Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 119

25 More Hard Truths About Writing And Publishing

1. You’re Always About 12 To 24 Months From Dying In The Abyss

I talked about this in one of my more recent posts (advice for the mid-career writer) — but looking ahead a year or two down the line, most writers will see a cliff. This cliff represents the end of your current contracts, maybe the end of a series, and at that point you should expect your career to become a giant blinky spinny question mark. A cartoon question mark that laughs (“hyuck hyuck hyuck!”) and just shrugs whenever you ask it a question. It’s like a Magic 8-Ball except it only has one answer in its cabinet and that answer is, “Gosh golly who the fuck knows, maybe you’ll be eaten by a bear, hyuck hyuck.” In fact, one wonders if a cliff is the wrong metaphor: perhaps it’s a cave. A dark cave whose dark depths may present treasure (your book sold well and the publisher wants more!) or tribulation (the publisher said you sold four copies and will now exercise a rare contract clause where they get to force you to battle other authors in a subterranean Manhattan fight club for the pleasure of the literary elite).

2. Social Media Will Not Sell Your Books

Said it before, will scream it again and again at the asylum walls until my spit-forth soaks the padding — social media will sell tens or hundreds of books, but not thousands. Social media is good for getting the word out! Social media is good for earnestly talking about your book. Social media is not a good long-term sales channel. Like, that thing where you hop on there and constantly run through a reiterative a sales pitch? Day after day? It feels gross because it doesn’t really work. If it did work, you’d be selling many copies of your book to a considerable portion of your social media audience. And you’re probably not.

3. Your Book May Not Sell For A Lot Of Uncontrollable Reasons

CONGRATULATIONS YOUR BOOK IS PUBLISHED. *trumpets and fanfare and ice cream firehoses and literary fight clubs for your delight* OH SHIT SORRY YOUR BOOK SOLD FOUR COPIES. And you’re like, wait, why? Why did it only sell four copies? Could be that your book sucks. Or your publisher didn’t care about your book. Or the one person your publisher picked to market your book is the janitor. Maybe the bookstores didn’t carry it. Maybe the print run was too short. Maybe someone forgot to send it out to trade journals. Maybe the trade journals had a backlog because it’s a busy month with a lot of books landing and sorry, yours just wasn’t the priority. Maybe your genre has been oversaturated. Maybe somebody in the CHAIN OF POWER just fucking hates you and your hair and your clothes. Maybe you’re secretly a ghost and don’t realize it and nobody can see your book. Who knows? Ha ha ha, it’s a spinning carousel of constantly defecating horses! You don’t know which one shit on you! They just did! And maybe at the end of the day it is your fault and you wrote a less-than-great book or the wrong book or…? So, control what you can control and write the next one as best as you can, and the next one even better.

4. Quality Matters Less Than You’d Hope

Wait, did I say that you should write the best book? You should. You totally should. And it proooooobably doesn’t matter. Let’s face this train head on: a book that super-sucks might do really well, and a book that is legitimately fucking amazing and everyone knows it and it wins awards and is precious to many might sell like a rock dropped into a toilet. This is far from universally true! Sometimes great books sell equal to its perceived quality. Sometimes bad books huff glue and die in a gutter. And nearly always, good and bad are totally subjective declarations because outside of core writing competency, stories are not plug-and-play dongles.

5. Luck Matters More Than You’d Like

I have asked a question of authors whose books hit big, and that question is: “How did you do it?” And more often than not, the answer is an empty smile and a slow shrug. Books are not widgets. They are not generally the result of a creator looking at the market and saying, “You know what the Butt Plug industry is missing? A Butt Plug that looks like David Bowie’s The Goblin King.” It’s not a greeting card where you suddenly identify a new holiday (“OMG it’s Dachsunds-In-Catapults Day!”) that needs a line of greeting cards, stat. Books arrive in a giant sweeping tide of releases — hundreds of books crashing every week upon a narrow audience. The ones that do well may do well because… god, who the fuck knows why? They pluck some precious chord in the audience and they buy in. Books that do really well tend to set trends rather than follow them. The good news here is, you can totally maximize your luck. Selling lots of copies of your book is like meeting Oscar Isaac. You might just randomly meet him in a CVS somewhere, sure, but you can increase your chances by going to a CVS in Los Angeles, or frequenting a dance club he likes, or by hiding in his medicine cabinet like a haunting spirit. In publishing, you can write the best book you can and publish with the best publisher you can and then they market it and give it a hopefully great cover and ideally nobody drops the ball or humps the ball before dropping it down a sewer great, and all of these things increase the Luck Stat on your book’s character sheet.

6. You Have More Power Than You Deserve

You’re a writer. Congratulations. That means you write books and that’s really all it means. But for some reason, writers are assigned more power than this. Writing a book affords us an unexpected platform made from our own books and suddenly we’re up on top of it and people are listening. And most likely, we have not prepared jack shit to say, and so we just hilariously gabble through some swiftly-invented wiffle-waffle and next thing you know people are taking that to heart or they’re pissed off at you or they’re forming a cult to either venerate or destroy you — and yet, all the while, you’re just someone good at writing books. Recognize that being a writer affords you some small measure of power and privilege (which is on top of any you already possess) and it is a thing to protect, a thing that asks for caution, a thing that demands responsibility. (Though audience, please also realize: writers are full of shit. Brimming with it!)

7. (Amazon and Barnes & Noble Have Way More Power Than You, Though)

Ha ha ha, don’t worry, your power is still unmercifully tiny in the grand scheme of things. Two entities have way more power than you: Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Sure, this is a duh thing, but it bears reminding that each of these entities is not your friend and also not your enemy. They’re just big companies full of individual people and their actions can conspire to save your book or slit the book’s throat. And sometimes these actions are accidental, sometimes these actions are willful against publishers or genres or even against you individually as an author. B&N, for example, accepts the industry chestnut that FIRST WEEK SALES REALLY MATTER, except sometimes B&N doesn’t put your book out on shelves during that first week for untold reasons and people go to that store looking for your book and it’s in a box in the back — and then, first week sales are lower than everyone would like and when it comes time for B&N to put in an order for book two, the buyers tut-tut and say, “Well, this book didn’t sell that well in its first week,” and they don’t order as many or they don’t order any at all. Amazon, on the other hand, has theoretically infinite shelf-space, but will gladly undercut the Kindle price of your book by slashing the physical price of the book lower than the digital version and then they’ll put this little passive-aggressive note under the account that says, Price set by that stupid publisher because we would never do that because we love you very much. B&N can demand a new cover or title for your book. Amazon can completely erase your publisher from their site during disputes, which mmm, probably sucks for you, author. Are either of these companies evil? Nope. They’re doing business. And business can sometimes be hard for the little guy. (AKA: you.)

