The Philosophy of Selling Ebooks for Nothing

This will be the first of a three part series I've written about the philosophy, theory, and practice of selling ebooks for free. Seeing that the subject turned into something of a manifesto, I guess I have a lot to say about on the subject. Perhaps because it is the founding principle of my publishing business, and compared to similar author/publishers, my work is read by so many more people without having to give up much, if anything, in the way of revenue. I think it works.

The principle philosophical question that needs to be addressed is the connection, if any, between the subjective and objective quality of a book and its value as expressed in monetary terms. Or to put it more plainly, the fairly common perception that high quality commands high prices, low quality, cheap prices, and whether this relationship applies to art in general, and books in particular. Spoiler; I am going to argue that it doesn't.

Writing is an art, and art is often judged subjectively, i.e. whether it appeals to the viewer or listener of the individual work. There are, however, certainly objective standards that can be applied to judge how accomplished the art or artist is. In writing these standards can include, spelling, grammar, and story structure. However, in the name of art and originality, even the objective standards of any medium can be successfully challenged. In short, anything goes in art, especially if the size of the appreciative audience is not a consideration.  

It is uncontroversial to say that some readers and some writers equate the price of a book with the artistic quality of the book. It is hard to say just how many do, and at what conscious level, but I suspect this is a fairly common attitude. Indeed, I will suggest in my upcoming essay "The Practice of Selling Ebooks for Nothing" that when it comes to readers, you can divide the market into those that won't buy a free ebook, and those that only buy free ebooks - with some overlap and exceptions. As for authors, when I see the fact that authors are seemingly content to sell a handful of books a year, I have to believe that many authors also feel that there is a connection between the worth of their work and price in money they feel they must charge to reflect that worth. Clearly, I'm not one of them.

"If an author doesn't believe their book is worth anything and is just giving it away, why should I believe it is any good?" is a common response to a free book. To  answer that question the first thing one needs to accept is that every value of the quality assigned to a book is subjective, and because it is subjective, the value of the work, as expressed in dollars and cents, is a quantum value; it varies with how much each individual reader enjoyed the book. Nor is there any agreed on standard level of payment for the entertainment value of a book, making it impossible to assign any sort of objective value to a book in dollars and cents. While there may be a perceived relationship between the quality of a book and its price, when one actually thinks about it, it is clear that there is none. A reader can pay $30 for the hardcover version of a book, only to DNF it, because they hated it. The price they paid had no relationship to their subjective enjoyment of the book. Or to take another example, does the quality of a book go down, when it goes on sale? Quality and price are two different things.

The same logic applies to self-publishing authors who get to set the price of their books. They are free to price their work according to the value they believe it represents, so if they feel that there is indeed a connection between value and price, their price should reflect the value they perceive in their work. But do they? By and large, no, even if they think price should reflect quality. At least I don't think so. And why don't I think so? Because they price their ebooks significantly less than traditionally published ebooks by traditionally published authors. If they truly believed that price equaled quality, then what does the fact that self-published books are generally priced between one third and one tenth of the price of traditionally published ebooks? Are they saying that their work is only 33% to 10% as good as the traditionally published books? Maybe, but I doubt it.

What self-published authors realized, even if they do not acknowledged it, is that price is actually a tool of marketing. Sadly, self-published books are a victim of the price equals quality mindset. Because of the perceived inferior quality of self-published ebooks as a whole, self-published books usually cannot command the price of traditional published books, even though self-publishing authors have the ability to price their ebooks the same as traditionally published ebooks. Instead, self-published ebooks compete with traditionally published books and authors by offering books at a lower price, making them, ideally, a better value for the money. This lower the price need not reflect an acknowledgement of lower quality of work. Lowering the price of their work to be able to compete does not lower the quality of their writing. It is simply marketing.

And I might add that just as there is a distinct free book market, there is a self-publishing market that is distinct from the traditionally published book market. In both cases there is, of course, some overlap, but the important point is that a publisher can target a market that will generate the most sales, and that price is a key tool in doing this. Put a price on your book, and you won't sell to the free book readers, put a traditionally published price on a self-published book, and you won't sell to the self-published market, and likely not to the traditionally published market either. Once again; price is merely a marketing tool.

Given this lack of real connection between quality and price, and given that price is a tool of marketing, not a measure of quality, selling books for nothing can, and should be looked on by readers and authors as a marketing decision, not as any sort of a measure of quality.  Experience has taught me that there is a distinct market for free books. Readers are readers, and that this market is worth considering if one wants to be read and especially if an author's books are not in the mainstream of commercial fiction.

Next week my manifesto continues with " The Theory of Selling Ebooks for Nothing." Stay tuned, you won't want to miss it.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 10)

In this installment of the Post, I am going to review two works; Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and C J Cutcliffe Hyne's The Further Adventures of Captain Kettle. Why these two books? you ask. At least you do rhetorically so I can tell you why.  

Why? Because when I was doing my research on Hyne for a previous blog post, the Wikipedia article on him mentioned that: "Conrad .. read Pearson's (the magazine Hyne's stories appeared in), and borrowed whole phrases, key episodes, and images from the Kettle stories for Heart of Darkness." Now borrowing incidents from other writers appeared to be somewhat common back then. I know that W Somerset Maugham was accused of borrowing a scene for his story The Moon and Sixpence, and he said so in the preface of the volume I read. He had also been accused of using real people in his story Cakes and Ale. So it would appear that a little borrowing was no great scandal, You can read about the similarities here.  I glanced over it, but I was more interested in the fact that here were two writers writing about the same time and about the same place, one of whom is still remembered today while the one is forgotten. Why? Again. 

To find out, I reread both of the stories.

 My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad  C

I first read this book in high school, and I remember two things about it, those being the image of a solitary warship off the shore of Africa firing its cannon into the jungle with no seeming effect or purpose. And of course the punch line, "The horror, the horror." 

The story is drawn from Conrad's own experiences working on a riverboat in the Belgium Congo in 1890.

