s just the way things are. And to quote one of the posters on the thread, “show me one rule, law or set of guidelines that aren’t continually updated and modernised {sic} and I’ll show you a dictatorship.”
BINGO! You just summed up the entire XN forum in one sentence. The comments on this thread also reminded me, once again, exactly why I have not really been lurking around XN that much these past two years.
This is a singular truth to the XN forum that has been driving me nuts ever since I joined the community back in 2008. It’s always the same shit, different day. It’s always one person who hides behind the little clique of ‘friends’ who will come to her aid and pounce on anyone who dares to go against her. And those who have stated the blatantly obviousness of what is going on is soon ganged up on by that small little group, and it grows and grows until finally, yet more notable authors or those with decent, raw talent get sick of it and move on to other sites.
Perhaps even more disturbing than the fact that this goes on is the fact that the owners, namely Lemark, actually LETS this type of shit go on. It boggles my mind.
And then it once again hit me, a simple truth about myself and that site that I keep forgetting. It is a simple truth that anyone who takes themselves seriously as an author will eventually come to realize. There comes a time in every writer’s life when you realize that you are ten times the writer of any of the ‘greats’ of any given site. When that day comes, it is sometimes better to cut your losses and say your farewells. This is pretty much what I have been doing with XN. I now have four novels in publication, am working on novels five, six, and seven as we speak. I have another six novels planned for the Before the Sun Rises series and several more short stories. I get trolled on XN by writers, I despise the clique that runs the forum, I wonder why on Earth Lemark would bother to have the forum and not have someone who was dedicated to running that side of things aside from the tyrant moderators who use it like their own personal playground, and I simply cannot stomach the majority of the stupid ‘discussions’ that go on amongst mostly intellectually, and literarily, challenged members. I’m tired of it all, I’m tired of beating my head against the proverbial brick wall and begging for a decent conversation regarding literature instead of ‘discussions’ that quickly dissolves into dozens of people who can barely string two coherent sentences together stating they know everything there is to know about writing, or those writers who cannot seem to grasp the simple concept that being good at non-fictional writing will not mean you are automatically going to be good at creative writing and trying, and failing miserably I might add, at trying to painfully teach such people the difference.
So that’s it. I’m pretty much through with it. That’s not to say that I won’t ever post to XN again, it just means that I have other options that I will utilize in addition to wallowing in the dregs of writing society that XN has become known for.
I am in a completely different ballpark; I am not content at just being known as a ‘great’ writer of some random forum. No, I do not write for fortune, and not to self-congratulate myself on a job well done or to win some useless title or have a few cliques kiss my ass and hail me king for a day. But I just may keep using XN, sometime, if for no other reason than to just keep my options open … if I so decide upon it.
In addition to the follow-up to Vindictus, The Dark Lord, a work currently entitled Vindictus: Through the Rift, and the second novel in the BEFORE THE SUN RISES series, a book called Immortal Sins, I am also working on another anthology which currently is going to sport four stories: the ever-wildly popular “First Time Zombie Fucker,” a follow-up to the story called “Run, Zombie Fuckers, Run!”, and two brand-new stories called “The Friend” and “Twisted.” This anthology is tentatively being called Beneath the Still Moon and will hopefully be released sometime next year within a few months of Immortal Sins.
In the meantime, I wanted to celebrate this impending new release with a re-posting of “First Time Zombie Fucker,” along with some background story on how this fun and sexy-but-twisted story came to be.
Even before I had released The Red Fang, I had already begun penning the next novel in the BEFORE THE SUN RISES series, a book entitled Immortal Sins. After the release of TRF, I was wiped out from spending the better part of a year finishing up the novel and doing some hard edits. But I was eager to start the next novel, and soon found myself struggling with writer’s block. I knew what I wanted to write, but the words just would not make their way out of my head and onto the paper. I was, in essence, burnt out on the whole supernatural thing.
So in an effort to clear out the cobwebs inside of my head, I decided to write something so completely outside of my comfort zone that it would make me cringe. I did not want anything supernatural about the story, I wanted to get back to my roots by writing a pure sexual story, and I wanted to write it in a style that was not my norm. I wanted raw, in-your-face and a clear ‘I don’t give a damn’ style. The original story “Now That’s Fucking Hardcore!” was born. And man what a reception it received. That original story saw over 350,000 reads in the first 30 days after it hit XN. Over the next three months, it saw well over a half-million reads all told. And then, since it was being plagiarized all over the adult communities across the web, I had it yanked from the story site.
Last year, I was once again feeling writer’s block due to stress from my full-time day job. I once again wanted to write something just for the fun of it, but I did not want another NTFHC! story. Instead, I wanted to explore Ashton Jones’ sexually deviant side. But again, I wanted the same raw, in-your-face writing style as NTFHC! Instead, I ended up with a hilariously twisted yet sexy story that had a lot of hidden meanings. I got to explore a different side of a new character that I really like, and it helped to clear my mind enough for me to see the path I wanted to take with Immortal Sins.
Since those two stories have hit, I have a whole new reader fan-base and managed to reinvent myself as well. Those stories spawned a brand new selection of stories from me, all written in the same raw, in-your-face style that fans seem to love. More importantly, the “First Time Zombie Fucker” gave me an idea for a follow-up story, “Run, Zombie Fuckers, Run!” which is shaping up to be just as much fun and sexy as the first one.
With that said, allow me re-post a favorite of the fans, “First Time Zombie Fucker.”
Click on Page 2 below to go to next page.
For the better part the past two years I have thought very seriously about ‘coming out’ as an underground novelist. As many may know, I have an Evil Day Job. That is to say, my writing ‘career’ is what I do on the side because I love to write and I love to share my creations with others. But it doesn’t pay, and I don’t do it for the money any way. Needless to say, I must have some way of making money, so I have an official ‘Evil Day Job’ that keeps me away from my home for about 11 hours a day. No one outside of my immediately family knows that I am a published author on the side. I fear that I might lose my job if I told my employer, considering the nature of what I write about and where it all has been posted over the years.
Recently, however, I have pretty much stopped posting on the XN forum and decided that any new material I decide to post will be posted either on my website or my blog. I’m sick of the trolls over on XN and at this point, since I am trying to build my name up more, I think it is best if I move away from the stigmata associated with XN and try to get my name recognition to stand on its own feet. I’m working with a small internet cafe and bookstore in my home town to get some of my novels sold there, and there may be some book signings in the future as well. For this reason, my status as an ‘underground’ author will soon be out the window.
This has gotten me to thinking and wondering if I should bother to start putting my face out there to go with my name. I somehow doubt it would make any difference. Let’s face it, authors are not exactly known for being ‘famous.’ Sure, I know what Stephanie Meyer and Anne Rice and Laurel K. Hamilton look like, but I wouldn’t give them a second glance if I passed them on the street. Authors don’t really get their faces out there like the other arts, so while I would instantly know Johnny Depp when I set eyes on him, chances are I wouldn’t give Stephen King the time of day if I saw him sitting at a diner.
So the question remains: should I begin to post photographs of myself on my Facebook, blog, website, and on my novels? Should I just reserve photo sessions for the rare times I might accidentally get to do a book signing? Should I even bother? More importantly, would it even make a difference?
Welcome to the Underground Lair of the Paranormal Princess 