8. Selling Poorly Can Mark You

Poor sell-through on a single book, as noted, can hurt you. It might mean smaller advances or less copies ordered for shelves or less bargaining power at the table for contracts. If your new book doesn’t sell well, an actual goblin manifests in your bedroom just as you’re falling asleep, and every Tuesday night the goblin punches you right in the crotch. That’s no lie. That’s one of many hard truths about publishing. Goblins. Fucking goblins. Dang.

9. … And So Can Selling Well

Selling well is amazing! Go you! Now you can pay bills and buy cool stuff and fans carry you around on a motherfucking palanquin. It’s all cake from here. And what I mean is, it’s all one flavor of cake. I hope you like that flavor because now if you try to write something of a different flavor, nnnnyeah, it may not work. A big successful book is like a moon orbiting you — that bastard has gravity, and it will affect all your tides. It will be harder to pull away from the thing that made you successful and harder to do something more creatively satisfying. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it feels like an ART PRISON. But it’s something to note! A good problem to have, admittedly — but it can still be a problem.

10. No One Way Is A Lottery Ticket

This is obvious and probably doesn’t bear its own entry — but I am very, very happy that the discourse in writing and publishing has pulled away (presently and hopefully permanently) from all that talk of THE ONE PROPER PUBLISHING PATH. No one method is a lottery ticket. Yes, luck matters. Yes, quality is of varying degrees of usefulness. Just the same: writing is not some ALL OR NOTHING charade — it’s not you shoving all your wishes and dreams into one bottle and then chucking it into the ocean with the hope it washes up on some precious beach. It can be a slow and steady career. Sometimes a writing career is less about the flash flood and more about the power of orchestrated erosion — wearing down stone one sluice of water at a time. No one publishing path is a lottery ticket, but every publishing path is a goblin who will crotch-punch you before bedtime. Or something? I think I lost the thread there.

11. Bigger Advance Means Bigger Money Spent On Your Book

The more money spent on your book means the more money gets spent on your book. This is both sensible and weird. Sensible because investments must be protected, and sometimes you protect an investment by adding money to it. Weird because, hey, why does Coca-Cola advertise? Do they need it? Is there anybody in the world who doesn’t know that Coke exists? But even Coca-Cola must remind the world of its presence (and if I recall, Coke’s sales are down, too). In terms of your advance, it probably means the contrary is true, too — if you got a smaller advance, well, expect that fewer dollars will be thrown toward your book doing well. Your book is possibly relegated to the THROW THAT POOP AT THE WALL AND SEE IF IT STICKS department.

12. Publishers Don’t Always Know How To Sell Your Book

Marketing a book is less like using antibiotics for an infection ten years ago, and more like using antibiotics for an infection today. What I mean is, ten years ago if you had a bacterial sickness the doctor would be like HERE TAKE THIS ZITHOMYCILLIN PILL AND TA-DA YOUR SICKNESS IS GONE, and now it’s like, TAKE THIS FLORKOMAX PILL AND IF THIS DOESN’T WORK WE’LL TRY LIKE SIX OR SEVEN MORE AND HOPE LIKE HELL THAT YOU DON’T GET SOME SORT OF FACE-EATING UBER-MRSA BECAUSE AT THIS POINT WE KINDA FUCKED UP THE WHOLE ANTIBIOTIC THING SORRY. Making a book sell is not an act where as long as you make the proper sacrifices and insert TAB A into SLOT B you are guaranteed a bestseller. It’s important to realize that publishers don’t actually know what they’re doing. This sounds like a knock against them; it isn’t. It’s to make it clear that they are not perfect gatekeeper entities curating bestsellers while willfully relegating everything else to the sewer. The best publisher tries a lot of different things based on experience and data. Even still, the best publisher has to concede that what worked for Book #1 will not automatically work for Book #2.

13. Getting That First Book Published Is Like Yay, And Then, Oh Shit

You got a book published. Woo. Huzzah. Fuck yeah. That is awesome. You are awesome. Everything is amazing. Or, rather, everything is amazing until it’s not — the book comes out and now you’re in the fucking wilderness, you poor fucker. You’d gnaw your own arm off for some data. And the data that comes in is a crude porridge, not a fine consommé. BookScan is about as accurate as you throwing shoes at cars. You hit some, you miss some. Your digital sales numbers are not necessarily accessible (and not always right) — though they’re accessible if you self-publish, of course. Amazon ranking is less reliable than scrying your sales through bird entrails. Then reviews come in. Professional reviews hurt worse sometimes. Reader reviews can be wildly variant (LOVE THIS BOOK AND WILL KILL ANYBODY WHO SAYS DIFFERENT, 3 STARS; THE BOOK SMELLS WEIRD, 0 STARS; POOPY PANTS, 5 STARS). You expect that the book will come out and now it’s all huggable kittens and a fragrant odor that never leaves your nose, but mostly it’s a lot like wandering a shopping mall not sure what to buy or how you even got here or if you’ll ever be allowed to leave. You live here now. Oh well?

14. Getting That Second And Fourth And Twelfth Book Is The Same Way

Every book is that way, not just your first. Sorry.

15. People Are Going To Hate Your Book

They just are. Not all of them, of course. Even the dog-shittiest crap-nastiest what-the-fuckiest book is going to have fans, but the reverse is also true: even the BEST BOOK EVAR OMG is going to have a percentage of people who hate it so bad they will film themselves force-feeding it to a weeping zoo animal. “I HATE HIPPOS AND I HATE THIS BOOK, EAT THE BOOK MISTER TUB-TUB, EAT THE GODDAMN BOOK.”