The story, such as it is, has Charles Marlow relating his experience in Africa as a riverboat pilot on an unnamed river. He is sent up stream, and spends several months slowly repairing the steamboat he was hired to command. At this station, he hears of a company agent, Kurtz, who appears to be something special, even to those who dislike and suspect him of being some sort of idealist when it comes to the natives. He appears to have some sort of great magnetism that attacks people to him. Marlow's steamboat eventually reaches Kurtz's station to find him dying, and against his will, they carry him - and his ivory - back down the river. On the journey back, Marlow also falls under Kurtz's spell, to the extent that when he presents the last of Kurtz's papers to Kurtz's fiancée, when asked what his dying words were, he tells her that he uttered her name, rather than "The horror, the horror" to protect his reputation.

The short novel or novella reads as a very surreal, dreamlike, indeed, nightmarish account of rather disreputable Europeans rotting away and dying in the steaming disease-ridden climate. all in pursuit of the fortune in ivory and sundry other products the jungle produces. It highlights the casual exploitation of, and cruelty to, the natives. It involves a lot of naval gazing by Marlow as he slowly travels deep into the heart of darkness to discover that the high minded, idealistic Kurtz, had descended into the savagery of the land. Kutz had becoming worshiped as a tin-god of a tribe whom he lead on raids against other tribes to steal their ivory. Ivory which he intended to take out of the Congo to make his fortune. Somewhat surprisingly, besides offering a few of incidents to illustrate how ill treated the Africans were, they play only a small role in the story. They are portraited a savages with an almost childlike simplicity which is ruthlessly exploited by the disreputable collection of Europeans who have ended up in King Leopold of Belgium's private colony in along the Congo River for one reason or another. Most of whom die there in the hostile climate. 

I think it is important to add that Conrad never identifies the exact place in Africa his story takes place, even though he was a a riverboat captain on the Congo and worked for King Leopold's private colony/business. Nor does he ever mention the fact that King Leopold himself established the colony and company that ruthlessly exploited the natives of the Congo mostly to acquire ivory. One might argue that this is perhaps to make the story more universal. But it seems to me that he may well have not cared, or dared, to point a finger at someone who should've had fingers been pointed at, as Leopold & Co.'s treatment of the natives was outrageously brutal. I see this as being morally cowardly. Indeed, the Belgium government took over the colony from "Leopold & Co." in 1908 due to the excessive cruelty and exploitations of the natives that was the practice in the Belgium Congo under the King's company during Conrad's time in the Congo.

Still, this story, and Joseph Conrad, have endured which speak to it and his lasting qualities. It is, however, as you may've gathered, not to my tastes. Too highbrow for me, I fear.

Free Gutenberg edition of The Heart of Darkness: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/526

Further Adventures of Captain Kettle, aka A Master of Fortune: Being the Further Adventures of Captain Kettle by C J Cutcliffe Hyne  B

This books is a collection of short stories that appeared in Pearson's Magazine in 1898, the first four of which concern Captain Kettle's adventures while employed by Leopold & Co. in the Belgium Congo, first as a river pilot and then as a riverboat captain. Hyne was a world traveler and had visited the Congo before writing these stories, so they also include some first hand knowledge of the locale.

And as always when talking about the Hyne's Captain Kettle stories, I must mention that he employs a great deal of racist language and racist stereotypes in the descriptions of the non-white races and non-English nationalities he describes, which to some degree or another, likely represent the view of the author as well. It would seem both Hyne and Captain Kettle believed that the British race was superior to all other races and all other nationalities. There is also a tread of anti-Semitism in the writing as well, which was common in Britain at the time. Let me quote one passage describing the passengers of an immigration ship bound for America to illustrate this attitude. "The emigrants - Austrians, Bohemians, wild Poles, filthy, crawling Russian Jews, bestial Armenians, human debris which even soldier-coveting Middle Europe rejected..." However, Hyne presents Captain Kettle as a complex and contradictory character, who is "that master of ruling men at the expense of their feelings..." but once he rules them, he looks after them as well, as we shall see.

The first of the four relevant stories, "In Quarantine," has a desperate for work the 38 year old Kettle - he had a wife and three kids to support - signing on to be a pilot for the lower Congo River, piloting ocean going boats up the river to the Capital of the Free State or Leopold & Co. 

"Here is my wife's address, sir. I'd like my half-pay sent to her." 

'She shall have it direct from Brussels, skipper, so long as you are alive - I mean, so long as you remain in the Congo Service."

His first experience on arriving in Banana is traveling along with the pilot of the Lower Congo, Nilsson, piloting a Portuguese steamer, in a hurry, up the Congo River that smells like crushed marigolds. The reason for the haste is that the native passengers are restless, fearful, and dying, because there's sickness aboard, which turns out to be smallpox. Indeed, two very sick passengers were said to have died of it while Kettle and the pilot were taking a meal in the mess room - though it was pretty clear to them, that they were not exactly dead when they were sent over the side of the ship with iron bars attached to their legs. The small pox is discovered when the ship arrives in harbor and the ship sent to the quarantine station with all aboard until the disease runs its course. As the ship's captain takes to his cabin and stays drunk, Kettle takes charge of the ship, cleaning it up and keeping order. At the end of the outbreak he carries the last dying native and locks him along with himself just to make it fair, in the captain's cabin for a night as revenge for the murder of the two native passengers. The next morning the ship's captain, in fear, decides to swim for the shore and goes over the side, and never surfaces, "Guess a crocodile chopped him." The story illustrates this important feature of Captain Kettle, whatever his opinion of the blacks and other people he looks down on, he still places a value on them as people. 

In the next story, "The Little Wooden God with the Eyes," sees his servant killed and eaten by cannibals during a visit to a native village while he is staked to the ground to be eaten alive by ants. Freed by a missionary/gun trader, he drives the natives from the village in a rage for killing his servant. And when Kettle gets sick, it was Nilsson's native wife, "Mrs. Nilssen who tediously nursed him back to health. Kettle had always been courteous to Mrs. Nilssen, even though she was as black and polished as a paten leather boot; and Mrs. Nilssen appreciated Captain Owen Kettle accordingly." In this story we also meet that missionary who decided that gin and guns paid better than missionary work but ended up being chopped, i.e. eaten. "Chop" is a word used for both food and the act of eating in the pidgin English used as the lingua franca of the coast. 

