Writing lessons from Mad Max: Fury Road

*minor spoilers follow

 

Mad Max: Fury Road is an understated movie. Oh, I know, I know it's perhaps the greatest action/car chase/things-blow-up movie in existence. But it's also very understated and that serves to make it more powerful.

One of the things I think about when writing is the relationship with the reader. Am I telling the reader too much (IE the ol' show don't tell rule). Am I trusting the reader to put two and two together (and make four, of course) or am I not trusting them and telling them too much backstory (again!)? Readers become more engaged if they are allowed to participate in the story. To not have every scene and emotion handed to them. As writers we must give them space and just enough information to figure out for themselves what the character is feeling. We must keep the story tantalizing.

That's one of the brilliant aspects of Mad Max: Fury Road. Charlize Theoron's character, Imperator Furiosa (love that name), has a disability. She is missing an arm. But the director doesn't give us a long shot of her missing arm and dwell on it. In fact we see her several times before we get a hint that she is using a prosthetic. And even once it is clear that she is missing an arm no one makes a note of it. In fact it's a non-issue (and makes her cooler because of her metal arm). No boring forced dramatic back story. We just know that she has been scarred by some past event and has risen above it. We are allowed to come to that conclusion on our own.

Max himself has a back story. We are told in frightening micro-second flashbacks that he has lost his family. But we aren't hit over the head with a long backstory. He doesn't stop to shout out "My family is gone and that's why I'm so messed up." Again, the viewer is allowed to come to that conclusion.

The world they live in is a dystopian world. Again, there isn't a long dramatic voice over telling us all the horrible things that happened to make it that way. We are just thrust into the world as it is and have to figure out the rest for ourselves.

Throughout the movie we are given just enough information to flesh out the characters or the background of the world we are inhabiting. But not once are we slowed down from our pursuit of the story.

And what a relentless story it is.

Art

10,000 Copies Sold! Now I Can Retire

Well, my total eBook sales across all platforms is now 10, 016 copies. I'm happy to have reached this magic milestone and have now ordered a yacht for my backyard. All hands report on deck! Or perhaps I should write about about how to sell ebooks for the YA and Children's market. It could be titled: How To Sell 10,000 Copies in Fifty Months!

All kidding aside I'm glad that this ebook adventure has been (sometimes) a tidy little addition to my regular income. All of the books that I'm selling are either out of print editions that I've re-issued in various countries or collections of new work (for example my short stories). And the work I did at the beginning of this experiment has paid off. Basically, I don't have to lift a finger to keep that income trickling in.

If you're curious about reading this adventure from the beginning click:  beginning.

Oh, why don't we look at the handy dandy chart?

It does look a bit like a patient who has flatlined, doesn't it? Except for that little burst of life at the end there. To quote Monty Python: I'm not dead yet. I think I'll go for a walk. The basic story to the graphic is this: when I started selling eBooks in 2011 you could give away free books then when you switched your book back to being paid it would (sometimes) rocket up the charts. That's why there are those two big mountains at the start of the chart. But in 2012 Amazon changed its logarithms so that this "trick" didn't work as well. And from that point on the books sold whenever someone stumbled across them. The smaller "mountains" are when I lowered the price to 99 cents and the book gained a bit more traction then went back to selling 10-30 copies a month again. And that's why the graph begins to rise at the end. One of my books (DUST) was on sale and briefly went up the charts. The graph will drop back down again this month. I'm certain of it.

I have 16 different books for sale and the majority of my sales (90%) have been to Kindle. Dust has sold the majority of the copies (6500). I think that's because it's a book that crosses over from YA to adult reading and the majority of ebook sales are to the adult market. And it has the most reviews.

  

The Hunchback Assignments are in second place. My self published versions are only sold in the UK (because publishers in other countries own the erights). The four books have totalled 1600 in sales. That's a tidy sum over time for very little extra work on my part.

Anyway, as I said, I'm pleased to have reached this milestone. And it's still my experience that in general books for younger audiences sell a lot more copies in paperback than they do eBooks unless they are able to attract adult eyeballs online. I do plan more experiments in the future, including a How to Write Kid Lit book and other "manual" type books to test out that part of the market.

Until then...tally ho!

Art