16. No, You Don’t Need That MFA, Or That Program, Or That Workshop

‘Twas a bit of a row last week when Neil Gaiman enthusiastically endorsed Clarion the way that I might enthusiastically endorse eating tacos — I might say, for instance, that if you want to know why life is worth living, you need to eat a taco or you are dead to me. I don’t mean that literally, of course (except I do), and so when Mister Gaiman said that real writers need Clarion, he surely didn’t mean it given that he himself did not attend Clarion and neither did Margaret Atwood and neither did I and c’mon. That said, he has the privilege of a huge audience and a big voice (see earlier comment: “You Have More Power Than You Deserve”) and many penmonkeys felt stung because of a long history of being told they’re not allowed to be quote-unquote real writers. So, let’s just get this out of the way: Clarion is an amazing program and it is also a non-essential program. So too with any other workshop or group or MFA program. Those entities are in no way bad (though MFAs in particular can be very expensive and offer too little bang for your considerable buck) and are useful to many authors. But you don’t need them. Some people might care, but most don’t. What they care about is that you wrote a book and it does not suck.

17. Critique Partners Can Save You, Or Kick You In The Throat

A good critique partner helps you understand your work better and will point you toward a better iteration of that story. A bad critique partner will tell you how they would write the book and how to send the book in an entirely different direction that is wholly not your own. Bad critique partners and groups outnumber the good ones, in my experience. Most critique partners possess no qualifications and them messing with your work can be like some rando off-the-street trying to fix your bathroom plumbing. A book is a little like pancake batter — it’s best with some lumps in it, and a lot of critique partners want to overmix the batter, which dorks up the pancakes. Don’t let some clumsy ass-hand dork up your metaphorical narrative pancakes. That may be the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written, so please update your records.

18. People Want You To Give Your Film And TV Rights Away

Film and television rights should get you good money. Key word: should. Some publishers will try to just take them from you (and note, that few publishers actually have the incentive or skill to peddle those rights to the proper channels in La-La-Land). Some people in Hollywood will also just try to take them in the hopes that you feel blessed just by having that rare chance of them making a film product from your book. You’ll get word from some screenwriter or production company that they want to license the work for a time for basically no money in the hopes of developing a script and shopping it around and… boy-howdy that sounds nice. They’re scrambling to sell it then, too, and you’re all in the same boat together and if they win, you win! Except, this is really common. Your work is going to go in a bin with dozens of other freely-given rights. And they have as much value as you assigned them, which is to say: mostly zero. Earlier I noted that publishers who spend money on a book will then spend more money and attention on that book, and the same thing goes here. If someone pays you for the film/TV rights, they are likelier to make it. In fact, the more money they give you, the better your chance — because this is an investment. Your book is not a fucking penny-stock. If someone wants to park their Hollywood car over your rights for a year, they should pay you for the privilege.

19. Publishing Is Shockingly Niche In A Lot Of Ways

Publishing is tiny. The audience is small. Bestsellers hang around the list for a long time because most readers just read one or two books a year and the same books circulate in that audience — it’s a self-replicating machine that way. Most people in publishing know each other. Many writers know one another — especially in their particular genres. It’s all very niche. This is important to know because to many, it’s quite a surprise. It’s also a good reminder not to shit where you eat, because a whole lot of people are watching you pop that squat. (I must also note that publishing is also shockingly white. Or not shockingly, since most industries are? See the current row over the Oscars. Diversity on the page matters, yes, but inclusion has to be a column and not a floor — it has to go from ground to ceiling, and it has to cascade off the page to the writers writing the books, to the editors editing them, to agents and marketers and book buyers and so on. This is a bit of an adjacent point, admittedly, but I think it’s worth calling out.)

20. The Digital Revolution Created Whole Lotta Noise

E-BOOKS ARE JESUS AND WILL SAVE PUBLISHING AND yeah but no. It’s untrue that e-books aren’t doing well. They are. They may have plateaued, and physical sales may have thankfully rebounded, but they’re doing fine. They also did not transform the industry or destroy print publishing as some predicted. They revolutionized some authorial paths, they created accessibility for some readers and they also created a great deal of noise. I say this as a hard truth just in case someone out there is still peddling this as a MAGIC UNGUENT that will heal PUBLISHING ILLS. It’s not. Digital is great. It also created the opportunity for infinite trash — which is fine, I like infinite trash because that’s basically what the whole Internet is, anyway. It’s just useful to keep expectations in check.

21. The Desolate Heart Of Book Signings (And Why You Should Do ‘Em Anyway)

Most authors, even the best, will do book signings where nobody shows. And some folks’ll say that book signings are old hat and not worth doing but I call shenanigans. Bookstores are best when they are front-facing to the book-reading community, and they can only do that with the help of authors. Bookstores allow authors to connect with readers, and further, connect with the bookstores, too. Booksellers have the magic power of HANDSELLING, which is about as wizard as it gets inside publishing — the one tried-and-true way to sell a book is by word-of-mouth, except booksellers have a cheat code where they are forever accepted into a reader’s word-of-mouth trust-circle. Make friends with bookstores. Sign stock. Buy booksellers beer.

22. Indie Bookstores Are Amazing Except When They’re Not

I love indie bookstores. Correction: I love good indie bookstores. Some of them stink. Some of are not very nice to authors. I’ve gone to bookstores and talked about setting up signings or signing stock and they look at me like I’m trying to talk to them with a mouth full of pudding. I try to explain to them that I am a “real writer” and my books are already on their shelves but they make a face at me like a wrung rag and nnyeah, no. Good writers appreciate friendly bookstores and good bookstores appreciate friendly writers. Everything else is not worth the time.