In the third story, "A Quick Way with Rebels," finds Captain Kettle a riverboat captain, and after getting ambushed by rebelling native troops and the riverboat stranded on a sand bar because the loss of power due to a bullet hole in the boiler, Kettle convinces the Belgium army officer to let him take overall command of the expedition. He repairs the steamboat's boiler with the bullet hole in it while under fire, and then frees his steamboat from a sand bar. The attack on the steamboat echoes an similar incident in The Heart of Darkness, though the reasons for the attack are different. In this story, Kettle takes the steamboat down river to collect wood for the boiler, and to be use as protection from gunfire for the crew and soldiers they are carrying, and returns to exact some sort of revenge for his crew members that they had killed, black and white in the ambush. However, when they return to base the Belgium army officer Kettle had superseded gets the base commander to order the arrest of Kettle, and probably hang him as a "rebel" for disobeying him. Kettle will have nothing of this, disarms the people trying to arrest him, and together with an English doctor, Dr. Clay, and the 50 native troops onboard the steamboat, take the steamboat up river to escape.

And in the last relevant story, "The New Republic." the story begins, with "The fighting ended, and promptly both the invaders and the invaded settled down to the new course of things without further exultation or regret. An hour after it had happened the capture of the village was already regarded as ancient history..." Kettle has a new scheme, setting up a new state in the heard of the Congo with the help of the black crew and soldiers, some 70 all told who had been "dragooned" into obedience with little trouble, as Hyne asserts that if the natives are fed, and led, they are "quite content to work, or steal, or fight, or be killed as that master sees fit to direct." 

In any event Kettle is intent on setting up this new state where natives are treated not as equals of white people, but uplifted from their savage life to something like the European ideal of civilization, though "it's understood that we run this country for our own advantage first."

"What other object should white men have up-country in Africa?' said Clay. "We don't come here merely for our health."

'But I've got a great notion of treating the people well besides. When we have made a sufficient pile - and mark you, it must be all in ivory, as there's nothing else of value that can be easy enough handled - we shall clear out for the Coast, one-time"

Which means, like Kurtz, they set out to acquire as much ivory as possible by stealing it from the surrounding villages as they built this "New Republic". Unlike Kurtz, Kettle and Doc Clay awe the natives with Kettle's accordion and Clay's banjo playing and singing. Kettle, a very church-going man ashore, also set out to preach to his citizens, though Clay could hardly keep a straight face, given what they've set out to do. Their Congo New Republic ends not with Kettle dying, but with Doc Clay's death. His leg was mangled by a falling tree in a sudden storm, and though he instructed Kettle on how to amputate it, which he did, he could never quite recover, and slowly died with Kettle at his bedside. By refusing to leave Doc Clay's bedside his New Republic falls apart as a result of an intrusion of Arab slavers and Kettle's refusal to take to the field to deal with them. Kettle then must make his way slowly to the coast traveling through the jungle by being a traveling minstrel, entertaining the natives with his accordion playing and singing, a story that must await the pen of Captain Kettle to be written, in blank verse with hymns and songs he sang at each stop.

So there you have it. Two treatments of a similar incident. One a study in moral collapse, the other as a series of extraordinary adventures written as light entertainment. I think that Hyne's stories, despite their intent, are more authentic, in that he is far more descriptive of the place and the people, as viewed by an Englishman of the era. Conrad did not even care (or dare) to mention Leopold & Co by name, while Hyne does, and he also includes pidgin-English phrases to give the story a more authentic feel.

The remaining stories cover Kettle's return to the sea, with him ending up having to take on 650 people from a burning liner, which involved tossing some of the cargo over the side of his ship to house them all - and earning the disfavor of his owner and customers, which eventually gets him fired to become a farmer. Though, like Sherlock Holmes, his retirement is short lived, and nine more books follow.

Free Gutenberg edition of A Master of Fortune; Being Further Adventures of Captain Kettle; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12556

The Man behind the Curtain

How often, dear reader, do you pay attention to the "man behind the curtain," when reading a story? A story, like the Wizard of Oz, requires a man or woman behind a curtain to create the illusion. Often, but not always, the author behind the curtain wants to remain hidden behind the curtain, keeping the reader's attention on the story they are weaving. The best succeed in getting readers' hearts beating fast with excitement, skin crawling with creepy things, and shedding tears at the death of fictional characters. In short, making things real in the moment with words alone. If that isn't wizardry, I don't know what wizardry is. 

Of course the success of  this depends on how skillfully the author is and how engaged the reader is in the story's premise, but it is still a rather amazing accomplishment, when done. But the magic doesn't work on every reader, not completely, anyway.

I must admit I've never shed a tear while reading a book, or never got so wrapped up in a story that my heart raced or ever took a "scary" scene seriously. (Though I'm not a horror story reader, so that I don't tempt fate in this regard.) This is not to say that I don't get emotionally involved in a good story - though it takes a good story - but at some level, I think I'm always aware that I'm reading a story, not living it. I'm always aware of the author working behind the curtain, perhaps because I am one myself, and have been one most of my life. I don't think this distracts from my enjoyment of a well written story, it may even enhance it, but I am never entirely immersed in the premise of the story. So how does this being a writer reading a writer work?

On a basic level I would imagine most readers recognize certain story patterns as being artifacts of the style or fashion in fiction when it was written, but forget about them when reading the story. Take for example the opening scene in a lot of contemporary SF & fantasy books. These stories often immediately open with - without context - an action scene with lots of drama and violence. Sometimes its a prologue, and sometimes it's a scene out of story order which has to be walked back once the story really starts. But you see it all the time in contemporary fiction because it is thought to "hook" the reader - in the case of traditional published book, this reader is the prospective agent or editor - into reading the rest of the story. I, however, see starting a story by jumping immediately into some sort tense action as an artifact contemporary commercial storytelling. I see the writer behind the curtain writing it that way because they have been told that is what they need to do to hook an agent, an editor, or a reader. The same can be said, at least for me, for stories that jump around between multiple points of view - another popular motif these days. While many readers find this technique interesting, I can't help but see it as an artificial construction of the author to tell a story in a contemporary way. The popularity of these techniques gives them a level of invisibility to readers. But as someone who has, over the last decade, read various "how to" write advice pieces, (which I read far too late ever to take to heart) I've often encounter these prescribed patterns. Thus when I see them, they immediately bring the author out from behind the curtain for me. It's an "Ah-ha!" moment; they're doing this because it's what so-called experts, agents, or editors have advised them to do. I see the man behind the curtain pulling levers. This awareness of techniques - of authors manipulating the levers - often takes me at least a bit out of the story.

