How To Be... an Incredible Hulk (and an Indie Life post)

Okay, so this entry may seem like an odd choice (my wife totally disapproves of it), BUT, if you follow along to the very end, it will all make sense. Probably. I think it will. It does in my mind, anyway. Besides, in a comment back on this post, Rusty said that growing up to be the Incredible Hulk

was his childhood dream, and I felt like that deserved some recognition. I wanted to dig up old bones; he wanted to "turn into an enormous green rage monster."

But how would one really go about doing that?

Well, my first bit of advice is to be the age of a middle schooler. They have the whole flying into a rage monster thing down. Most of us grow out of that, though, so what other way would one have of becoming a Hulk?

Well, in pretty much every version of the Hulk out there, the first thing you need to have is some pretty serious anger issues, ideally that you're suppressing. For some reason, gamma radiation will release this suppressed anger while also turning you green. Unless you become the a red hulk.

But, then, I'm not actually sure they used gamma radiation on those, so let's just stick to green. Which takes us back to gamma radiation, which is the second necessary ingredient to Hulkify yourself.

Originally, this gamma radiation was delivered via a gamma nuke, but I don't suggest this as your option. Also, it turned him grey

which isn't as impressive in that he looks more gorilla-ish, but he does dress better. Sometimes. But I digress...

More recent iterations of the Hulk have included such things as genetics research and bioengineering, and, honestly, those things put the idea of something Hulk-like into the realm of possibility. We are already working on programs to produce results like this. Okay, maybe now quite like busting out of your clothes and turning colors, but still...

At any rate, if you really want to be the Hulk or Hulk-like, I would bet there are plenty of programs that you could volunteer to join for "testing." I'm sure there will be a lot of paperwork to fill out. Mostly paperwork involving non-disclosure agreements and, um, whatever those things are called where you don't hold the other people responsible when you burst into a green rage monster.
There may also be private individuals who would not need you to sign all of that messy paperwork.

The point is that, if this is something you really wanted to achieve, it's not out of the realm of possibility anymore.

This is also an Indie Life day.

People seem to always want something for nothing, and I get that. I do. Free is good, right? But that's not really what I'm talking about, because free implies that the giver is making a gesture. It's his choice. No, what I'm talking about is when people work the system to take advantage of a situation to get something for nothing.

For a while, Amazon allowed, through it's affiliate program, people to get something for nothing. Just by listing the daily free Kindle listings on their site, an affiliate could earn money from downloads that Amazon wasn't making any money off of. It went on for quite a while before Amazon put a stop to it. The thing that gets me about this is that these people that were taking advantage of what was basically an oversight on the part of Amazon began complaining as soon as Amazon said it would no longer pay affiliates for free downloads. Basically, if we don't make any money from it, you don't make any money from it. I don't see anything wrong with that.

A lot of these people that run these sites advertising free books have been yelling very loudly, though, not that it's doing them any good. Personally, I just don't understand how anyone can feel justified in complaining about not getting something anymore that they were, in effect, stealing to begin with, but they are.

To make up for this lack of income, many of these sites want to, now, charge the author for these services, services that many authors didn't know they were receiving in the first place. On the surface, there's nothing wrong with this; my issue is the way some of these sites are going about it. They want you to have a free offering (to pull in clicks) and a paid option which will earn them affiliate money from Amazon. In effect, they want to be paid from both sides at once. And, maybe, that's okay, it's the way some of these sites are going about it that bothers me along with the fees they want to charge the authors for the service.

Which is how this applies to Indie Life. It's important, as an independently published author, to not get roped into paying more for a service than you're going to get back from using it, and most of these kind of sites are going to do just that, charge you more for the service than you will make from it. Sometimes much more. So what I'm saying here is "be careful." Before you spend any money to promote your book, make sure you do a full evaluation of the service. What kind of traffic do they get? What kind of experience have other authors had? Are they upfront with you and will they answer your questions?

I've gotten pretty used to seeing authors posting about how they spent $50-60 to promote on one of these types of sites for a day and how they only made $10 from it. There's no way to cut that so that it's good for you as the author. Don't be roped in by promises of increasing your visibility or broadening your reader base if your just feeding someone else's thirst for free money. At that point, you may as well be working with a vanity press.

Remember, the money should flow to the author, not from the author.