23. A Book You Can Describe In 30 Seconds Will Do Better Than One You Can’t

This might be very cynical of me, and it isn’t a true and proven thing but just a thing I’m feeling — if you cannot describe your book with merciless efficiency, then that book may not do well. Meaning, if the book isn’t an easy sell — something you can say fast, like, A GUN-TOTING PENGUIN AND A NOBEL-AWARD-WINNING PHYSICIST PROSTITUTE FIGHT NAZI SEX WORKERS ON THE MOON, then that’s a problem. I tell people about the Miriam Black books and say that it’s about a young woman who can see how you’re going to die when she touches you — it’s a short sharp hook that sticks in your cheek faster than you even realize it. (And the books have done very well for me, I think in part due to that somewhat elegant shiv-stab of a premise.)

24. Writing Exposes Your Heart, And Publishing Takes Its Bite

Writing is a craft. Storytelling is an art. Publishing is a business. What you do is a combination of those three things, and that is very confusing — it’d be like monetizing your marriage or shilling your adorable puppy like you’re some sort of cackling puppy peddler. You do this thing you love. You bleed on the page. You art hard like an artful art-er and now here’s this thing in your hand. It’s your pulp-slick heart throbbing like the neck of a frightened toad. You want the world to protect it and care for it just as you yourself have done… but then publishing grabs the organ out of your hand and takes a big honkin’ stonkin’ bite. Chomp. Then publishing grins with its blood-slick mouth and hands it back. Craft plus art plus business makes for an uncomfortable combo but that’s how it is. The advice then is to harden your heart a little. Callus that motherfucker up. It’s still your heart. It’s still your art. Do not compromise that, but also be ready for when publishing opens its clacking maw and scooches closer and closer…

25. There Is No Map

The header says it all. No map exists. None of this is science. You don’t add two reagents together to get a consistent reaction. This thing we do is weird and wonderful and horrible and soggy with luck and pickled in privilege and is very much like being lost in the woods. But take solace that at least we’re all lost together. That has to count for something.

As always: go forth and art harder, little penmonkey.

Because really, what else can you do?

* * *

Miriam Black Is Back (In Print)

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. She merely needs to touch you—skin to skin contact—and she knows how and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, and she sees in thirty days that Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and Miriam will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.” — Lauren Beukes

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Macro Monday: Snow Is Prettiest When It’s A Flake And Not A Flood

We got dump-a-dumped on this past weekend — a hellacious blizzardo loco that diarrheaed about 25-30 inches of snow upon us. And so a wintry macro seemed apt, because looking at snow down to the micro flakey level is much nicer than staring at a snowstorm punching you in the face. (Though the snow outside is quite pretty, I’ll admit.)

ANYWAY.

Macro Monday, please to enjoy this Darling Little Snowflake.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Ten More Titles

We’re going to ape the challenge from last week because honestly, that website came up with so many rad titles I want to keep forcing you to use them. And I’m also lazy.

Never discount the fact I’m incredibly lazy.

ANYWAY.

Here’s how this’ll work.

At the bottom of this post will be ten titles randomly selected at this website — you must choose one of them and write a flash fiction story (~1000 words) using that title. Any genre. Post it at your online space. Link back to it in the comments. Due by next Friday, January 29th, noon EST.

The ten titles are:

The Incubus’ Tale

The Manor Above

The Dancer And The Shattered Shell

The Hero Will Not Be Automatic

Ring of Bullets

The Music Box of Manhattan

These Damned Insects

Tiger, Burning

A Cold Opportunity Without The Kingdom

The Apocalypse Ticket

Tim Akers: Five Things I Learned About Writing The Pagan Night

The Celestial Church has all but eliminated the old pagan ways, ruling the people with an iron hand. Demonic gheists terrorize the land, hunted by warriors of the Inquisition, yet it’s the battling factions within the Church and the age-old hatreds between north and south that tear the land apart.

Malcolm Blakley, hero of the Reaver War, seeks to end the conflict between men, yet it will fall to his son, Ian, and the huntress Gwen Adair to stop the killing before it rips the land apart. This is an epic tale of mad gods, inquisitor priests, holy knights bound to hunt and kill, and noble houses fighting battles of politics, prejudice and power.

Trust your talent

This book was an ordeal. I have notes on it going back nearly a decade, bits and bobs that I had scribbled into my notebooks while I was writing other stories. I started the actual writing a little over six years ago, and turned in a rough draft to my agent five years ago. Since then it’s been through at least seven full rewrites, some drastic, some cosmetic, and at least one that nearly broke my will to be a writer. I got lost in the process. The book very nearly got lost with me.

But it turns out that I’m a pretty good writer. That’s why I started in this business in the first place, after all. I like to write. I’m good at it. People enjoy the books I write, assuming they’re able to find them in the ceaseless cloud of other books that are getting published at the same time. And whenever I thought I had lost the book, I was able to find it. I just had to bury the revision notes, and my memories of what I had already written, and write the book that I thought was interesting.

Persistence Matters

Five years is way too much time to spend with a single book. It becomes precious to you, especially as the days and months tick by since you’ve had anything on shelves. It’s very easy to overwrite a book like that, but even worse, it’s easier to get fed up with it and throw it out there in a suboptimal condition. There have been versions of this book that I would have been perfectly happy publishing. There have been many more versions between those versions that were absolute shit. But none of those drafts were as good as the final book. I had to bear down through the overwriting, resist the frustration and financial stress that it was causing, and get to that final draft. I’m glad I did. I think my readers will be glad, too.

George Martin is EVERYWHERE

The inspiration for this book is two-fold: the cultural integration of the Angles and the Saxons following the Norman Conquest, and the religious integration of paganism into early Christianity. As every good human being knows, GRRM based his books on the War of the Roses. Because we are both drawing on similar source material, a lot of the notes I got from editors, my agent, and early readers said something along the lines of “This feels like Game of Thrones.” At one point someone even suggested that I change my geographical axis so that the conflict was between East and West.

This is unspeakably frustrating, but something I’ve learned to accept. Intentionally running away from those comparisons would mean writing a different book than the one I wanted to read (which is how I decide what to write). It would mean making cosmetic changes that would impact the theme, without improving the book. And it would mean abandoning the things I love best about the genre.

But seriously, George, if you’re reading this? Please finish so the rest of us will stop getting compared to you. Thanks?