I'll use an actual example of this from the book, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Many readers of this book often cite it as one of their favorite books of all time. In it, one of the main characters dies. If you've seen the TV mini-series you know who. Many readers say that they are so sad that they shed tears over this incident, even if they had seen the series of TV. In my case, however, it just made me angry. Angry enough for me to stop reading the story at that point. So why did I react this way? Because it felt like a cheap trick by McMurtry designed to manipulate my emotions. I saw him as deliberately pulling levers to create an emotional response, which, I will readily admit is something authors regularly do, and readers expect. It may well be justified, and obviously works within this book for most readers. But you see, I'd made the mistake of reading the prequel novels,  Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon prior to reading Lonesome Dove, so that I did not see this death, and all the others in this story in isolation. I was painfully aware that in the prequel books (written after Lonesome Dove) McMurtry introduces a great many named characters, has them do stupid things, and then kills them off. It seems like nine out of ten named characters never make it out of one of these books alive. So I was well aware of his technique of introducing characters only to kill them off when I was reading Lonesome Dove. I could seem him at it once again in this story, killing off many minor characters along the way, just as he had in the prequels. And so it goes... But when he pulled this stunt on my favorite character in the books, it was a bridge too far. He had finally flogged that mule to death. It was clearly McMurtry who had killed him, not the native Americans in the story who did the deed within the story. McMurtry was no longer behind the curtain, and, like Dorothy and her friends, I was no longer impressed. The magic of storytelling was gone.

While this is the most dramatic example an author visible behind the curtain, I can cite other examples. Charles Finch in his The Last Passenger, inserted random explanations of this and that into his Victorian era mystery story, perhaps to recreate the timeframe, but which struck me as merely trying to impress the reader with his Wikipedia-sourced tidbits of Victorian life. In the fantasy book The Lefthanded Booksellers of London, it seemed that the author was using Ready Player One's formula of inserting all sorts of trivia from the culture of the time period into the story, I suppose to world-build, but struck me as just that; random trivia. Every time I encounter a handsome 6'3" square jawed hero I cringe. And all too often when sampling SF stories I see Star Trek or Firefly, or Star Wars lurking behind the story from which the author drew their inspirations from. In short, I am often struck by the things the authors do in writing their stories - especially in modern stories - that take me out of the story, or at least keeps me a arm's length of it.

And yet, seeing the author at work is not always bad. There are stories I read just to watch that little man behind the curtain do his or her stuff. Indeed many of my favorite authors and stories fall into this category. These are the books that I enjoy how they are written - how they pull the levers. I enjoy observing just how these authors put words together to tell their story as much or more than the story they are telling. These are writers I can read over and over again for their wordsmanship rather than the story, i.e. authors like my often mentioned favorites; P G Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Patrick O'Brian, and Jasper Fforde to name a few. When reading these stories, I can both admire the authors' skillful manipulation of these "levers" and still enjoy the stories they produce without any disconnect. Though even at this level, it is not always the case of me enjoying their magic. Gene Wolfe springs to mind. He is often held up to be one of the great American literary writers, whose style and depth of writing is admired, though less widely known because he wrote in genre fiction - SF & fantasy. In the one book of his I tried to read, I found his obvious manipulation of the levers of writing too self-pretentious, deliberately obscure, and too literary for my simple tastes.

So, to sum things up, it seems that I can't help but look on stories with the eyes of either a writer, or a critic. To some degree or another, I peek look behind the curtain. The question I have is the one I posed at the beginning of this piece; how do you read stories? Are you also aware of the author behind the curtain as you read the story? Or can you completely lose yourself in the story? Can the story be everything in the moment for you? Drop a line in the comments below to enlighten me. I am very curious about this.

The Saturday Morning Post (No, 9)

This is the first of a series I plan to post chronicling my reading of P G Wodehouse's Blandings Castle Saga. This instalment reviews the first three books in the saga, beginning with the 1915 Something Fresh, aka in America, Something New. In this review and subsequent ones I will be using the covers done by the artist Ionicus whenever possible, as he is my favorite Wodehouse artist. 

The series includes 10 novels, and nine short stories spread out over four short story collection written between 1914 and 1972. I am missing only one short story, "Birth of a Salesman." in Nothing Serious.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Something Fresh (a.k.a Something New) by P. G. Wodehouse  B

This is the first Blandings Castle book written while in America in 1914 and it set the pattern for the series. It opens with an introduction to Ashe Marson, a 26 year old enthusiast of physical health who is living in a London boarding house, making a meager living by writing the monthly adventures of Gridley Quayle, Investigator for the Mammoth Publishing Company, a job which he finds like being "chained to some horrible monster." Early on he meets a pretty girl by the name of Joan Valentine who just moved into his boarding and discovers that she is a "comrade in misfortune" a fellow writer who writers a short story every month for Home Gossip magazine from the same publisher. Joan has done a number of things since her wealthy father died included working on stage, and is more or less broke as well. Being a can-do person, she urges Ashe to act if he is so dissatisfied with his job.

We are then introduced to Freddie Treepwood, the younger son of Lord Emesworth, who is engaged to Aline Peters, the daughter of a wealthy retired American business man. He fears that letters he sent to Joan Valentine when she was on the stage might be used to sue him for breach of promise and wreck his change of marriage, so hires a rather shady fellow to visit her to recover those letters (which she had already destroyed). Meanwhile, his very absent minded father visits the home of Mr Peters who shows him his collection of Egyptian scarabs. Mr Peters is called away for a moment during this process, leaving Lord Emsworth alone, who absently pockets the very valuable scarab that he had been when Mr Peters was called away holding, and leaves with it. Mr Peters believes that he stole it, and wants it back, and is willing to pay $5000 to recover it. Ashe, remembering Joan's urging to do something else if he hates writing the Gridley Quayle stories, answers a newspaper ad and is hired by Mr Peters to accompany him in his visit to Blandings Castle acting as his valet to steal the scarab back. Joan, an old friend of Aline Peters from her more affluent days, also wants to collect the reward and travels to Blandings as Aline's maid for that purpose as well. We also have staying at Blandings, one George Emerson, who is in love with Aline and urges her to ditch Freddie. And with that, we have the pattern of the saga set; people visiting Blandings Castle as imposters for various reasons with various star-crossed lovers in need of money. 

