Advice for Occult and Pagan Authors.
Aaron Leitch posted a great piece today on the realities of being an author in the internet era. Apparently someone went so far as to accuse him of hate speech and post his address online. Thankfully that has never happened to me. I have had a similar experience a few years ago though. Someone who showed clear signs of instability wanted my assistance (free of course) with some magical troubles. I politely declined to help, so they tracked me down at my day job, where I was very much in the closet about my occult activities, and started demanding my help ranting about demons and the whole nine yards. I had to inform him that I was not the person he was looking for and when he did not take the hint I had to have security remove him.
At other times I have had my life threatened if I did not take someones case (also for free), been accused of cursing someone that I did not curse, and accused of killing someone with magic that apparently cursed me for who knows what reason.
In general being an Author is GREAT. Being recognized in public is also great. Someone on my facebook thought they saw me at the PA Renaissance Faire this weekend but I guess were not sure so they didn’t say hi. I wish they did, its a great feeling to be recognized for your work. There are however some downsides. From crazy people to negative reviews. In general Aaron’s advice of not getting trapped in the Tar Baby is spot on. I do however have a couple pieces of specific advice.
SECURITY: In this day and age everyone is a celebrity, its just a matter of magnitude. If Brad Pitt is A-List and Kathy Griffin is on the D-list, and that dude who published his own album of Acoustic songs is a Z-list celebrity, as an occult author I figure you are somewhere around the U or T list. Not exactly in need of a body guard, but certainly worthy of some of these steps:
- Alarm system for the house that you actually pay to have monitored.
- Using a nom de plum. I ended up using my real name because it is common and there are two Jason Millers more famous than I will ever be, but it is certainly worthwhile considering using an assumed name if you publish occult books.
- Keep personal info to a minimum on FB. I am terrible at this, but as my professional page takes off I will be slowly limiting the amount of friends that I approve on my personal page. When I am on my page I don’t reveal where I work or the town I actually live in. I mean if someone really wanted to figure out that I don’t really live in Ong’s Hat, they could figure out where I live but certainly there is no need to make it easy.
- Provide a good way for people to get in touch with you. If you have a good way for people to contact you, than you should feel perfectly justified in telling them to fuck off or pretending that they have the wrong person if they contact you outside of those parameters. If you don’t want to be arsed, than make it known publicly that you do not want to be contacted at all and that your work stands on it’s own.
- If you are concerned about cyber privacy you can use a Tor Browser, encrypt e-mails, and use secured wireless connections. Not gonna help with the NSA, but that is not your main concern here. We are talking about crazy fans and loopy people.
REVIEWS: Aaron mentioned reviews in his piece, and certainly one of the things that is toughest about putting something out there into the public sphere is having it criticized. It is especially hard when the criticism is completely off base and un-warranted. Sadly people can and do give one star reviews of books on amazon because their mailman damaged the packaging. I have not had that pleasure yet, but I have had:
-A complaint that shields were not covered in P&R Magic when in fact there is a whole section on them.
-A complaint that I used foreign words in some of the spells and they don’t have the time to look stuff like that up.
-A complaint that Sorcerers Secret’s was not a straight forward spellbook, which the back of the book clearly states it is not.
-Several complaints that protection and reversal magic is not basic enough, when the cover clearly states “beyond 101”.
-Complaints that Financial Sorcery contained non-magical information about finances.
-Complaints that it was not as good as some other book that their best friend wrote, to which I will of course be happy to provide a link for.
You get the idea. It is frustrating, and worse yet it can effect sales. Sadly there is a momentum to reviews: if there are several bad reviews people are more apt to share their negative opinions and add to the heap. If there are good reviews people are less likely to blast the book and be in the clear minority. I have three pieces of advice for dealing with reviews:
- DO NOT fight the reviewer or challenge them. If it is something that amazon will remove a review for (like a review clearly meant to sell another book instead of yours) ask Amazon to remove it. If not, do nothing. See Aaron’s advice about the Tar Baby. Take the lesson from Anne Rice and just don’t do it. Besides, sometimes you deserve what you get, as in the case of editing in The Sorcerer’s Secrets.
- DO NOT post a review of your own work under a sock puppet account. I don’t care if Ryan Holiday says that everyone does it. It’s bullshit.
- DO find people who like your work and are likely to review it fairly and kindly and ask them to do so. Send them advance copies. Have several people lined up for launch day so that you have good reviews up on Amazon the moment it launches. Have other people that have not already reviewed the book ready to do so in case someone gives a one or two star review. By all means you should let that bad-reviewer have their say about your work, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave it as the most recent review.