Scale it down

One of the best notes I got during the revision process was from my agent. He told me to take my battle scenes and make them fight scenes, and convert all of my fight scenes into tense conversations. This let me focus on my strengths while also allowing me to really craft those fight scenes into something beautiful. There are still major battles in the book, but by drawing the focus down to a couple key moments I was able to ground the reader in the characters without getting swept away in cavalry charges and shield lines. The best way to write big action is with little human details. It’s an amazing trick.

Write What’s Hard

This is more of a general statement about writing, but it’s a lesson that was hammered home during The Pagan Night. Throughout my writing career, I have made an effort to figure out where I’m weak so I can improve. There are so many different skills that go into writing a book. There’s worldbuilding, plotting, pacing, character development, description, dialog, revision, and so forth, and so on, until the end of time. When you start writing you may excel at some of these skills, or all of them, or none of them.

When I first started writing, my most glaring weakness was dialog. So I sought out books that depended on dialog, wrote scenes that were nothing but dialog, and talked to other writers about how they approached this one aspect of the craft. Years later, I’m pretty good at dialog. Now I’m working on fight scenes.

The point is that the temptation is to only write what you’re best at, and try to spackle over the rest. That will create the illusion of a good book, but the better book, the book you could have written, will never be realized. Make your weaknesses your strengths, and your strengths into phenomenons.

* * *

Tim Akers was born in deeply rural North Carolina, the only son of a theologian, and the last in a long line of telephony princes, tourist-attraction barons, and gruff Scottish bankers. He moved to Chicago for college, and stayed to pursue his lifelong obsession with apocalyptic winters. The Pagan Night is his fourth book, and the first in The Hallowed War trilogy.

Tim Akerts: Website

The Pagan Night: Indiebound | Amazon

Dan Koboldt: Five Things I Learned Writing The Rogue Retrieval

Stage magician Quinn Bradley has one dream: to headline his own show on the Vegas Strip. And with talent scouts in the audience wowed by his latest performance, he knows he’s about to make the big-time. What he doesn’t expect is an offer to go on a quest to a place where magic is all too real.

That’s how he finds himself in Alissia, a world connected to ours by a secret portal owned by a powerful corporation. He’s after an employee who has gone rogue, and that’s the least of his problems. Alissia has true magicians…and the penalty for impersonating one is death. In a world where even a twelve-year-old could beat Quinn in a swordfight, it’s only a matter of time until the tricks up his sleeves run out.

HAVE A KICK-ASS PROTAGONIST

As a reader, nothing irks me more than a reluctant protagonist. I loved Lord of the Rings so hard, but I had trouble connecting with the hobbits. Not enough to go around calling them FILTHY HOBBITSES, but still. I’m an adventurer at heart. Bilbo and Frodo were not. It took the Nazgul or a dozen dwarves to get them out of the Shire. I admire how much they grew as characters, but I don’t think I’d be able to write such reluctant characters.

Besides, writing a kick-ass protagonist is SO much more fun. I’m not talking about a Mary Sue character who does everything perfectly without even trying, but it’s useful to have characters who bring actual skills to the table. The hero in my book is a Las Vegas stage magician. That’s not a career you can fake. He’s got quick fingers and charisma, which come in handy when you’re infiltrating a medieval world.

He’s not without flaws, and some of those flaws come back to bite him, but my hero keeps things interesting and loves to improvise. Hell, so do I. But he’s got more wits and charm than I do. I love how fiction lets me do that.

CRITIQUE PARTNERS ARE PRICELESS

When you write the first draft of a book, two things are likely to be true: (1) You’re alone most of the time, and (2) most of the writing sucks ass. So you go back and revise and polish it and spell-check. It’s better, but unless you’re Hemingway, it’s not even close to publication-ready.

And you’re not Hemingway. I know this because he follows me on Twitter.

The fact is that most of us are blind to certain aspects of our own work. As John Adamus wrote in a recent guest post here on Terribleminds, editing by someone who is not you matters! As authors, we’re too close to the project, so we don’t realize that we offered too much or too little backstory. We think all character actions are perfectly motivated and logical. After all, we created them, damn it!

A good critique partner points out these blind spots, and makes other good suggestions besides. No less than four critique partners read The Rogue Retrieval start to finish and gave me detailed feedback. Some are short-fiction specialists, others are novelists. One is a genre fiction expert, and another only reads contemporary YA. They pointed out things like hey, when your protagonist learns that his new employer has access to an entire other world, he should probably be freaking out more.

A diverse group of CPs may converge on certain issues with surprising precision, but often they complement each other. I have one who’s ruthless about nixing dialogue tags. I have another who will just comment, “I want more feels!” The more varied the feedback, the stronger the book can become.

It’s up to the author to decide which suggestions to take. Did I address every single critique for my book? No. But I nixed a shit-ton of dialogue tags.

KILL YOUR DARLINGS (OR YOUR EDITOR WILL)

My CPs weren’t the only people to critique The Rogue Retrieval. My literary agent, the fabulous Jennie Goloboy, offered feedback as well. I went along when she made me cut the prologue, but I balked when she told me I didn’t need my flashbacks to events that happened on the Earth side of the gateway (mine is a portal fantasy, in case you didn’t know).

No way– that shit’s IMPORTANT! I argued, just as I had when my CPs told me the same thing. My training montage was one of those. Who doesn’t love a training montage? I trimmed those scenes until they were lean and mean. I fought to keep them, and I won. I brought my agent and CPs around. It was sweet. Sweeter than a brownie topped with ice cream and chocolate syrup.

My editor, David Pomerico, acquired the book for Harper Voyager. The first thing he wrote in his edit letter was, “Those flashback scenes? I think they can be cut.” I’ll admit something: at first, this made we want to set the world on fire and eat popcorn while I watched it burn.

But then I got to thinking. This is someone who edits books FOR A LIVING, and he’s pretty damn good at it. He made a number of other suggestions that were spot-on. I’d whittled those flashbacks down as far as I could. It was keep-them-or-cut-them time.

The thing is, when you work with an editor, you have to pick your battles. The minute he brought this up, and I remembered what my agent and CPs had said. I finally conceded that this was a battle I probably shouldn’t win. So the flashbacks were gone, and I think the book was better for it.