Wodehouse plots are very intricate, so I won't go any further into it, save that we meet several of the regulars in this first volume, including Beach, the butler and Lord Emsworth's private secretary, the "Efficient Baxter." Lady Ann Warblington is the sister of Lord Emsworth living with him in this story, but she is replaced by the formidable Aunt Constance Keeble in all subsequent stories. This story is also set in the spring, while all subsequent ones are set in an endless summer. Market Blandings is said to be 5 miles distant in this story, when in latter books it is a more convenient, and walkable, distance away at 2 miles.

Up until this story, Wodehouse had been selling his stories to lower paying magazines, but he sold this one to George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post for "the stupefying sum of $3,500." As he wrote in the preface; "I had always known in a vague sort of way that there was money like $3500 in the world, but I had never expected to touch it. If I was a hundred bucks ahead of the game in those days, I thought I was doing well." He went on to sell the magazine rights of many of his stories to the Saturday Evening Post for decades to come. He would not write another Blandings Castle book until 1922, eight years later.

Free Gutenberg edition of Something New: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2042

Leave it to Psmith by P. G. Wodehouse  B+

Leave it to Psmith marks the fourth story the character of (Rupert or Ronald) Psmith appears in. He made is debut in 1909 as a sidekick character for Mike Jackson in the school story "The Lost Lambs" that Wodehouse wrote for The Captain magazine and later published as the novel Mike and Psmith.  (Available on Gutenberg.) He then appeared in two more stories for the Captain, which were published as Psmith in the City (1910) and Psmith, Journalist (1915) before appearing in this story. Wodehouse has said that Psmith is the only character drawn from real life, a school mate of this cousin - one of the sons of Richard D'Oyly Carte of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, either Rupert or Lucas.

In this 1923 story, the second in the Blandings Castle saga, we find Psmith... Never mind. I had written a hundred plus words and had just scratched the surface of the set-up for this novel. Wodehouse books are constructed like clockworks, as one of the characters would say, "wheels within wheels," and to just describe the various various wheels without even setting them into motion would make for an essay in itself. Let's just say that Aunt Connie sent Lord Emsworth to London to collect a Canadian Poet, and returns with Psmith, pretending to be that poet because he wanted to follow a girl he had just met, who had been hired to catalog the Blandings Castle library. Freddie Treepwood needs money, and so does Aunt Connie's husband, Keeble, who is dominated by Aunt Connie, to the extent that he can't call his own money his own. They devise a plan to steal Aunt Connie's valuable diamond necklace to get that money. Keeble would replace the necklace, of course, but use the proceeds from the stolen one to help out his step daughter and her husband who just happen to be old friends of Psmith... And so it goes... As I said, wheels within wheels... All the usual suspects are present, including Aunt Connie's protégé, the Efficient Baxter as Lord Emsworth's private secretary whose suspicion must be foiled...

In Something Fresh you see the beginnings of the Wodehouse's musical comedy without music style, and in Leave it to Psmith, it is almost perfected; snappy, intricately woven, tightly paced scenes that have all the characters pursuing their various schemes, however ineptly. 

In this novel Lord Emsworth sister Lady Ann Warblington is replaced by the formidable Lady Constance Keeble, aka Aunt Connie, and I don't believe Lady Ann appears again, though Lord Emsworth seems to have a lot of other sisters to produce the necessary nieces and nephews, including Julia Fish, and Lady Charlotte, who is said the be even a tougher egg than Lady Constance. Aunt Connie's husband makes his only appearance in this story, and in later stories she is said to be widowed.

Free Gutenberg edition of Leave it to Psmith: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60067

Blandings Castle, (a.k.a Blandings Castle and Elsewhere) by P. G. Wodehouse  B

There are a dozen short stories in this collection, of which six are part of the Blanding Castle saga, to wit; 

"The Custody of the Pumpkin" concerns Lord Emsworth prize pumpkin and Freddie's secret new girl friend, Aggie (Niagara) Donaldson, who is sort of a cousin to his gardener Angus McAllister. When Lord Emsworth learns of this, he fires Angus because he won't send Aggie away. But he soon comes to regret it for his pumpkin's sake - this story being before the pig, Empress of Blanding, takes center state as Lord Emsworth pride and joy. In this story Freddie elopes with Aggie, who turns out to be the daughter of a millionaire of Donaldson's Dog-Biscuits fame. And much to Lord Emsworth's relief, Freddie is off to America to help his new father-in-law sell dog biscuits.

"Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best" In this story, set eight months later, Lord Emsworth has grown a beard and Freddie is back in England selling dog biscuits and is on the outs with Aggie because of his effort to sell a movie script by taking out a actress to dinner.

"Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey! in which the Empress of Blandings makes her first appearance as a contender for the silver medal in Shrophshire's 87th annual Agricultural Show's Fat Pig class. Just ten days before the show Lord Emworth's pig man gets locked up in jail, and the Empress is off her feed, sending Lord Emworth to London to find a substitute pig man. Meanwhile his niece, Angela has broken off an engagement with Lord Heacham and intends to marry a neighbor, James Belford, who is back from spending several years in America where he worked on a in Nebraska farm. Lord Emsworth tries to discourage James, but in explaining his concern for the Empress, James explains that the pig is pining away for his jailed pig man and probably misses his special afternoon call for dinner, because "Pigs are temperamental. Omit to call them, and they'll starve rather than put on the nose-bag. Call them right, and they will follow you to the ends of the earth with their mouths watering." He teaches Lord Emsworth the "master word", i.e. the title of the story. And, in the end, when Lord Emsworth doesn't get it quite right, uses it to get the Empress to feeding again, thus winning the hand of Angela in marriage.