COPY EDITS WILL TAKE YOU DOWN A PEG

When it comes to the technical aspects of writing, like spelling and grammar, I thought I was in good shape. Sure, I repeat the occasional word — a characteristic I blame on my distraction-filled life — but I thought I had the fundamentals down cold. Besides, by the time I’d finished my revisions with David, my manuscript had really been through the wringer. It wasn’t just clean, it was downright sparkling.

When it went off to the copy editors, I thought they might catch a mis-placed word or two. Maybe a fragment or cut-and-paste error that had happened during revisions, but that was about it. I can punctuate a damn sentence! See? I wasn’t intimidated by the copy editors; I knew my way around a semicolon.

Then the copyedited manuscript came back. It was a Word file with [suggested] corrections marked using Track Changes.

There were about 1,500 edits and comments. Fifteen hundred, in a 90,000 word manuscript. Perhaps you were not as strong as the Emperor thought.

Many of those were formatting changes, but there were typos, repeated words, and (gasp) punctuation errors. Apparently I don’t know how to use the hyphen nearly as well as I thought I did. They caught other logical issues, too, like the fact that I wrote “.45 mm” when I meant “.45 caliber.”

Copy editors, it turns out, are vital to the publishing process. They give a book the fine polish it needs to prevent hordes of ranting 1-star nitpickers.

EVERY BOOK IS A TEAM EFFORT

In the beginning, a manuscript represents the work of just one person: the author who sat down and put those words on the page. But it takes an entire village to get from there to putting that book on a shelf. Between the agent, editor, publicist, copy editors, and cover artists, a dozen people or more might touch the book between writing and publication.

You started this journey alone, just you and the blank page with the keyboard in between. By the end, you’ve got an entire team around you. Part of that means that the book isn’t entirely yours anymore. Everyone who helped you get this far has a little stake in it.

You hardly realize it until you start writing that acknowledgements page, and realize how many people there are to thank. That might be the most important thing I’ve learned while writing The Rogue Retrieval. It doesn’t just belong to me. It belongs to all of them, too.

* * *

Dan Koboldt is a genetics researcher who’s co-authored more than 60 publications in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and other journals. Every fall, he disappears into Missouri’s dense hardwood forests to pursue whitetail deer with bow and arrow. He lives with his wife and three children in St. Louis, where the deer take their revenge by eating all of the plants in his backyard.

Dan Koboldt: Website | Twitter | Facebook

The Rogue Retrieval: HarperCollins | Amazon |  B&N | Goodreads | iBooks 

Some Thoughts For You Mid-Career Writers Out There

Writing advice online is generally geared toward the new writer. It makes sense — most recipes online are catered to people who can cook but who don’t have a stable bank of techniques on which to trade. Sex advice, on the other hand, is often very different — it moves well-beyond INSERT TAB A INTO SLOT B and THIS DIAGRAM SHOWS A HUMAN PENIS and goes into some trickier business. It assumes you’ve done it and know what you’re doing, and so you start to get things like HOW TO INCORPORATE VEGETABLES INTO YOUR LOVEMAKING or HOW TO FUCK FOUR PEOPLE AT ONE TIME ON PLAYGROUND EQUIPMENT AND WHY THAT GETS YOU CLOSER TO YOUR INNER GOD. Sex advice goes right to the Kama Sutra (“monkey steals the plums”!) while writing advice is very frequently 101-level stuff (“how to put words next to each other”).

I find really one of the things that is missing from discussing of a writing career is talk of what a mid-career writer should do. Nobody talks much to the writer who’s already doing what she wants to do, with a handful of books already under her belt. But this is necessary stuff. You get to a certain point in your career and it starts to feel like you’re in a one-man washtub boat out on the ocean with no sign of shore and only the glimpse of islands in the far-off distance. The easiest thing to do is just to float, but the best thing to do is to pick a direction and paddle –

Problem is, what direction?

I’m in my “mid-career” now, I guess — which is to say, I’m not a beginner, not at all, though I certainly haven’t mastered my Authorial Kung Fu, either. Though I’ve only been publishing books since 2012 or so, I’ve had quite a few put out into the world (cough cough sixteen /humblebrag), and I’ve also been writing professionally for about two decades (haha oh shit wait I got old). I’m no chump, I like to hope, but I’ve also not had anything really really break out, and I still find myself wandering this career path without a map and a torch.

Given that I am at this point, I probably need the advice, but nobody’s really giving it. So I’m going to do the next best thing — I’m going to offer up my own advice and pretend I know what I’m talking about! This is the Internet, after all. It is the only way!

So, here are some thoughts on being a mid-career artist — aka, HOW TO FUCK FOUR NOVELS AT ONE TIME AND HOW THAT GETS YOU CLOSER TO YOUR INNER ART GOBLIN.

Or something.

(As with all posts here, this is very YMMV. And certainly some of what follows repeats things I’ve said before. As such, take it not just with a grain of salt but a whole salt lick.)

Good Time To Reevaluate Goals (Present And Future)

Forget loftier questions such as who are you as an author and what satisfies you the most as an word-chugging art-monkey, and go straight to the most practical one — the one that has to do with output, the one that has to do with practical application:

What do you want to write?

Maybe right now you’re writing the thing you want to write. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you like what you’re doing now but you think it’s time to try your hand at space opera, or mystery, or you really have a hankering to write about the long-simmering adventures of Gibblins McKink, an erotic dwarf detective. I will say the advice now applies as it did when you were a new writer, and it will apply in 30 years when you’re a writer on his death bad for having huffed printer ink for too long: write what you want to write. This career is not so lucrative generally that it’s worth writing things you don’t like. There is, of course, nothing wrong with writing just for money and just to the market — you do you, but I personally find it unsatisfying, and further, the market moves both so slowly and so unpredictably that I wouldn’t even know how to manage it. It’s like trying to thread a needle held in somebody else’s trembling hand. It is vital to note that satisfaction in a creative career is a very good way to stave off burn out and to ride out the DARK TIMES, and so for me it matters to be writing what I want to write.

Thus, I factor that into my overall plan.

And my plan looks a little something like this:

I try to figure out what my next year looks like.

And the year after that.

Then, five years.

Then, ten years.

This isn’t just about what books I want to write. It’s about where I want to be in my career. It’s about what kind of money I hope to be making, how I might evolve myself as an author, what sassy dance moves I might perform if I am ever mistakenly given an award. Really, you can have nearly any goal you’d like, reasonable or not — “I want to be published by Rangdom Panguinhaus. I want a short story published in Corklin’s Literary Salon. I would like to write a comic book or a video game or the marketing copy for a sex toy company. I would also like to quit my full-time job, be a bestseller, and have a trained marmoset to fetch me my feather and quill every morning!”

(Note: it’s better to have goals you can control rather than goals you can’t.)

(Note: it’s still fun to mentally identify goals about things you can’t control anyway.)

The long-looking plan works like this, by the way –

The first year is pretty much what you’re going to do now. It’s what you have on deck. You likely have some irons in the fire in terms of deadlines and contracts, so do those.

The second year for me may have more deadlines, but it’s also likely THE PRECIPICE — meaning, somewhere in the year after this one my career is going to again fall off the cliff and down the side of a mountain and into a hole where it will be eaten by rats because really, the writer’s career is pretty much always in danger of this. You’re always trying to negotiate the upcoming cliffs. An art career is peaks and valleys — but it’s both creative peaks and valleys and financial ones. Worse, those peaks and valleys don’t line up well. A financial peak sets you up for new creative deadlines — and then you fulfill those deadlines and have no more and suddenly you’re back in the hole and something something rats. It is the constant act of trying to juggle SELLING WORK and WRITING WORK, and sometimes that work is on spec which only further confuses the issue. Oh and then there’s also PROMOTING THE WORK which is a whole other thing I’ll talk about later in this post. A post that is likely to be epic in length and I’m sorry about that.

So, the second year is about evaluating how you’ll stake out temporal territory to plot and scheme what comes next — either a brand new novel that you’ll write or a pitch for a new novel that your agent will attempt to sell. (We’ll talk about agents shortly.)

The fifth year is a bit of wish fulfillment, sure, but it’s also the garden you envision growing up out of all these seeds planted. Looking five years down, you can start to see that what you want then needs to start now. It’s a good impetus for getting all your quacking author-ducks in a row. I find that my career is very much about these seeds. And I ask myself every week — what seeds am I planting? How am I moving toward my goals, even if in only incremental ways?

Ten years? Well, you’d be forgiven if ten years down your only goal is TO NOT BE DEAD, or TO BE CLINGING TO THIS WRITING CAREER WITH AT LEAST THREE FINGERS. But for me it’s also about bigger, loftier goals — positioning of oneself as an author, predicting potential career pivot points, considering larger and stranger diversifications.

Also Good Time To Revaluate Agents

I know quite a few professional mid-career writers, now.

And several of them have done the thing where they break up with an agent.

At the start of your career, this is unthinkable. You’re just happy to have an agent. It could be an agent who lives in a garbage can like Oscar the Grouch and you’re like, WHATEVER, PLEASE JUST SELL MY BOOKS, GLORIOUS TRASHMONGER. This isn’t the greatest way to be, of course, and sometimes it leads writers to a fracture in the agent-author relationship. The agent says she won’t — not can’t, but won’t — sell your latest novel. Or he tells you that he thinks you’d be better off writing [insert genre you don’t really like to write]. The agent offers up a view of your career that isn’t your view of your career. And some writers? They go with it. They see themselves as lucky to have an agent at all and so they follow the river where it takes them.

Do not do that.

Do not be that author.

This is a very good time to reevaluate your agent. The wrong agent is worse than no agent at all. Let me tell you an agent’s job — an agent’s job is to help you, the author, sell the books you write. The agent represents not a single book but rather, the total author. The agent also represents authors, not publishers — though some seem more interested in helping the publisher, instead. The agent is there to bring out the best career for you, and as a result, get both of you to make some motherfucking money in the process. If the agent does not see the potential in you, the total author, the agent should not represent you and you should not want the agent to represent you.

The agent-author relationship is a partnership — both financial and to a degree, artistic.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t trust your agent’s judgment. But those judgments should be again toward helping you realize the version of the career that you envision for yourself — not the career the agent envisions. (This is similar to the editor’s job, in a sense. An editor helps make your book the best version it can be. An editor doesn’t turn your book into somebody else’s book. So too it is with an agent and your career.) You do not work for your agent. To a degree, your agent works on your behalf, though not “for” you in that she’s not your employee just as you aren’t hers. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. SYMBIOSIS. If that symbiosis fails, well –

You may need to break up with your agent.

It’s okay if you do. Lots have, and they’ve survived.

Some of you may think you can get by with an attorney or a manager instead of an agent. This is true if you’re a screenwriter… but to my mind, less true if you’re an AUTHOR OF BOOKISH THINGS. In publishing, agents are both vital in their contract skills but also valuable in the relationships they have with editors. They know the history of a publisher, they know what can be gotten and what can’t, whereas most attorneys do not possess a familiarity with the industry beyond the contract you put in front of them.

(Er, just in case my own agent is getting wide eyes reading this — ha ha, no, I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me! And my daily neurotic emails! Sorry!)

Cash Money (And, Should You Quit Your Job?)

A career as an author is about a lot more than money.

…and yet, it’s also a whole lot about money.