"Company for Gertrude" in which Freddie, still in England promoting his father-in-law's dog-biscuit business works to get his aunt Georgiana, the owner of "four Pekes, two Poms, a Yorkshire terrier, five Sealyhams, a Borzol, and an Airedale" to try Donaldson's Dog-Joy biscuits figuring that her patronage would be good for business. Freddie meets an old university friend, now  Rev. Rupert "Beefy" Bingham, who wants to marry another niece of Lord Emsworth, Gertrude, but doesn't have enough money to satisfy Aunt Connie. Gertrude is in exile at Blandings Castle. "The family seems to look on the place as sort of Bastille. Whenever the young of the species make a floater like falling in love with the wrong man, they are always shot off to Blandings to recover." Freddie sends Beefy to Blandings to get on Lord Emsworth's good side, since Lord Emsworth has the power to hire ministers for several churches in the countryside. If Beefy could land one of those, he could make the case of being able to marry Gertrude. 

"The Go-getter" continues the story line in "Company for Gertrude" taking it to is  happy conclusion, with various alarms and excursions involving dogs.

"Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend" In this story, Lord Emsworth is expected to attend, in top hat and stiff collar, the "August Bank Holiday Saturnalia at Blandings Castle" i.e. the Blandings Parva School Treat. Upset after another confrontation with Angus McAllister about paving the yew alley with gravel, and having to wear a top hat and stiff collar, he is in the process of judging the cottage gardens of Blandings Parva, one of the event's contests, when he meets a young girl of 12 or 13, one of the London Air children that had been sent to the countryside from London's East End for a time to experience nature. She commands a dog to stop growling at Lord Emsworth, and goes on to say that she had picked some flowers from "up at the big 'ahse. Coo! The old josser the plice belongs to didn't arf chase me. 'E found me picking 'em and 'e sharted somefin at me and came runnin' after me, but I copped 'im on the shin wiv a stone and 'e stopped to rub it and I came away." Lord Emswoth's "mind was so filled with admiration and gratitude" on hearing how she treated McAllister right just after his tussle with him, takes her under his wing, showing her his garden, letting her pick all the flowers she wants, and treats her to a very fine meal, sending food more for her brother. A very sweet story.

Enough for now, more Blandings stories soon.

The Shape of Book Sales

The song "House of the Rising Sun" might have been written to warn poor sons and daughters not to become writers, since it's "been the ruin of many a poor soul." Artists tend to be temperamental, and a common fate of too many writers of fiction is to "wear that ball and chain" and "The only time he's satisfied, Is when he drinks his liquor down".  Maybe that's an exaggeration. But then again, maybe not.

The reason is that while a few authors become very famous - anything is possible, after all - the vast majority are not only not famous, but not even published. And even today when anyone can publish their own work at their expense, most are not read. As I have noted in the past, it is said that 60% of traditionally published authors are out of the business after three years, and 90% are out after ten. The rate is likely higher amongst self-published authors. The reason is that the book business is one where a relative handful of authors sell a ton of books, a lucky few sell enough books to stay published (this is a declining category) but most fail to click, selling a relative handful of books. I would go so far as to say that most traditional published authors are merely auditioning to become best sellers. They are given their chance - a contract - and if/when they fail to click, the luckiest ones end up either selling their future books to a small presses for a thousand dollars, while the rest find themselves looking for a new career.

To illustrate this sad fact, let's revisit some Amazon data dating back 2016 which I blogged about back then. To generate the data authors provided sales numbers and Amazon sales ranking to AuthorEarning. This data was used to reverse engineer how Amazon ranks each book by sales. Once a quarter, on a single day, AuthorEarnings collected the sales rankings from all the books listed on Amazon's many "100 Best Selling Books" lists and used known rank/sales numbers to estimate the sales of those books on that day. This captured data on 200,000 ebooks. Below is the chart AuthorEarnings "Data Guy" provided for Feb 2016. Click on the chart for a larger version.

The green and grey dots represent author supplied data points. The important thing to note about this curve is that it is logarithmic, both the sales numbers and ranking increase by an order of magnitude at every marking; i.e. sales on the vertical axis go from one book a day to 100, 1,000 and then 10,000 a day at the top, while the sales rankings run from #1 to a million on the horizontal one. This method creates a nice fat curve that looks promising, until you realize that by the middle of the curve, you've gone from 10,000 sales a day to 100 with a sales rank of perhaps 5,000. At the end of the scale you're selling one to 10 books a day. 

The graph below charts the above data on a linear scale, with sales represented by the red line. That fat curve in the graph above is the little bend in the red line below. This graph gives a much clearer idea of the big picture.

Using numbers from these graphs, we can roughly estimate the sales range for ebooks in the various levels of ranking, as they existed in 2016. The numbers might be slightly different today, but the picture is likely the same.

Sales Rank    number of titles  sales per day   sales per year at day rate

#1 to #10                        10     8000 to 2000    2.92m to 730,000

#11 to #100                     90    2000 to 500    730,000 to 182,500

#101 to #1000                900    500 to 100      182,500 to 36,500

#1001 to #10,000          9,000      100 to 12        36,500 to 4,380

#10,001 to #100,000    90,000         12 to 1            4,380 to 365

#100,001 to #200,000  100,000       1 or less            365 or less

The data collected only included the top selling 5% of Amazon sales. The lower 95% of books sell less than a book a day, and once a book's sales rank falls below 200,000, it is a book a month or less. Many sell none at all. While these figures are 7 years old, I doubt things have changed significantly - though pages read in the Kindle Unlimited lending library are now figured into sales ranking, somehow.

I do have one anecdotical bit of information that provides a glimpse of this sales phenomena. By some strange stroke of luck, my book The Girl on the Kerb earned some sort of promotion on Amazon after they cut the price to free, and so for several days it was selling between 700 to 800 free copies a day. This level of sales moved its sales rank up to being the #5 book best selling book on the 100 Best Selling Thriller-Espionage list, and I seem to remember it being somewhere near the 1,000 rank on the complete Best Selling Free chart. Today, with its glory days behind it, it still ranked around #29 on that list and #6,568 on Amazon's Best Selling Free list with its sales of 2 to 3 copies a day (76 for the month of July 2023), so that you see how fast sales fall off the further a book is from the top 10 sales spots.

All of which is to say that freelance writing is a very bad business to be in unless you are very, very lucky, and perhaps have some talent. To continue to be employed in it requires every bit as much luck. Heck, you need to be very lucky just to get your chance to fail at it. Failure is the norm. And it ain't easy being one of the lucky. I've seen an author literally begging people on Titter to buy his book, as he perceives his career circling the drain - without any apparent success. And you often hear of authors taking time away from pursuing their dream of being a published author for mental health issues. Plus, the initial high of landing a book deal- the dream of a lifetime - quickly fades as the reality of the business, settles in. Down through the ages machines have replaced people doing dirty, dangerous, and mind numbing jobs, and in this respect, the rise of AI written books could easily be seen as part of this tradition and a blessing in disguise. 

However, many people write simply for pleasure, myself included, so that AI will never replace writers completely. Human writers will find other ways to reach readers, and some may even find some sort of way of making some sort of money off of it. Again, anything is possible, after all. Perhaps these "handmade" stories will evolve into something that looks like the fan fiction community of today - a community of readers and writers who enjoy writing and reading, and not a business at all. Time will tell.

The Saturday Morning Post (No.8)

This week I'm reviewing two books, the first, a humous fantasy novel featuring a devil, Mephistopheles, and a wolf that he transforms into a man and a humorous romance about an Australian genetics professor's plan to find a suitable wife.
 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Devil and The Wolf by Richard L Pastore  B

Many centuries ago, an old and powerful devil, Mephistopheles had been tasked with giving the humans he selects whatever they desire, as part of an experiment to determine if humans are fundamentally good or evil. Apparently this question is of some importance to both heaven and hell, which are currently engaged in a cold war following a disastrously hot war. However, Mephistopheles has grown weary of his task, since no definitive answer has come out of this long running experiment. Because of this, he has devised a plan to end it, which involves remaking a wolf into a human; one JR Wolfe, the wolf in the title. I will admit that the metaphysical and philosophical underpinnings of both the experiment and how the creation of JR Wolfe fits into it are over my head, but I just went along with the flow. And the story flows along with a lot of humor as the former wolf explores his human nature and human possibilities. There are a number of subplots involving humans here on earth and angels and devils in heaven and hell that threaten Mephistopheles and his plot to bring the great experiment to an end as well. These subplots slowly unfold throughout the story, though it is never clear exactly what Mephistopheles is up to until the very end, so I won't spoil that except to say that there is an explanation of sorts, and that it involving a tense confrontation between him, heaven, and hell. Thankfully, this confrontation is kept low key, keeping the whole story somewhat believable, unlike the last book I read dealing with heaven and hell, Grave Importance by Vivian Shaw which carried its confrontation well over the top. To be honest, I don't know if the explanation makes any sense, as I'm unfamiliar Western philosophy, but I have my doubts. As I said, I content just to go along for the ride. I enjoyed the story, though I read it more as a modern fairy tale than a fantasy novel.

But oh, that premise again. What follows are a few remarks concerning that premise, not of the book The Devil and the Wolf, itself. My comments apply to all similar stories like Good Omens, The Good Place, Grave Importance, and likely many others as well. Indeed, the winning novel of the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off #8, Small Miracles by Olivia Atwater is another book featuring an angel and a devil vying to win over a selected human. It seems to be a popular theme.

But not with me. By the time I was in 8th grade in a Catholic school, I was reading SF and had come to realize just how insignificant the Earth's place in the universe is. This being the case, to ascribe it as the center stage of THE whole reason for the creation of the whole universe seemed silly to me even at that tender age. Four more years of Catholic education and a lifetime lived has not changed my view of the matter. This outlook means that stories that utilize Christian mythology with angels and devils, heaven and hell, strike me as being inherently nonsensical. And even when a writer tries to modernize this mythology, as in the stories mentioned above, by giving heaven and hell some sort of faux scientific basis using quantum mechanics and the theoretical multiverse, they are still ignoring the vastness of the rest of the universe. They are still placing the Earth center stage for THE universal drama, which as I said, just doesn't make any sense to me. Plus, the authors of these stories strip devils of their evilness and angels of their rightlessness, and in doing so, ignore almost everything fundamental about them. They instead simply make devils and angels into humans with magical powers and wings, who, like humans, must deal with politics, war, and death. Gone are the orthodox flames of eternal damnation and the great cathedrals of heaven; heaven and hell are just alternate versions of Earth. Since they are defanged, revisionist, unrecognizable versions of those mythological places, so why use them at all? Moreover, I believe that all of the stories I've mentioned keep the Christian god well off stage, without mention of him at all. I assume this is for story reasons, since a supposed all-powerful creator of everything could solve any problem presented in the story in a snap of his fingers. 

Still fiction is fiction, so what's the problem? There is none, except that for me, my fundamental disbelief of the premise they are playing with makes the story a mere fairy tale for me. By fairy tale I mean a story that, as I read the story, I can't suspend my disbelief and really get into the story as I would like. This is not always the case for fantasy or humorous stories for me. You can have silliness and silly characters, and still ground the story with just enough realism for me to suspend my disbelief in the premise and/or characters, so that, at least when I'm reading the story, the characters and their story become alive in my imagination. I'm willing, indeed, wanting to believe that P G  Wodehouse's world could exist somewhere in the multiverse because his characters seem like they could be real somewhere, in sometime. In writing his stories he keep one foot on the ground, even if he has to stand on his tip toes to do so. This isn't the case for me when dealing with devils and angels, as my long held disbelief in their existence and Christian mythology makes it impossible for me to see the story as anything more than tall tale. Blame it on my youth.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion  B

This 2013 book was suggested by my wife, who read and enjoyed it. It set in the author's homeland of Australia and concerns a socially awkward but detail orientated college professor, Don Tillman. He is something of a genius who is on the Asperger's spectrum. He has decided to find a wife, and to do so he devises the Wife Project that includes a 16 page survey for prospective applicants to that position to complete in the hope of avoiding wasting time on unsuitable prospects. Pickings are few.

By accident he invites Rosie, who he thinks is responding to his Wife Project, but wasn't, to a disastrous dinner, but nevertheless becomes involved with her, helping her in her quest to find who her real father is. It was hinted to her that her biological father wasn't the man who raised her, but someone in her mother's class of fellow doctors who, on the night of their graduation party she slept with. Don uses his skills in genetic, access to the university facilities, and as the story goes on, his newly acquired skills to covertly collect and analyze DNA samples of her mother's classmates. Along the way he is forced to change his way of life, becoming less rigid, as he faces new challenges - changes that he discovers are worthwhile to make in his life. As usual, I don't like to give much of the plot away, so I'll leave it at that.

I enjoyed the book and the character of Don Tillman. It is told in first person by Don, so that you get into the mind of someone on the Asperger's spectrum and who is not only aware of his social limitations, but has adjusted to them, only to have to navigate the many changes inadvertently brought about by his decision to find a wife. By telling the story from Tillman's point of view, so we can watch, step by step, his thought processes, Simsion is able to make a plausible  case that Don could change in the ways he did within the story. If you want an lighthearted interesting read, with a little something different, this is your ticket.

Series in Paint and Print

During my ongoing survey of art, I have sometimes come across artists who paint the same scene again and again, in varying light, seasons and viewing angles. It struck me that writers often do the same thing, either in the writing of series stories with a familiar cast of characters and setting, or in the writing of different stories that explore a favorite theme or topic again and again, or perhaps just by reusing patterns and stylistic techniques across their various books.

Painting by George Ames Aldrich

I suspect that both artists and writers do this for similar reasons. First being that they might well be a love of the subject, the scene, the locale, the world, the stylistic motif and/or the cast of characters. It may also be a comfortable way of exploring and developing a technique, isolating it from the subject by using it on a familiar subject again and again. Plus, I also suspect that both viewers and readers (and publishers) find these differences in the details of something familiar both interesting and comfortable as well. Plus, there may be commercial reasons for doing so as well, some genres almost demand that writers write very similar books.

Bridge of Flowers by George Ames  Aldrich

In painting, Monet's Rouen Cathedral series of at least a dozen paintings is one of the most famous series of paintings. In it Monet explores how light changes our perceptions. However I've chosen George Ames Aldrich's series of paintings of the bridge at Quimper (or Quimperie) to illustrate this little essay because while the general shape of the scene is maintained, he changes many of the little details - things like how he paints the houses across the river and how wide the steps alongside the river are. The distant landscape beyond the bridge also changes in each painting to suit the scene. Writers do similar things, taking the shape of a familiar story pattern, setting, and characters, and then slightly alter the plot, use new dialog, new characters and perhaps expand the world to make the new story different enough while keeping its familiar feeling. 

The Bridge at Quimper by George Ames Aldrich

The  example in writing that inspired me to write this little essay is P. G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle books. They feature the same setting and many of the same characters, or perhaps more accurately, many same and many similar characters, with similar story lines, like forbidden love, lack of money, and guests as imposters both benign and comically sinister. And then there is his unique writing style common to every story. What makes them interesting is how the plot, though familiar-ish, differs in the details as well as on a line by line, sentence level. And how, though the happy outcome is known to the reader from the pattern, it is finally arrived at.

Bridge at Quimperie by George Ames Aldrich

There are many other examples of authors returning again to familiar characters and familiar plots. I've mentioned the Stephanie Plum series as one where the author uses a formula to write the story - the premise, the title character that never gets better at her job, her helper, her love triangle, and her Grannie... all make their expected appearances. Perhaps less formulistic, but still familiar are the Louise Penny books that my wife looks forward to each fall. Indeed, mysteries almost always have their own familiar patterns, it is a feature of the genre. This true of many famous fantasies as well. And, then there are all those author-published romance, thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy series books on Amazon.

George Ames Aldrich (couldn't find its title)

In writing, as well as painting, there are more subtle ways of exploring different themes or subjects than just copying the same scene or using the same plot formula. One can use a familiar technique or style to present a different looking work of art or an entirely different story, that may still speak to a common theme. Different motifs and plot lines can be employed to address a favorite theme from different angles. And on a larger scale, it may be style and voice that provides the familiar elements across the artist's work, i.e. all Monet's work can be seen as a long series of impressionist paintings, just as stylistic elements tie all of Stephen King's books together.

The Flower Bridge, Quimperie by George Ames Aldrich

One such stylistic choice of mine, a common motif that I think may provide a familiar element in differing stories, is that since Beneath the Lanterns, I have written my first person narrator as a "Watson." That is to say, the narrator is merely the story's driving force character's sidekick, someone who sets out an account of what the mover & shaker of the story accomplishes. There is no particularity artistic reason for me to do this, it is simply that I am not a mover & shaker sort of person, so that by giving that role to a character in whose thought process is simply easier; I don't have to invent and describe the process in any detail. Instead, I can have them just explain their their motivations - or not - without describing all the messy mental work of arriving at them. I think that this point of view defines how the story reads, and thus, is an important element of my author "voice." Indeed, even Captain Litang in The Bright Black Sea starts out that way, and somewhat reluctantly evolves to be the decision maker a captain needs to be. And even then, in The Lost Star's Sea, he still often takes a back seat to companions who are more familiar with the world than he. 

Venetian Bridge by George Ames Aldrich

Of course, there can be much deeper themes and patterns within stories that an author might return to again and again that a casual reader may not discern. In this case the patterns might well be nestled deeper within the stories than the dissimilarities of the stories would suggest. Comfortable familiarity is often far from the aim of many writers. And well, this is what I suspect master of fine arts programs set out to teach. 

Still, while I am not a master of the fine arts, I think that I can say that most viewers and reader like a mix of the familiar with the unfamiliar. They will quickly get bored with the same old, same old, but they are also often reluctant to try something completely new as well. In art, viewers may not want to see the same subject painted over and over again in the same way, but as I have suggested they may well be a fan of an artist because of their familiar style regardless of the subject. And the same can be said of writers. Often it is the favorite elements of a writer's style that will keep readers coming back for different stories.

Untitled by George Ames Aldrich

So, in the end, there limits to both originality and repetition. Artists of all kinds and mediums, be it paint, words, music, etc. must, if they want commercial success, find and work within those lines of audience acceptance, as vague as they are - even as they often strive to push them out just a little more.