What this means is:

a) You should be getting paid. Any of that “for free exposure” bullshit better be over and done. Writing has value. Art has value. You are not a zero, and so your fee is not zero.

b1) You should be thinking about ROI — return on investment. Anything you do in service to your career needs to be considered with a return in mind. No, not every return is financial — some returns are about happy-making vibes or relationships or some other abstract metric. But financial matters. Planning on traveling in service to your work? Doing cons and festivals? Buying tech upgrades? Whatever it is, make sure you’re not putting out more money on it than you’re bringing in. (If it costs you a lot of money to sell not a lot of books, that’s a problem.)

b2) That said? “Creative ROI” is a thing. Sometimes you plant seeds in a new format or genre for less money in the aim that this garden will grow in a specific direction and offer up new bounty.

c) If quitting your job to become a full-time writer is a goal, think hard about it. Save up. Get ready. Don’t built a parachute on the way out of the plane. Keep your job as long as you can. For me the metric of when to quit your job in service to your writing is this: you cease to have time to do both. You have enough contracts and deadlines than either the day-job goes, or the writing gig does.

d) You should be having financial discussions with your agent. Not just creative ones.

e) You should be on a budget at home. The money that comes in from writing is unpredictable-ish — I mean, you can peg certain payout periods given your contracts, but the point is, the money fails to be steady. Budgets will help you figure that out.

f) Taxes are their own special fun. Have an accountant or book-keeper or MAGICAL MONEY HOBO to help you. Do not do it yourself unless you are well-trained in this dark art. Be advised: you can totally write-off lots of awesome and actually vital things as an author. Books are tax deductions. If you don’t think that’s totally awesome then I’m not sure we can be friends.

On Royalties And Advances

Information on this subject is often veiled behind shimmering clouds of bewilderment, like it’s all a state secret – for the most part, royalties and advances are hush-hush. Again, an agent brings value to this equation — they have enough experience ideally to pierce that veil of secrecy. They know the score. They know what’s gettable. And they’ll push to get it. Royalties don’t often budge, though it’s best to get royalties paid out on list/cover price rather than net, because net will vary depending on discounts and other price variations. Further, contracts can offer escalators that change your royalty or offer bonus payouts if certain sales targets are hit.

Advances are tricky, too — note that once you start to get those vaunted low six-figure payouts, you’ll feel like you made it. And those payouts are a helluva lot better than, say, five grand. Just the same, budget accordingly. One novel a year at ~$30k a year is nice money, but it’s not always livable money depending on where you live. Hell, if you live in New York City, that money will pay for four minutes of rent. (Oh, that reminds me, mid-career authors — it might also be high-time to reevaluate where you live. You can write from pretty much anywhere in the country, and all you need is reasonable Internet and proximity to an airport. Otherwise, you can extend your Publishing Ducats considerably by living somewhere with a lower cost of living.)

Hey, By The Way, Keep As Many Rights As You Can

Publishers will want to take rights from you.

Fight this with tooth and nail. There are exceptions, of course, as there are to every rule. But generally speaking, at this stage in your career, scoop up foreign rights and audio and film/TV and shove them in a box and then lock the box and then set a cranky badger to guard it.

Translation: Read Your Contracts

That header says it all, but really, no foolin’ — read them. If something is vague, ask your agent or the publisher. If you don’t understand something, ask the question. You don’t need to be a contracts lawyer, but read the contracts, learn about the clauses, realize what it means. Non-compete clauses can kill you if they’re too strict (though at the same time, publishers also don’t want you running around publishing 47 different epic fantasy novels because bookstore shelves have finite space for that shit).

Your “Do Not Die” Plan

Know your exits.

On an airplane, in a movie theater, in your writing career.

KNOW YOUR EXITS.

I am aware at any point the floor could fucking fall out from underneath me. The publishing industry could poop the bed or my books just won’t sell anymore or something cataclysmic and unpredictable could happen. Have a plan. Know what happens if that happens. Do you get another day job? (For me, that gets tricky, because my skillset has narrowed to the point where I’m good at writing things, less good at, say, sitting in a cubicle and doing cubicle things.) Do you seed opportunities in game design or comic books or marketing sex toys? What about Patreon? Or journalism? IS THERE A PYRAMID SCHEME YOU CAN SEIZE UPON TO EXPLOIT YOUR FAMILY AND NEIGHBORS? Lack of pyramid schemes is what killed the dinosaurs.

Have a plan. Be prepared for the meteor. Know how to evolve and, well, not die.

Survival May Mean Diversification

Being able to write in different media, different genres, different formats, different voices, for different age ranges — it matters. Different publishing models are an option, too. Writing diversely is a skill. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife out in the wilderness in case some shit goes down. With a Swiss Army knife, you can cut kindling, you can open wine, you can do a favor for a grizzly bear and punch holes in his belt if the belt is too small — okay, you know what, I’m getting the feeling here that Swiss Army knives actually aren’t that useful. Never mind that metaphor. Point is, get savvy writing lots of different things. Get ready to stick and move. It will make you a better writer and help you survive.

Something-Something Self-Publishing

Let me be so bold as to say, you should be self-publishing something. Maybe it’s your dominant mode, maybe it’s a side project. But self-publishing offers an opportunity to control the total content and have something out there that earns you slow but steady money. (Maybe more if you get lucky, but in a writing career, never make “GET LUCKY” part of your overall plan. No form of publishing is a lottery, so don’t treat it like one.)

Authors with devoted fanbases can use self-publishing (or other variant publishing models like Patreon) to deliver new stories to those readers — and, duh, make some coin in the process.

Financially, when I talk about gaps in payment, two primary ways to bridge those gaps is with:

a) royalties

and

b) self-publishing.

(Note, self-publishing does not pay “royalties” no matter who calls them that.)

That money softens the edges, and sometimes can do more. Maybe it pays for dinner, maybe a car payment, maybe more. But it’s meaningful.

Multiple Publishers

I have multiple publishers. Some authors do; others are locked into one by contract, by choice, or by the inability to provide fresh novel-length work for multiple outlets.

The advantages of this: you are diversified automatically, and you can write across different genres. Plus, you get experience with multiple editors and marketing departments. You start to zero in on what works, what doesn’t, what you like, what you don’t. And you foster relationships that matter, and not just relationships in a narrow way, but more broadly. Across an industry.

The disadvantages of this: publishers will want their own earned space on the release slate (meaning, on bookstore shelves), and that can be competitive and tricky. Also, deadlines may shift and suddenly work will back up and clog your creative pipes.

On The Subject Of Pseudonyms

A publisher may call upon you to take a pseudonym. OR NOT.

Advantages: you get to be a debut author all over again and that gives a boost to that particular book. It also lets you ditch any particular baggage you may have with your name, especially if your name is associated with something weird like a book about a guy who cornholes goats or something. Plus, maybe you get to write for a different age range or genre.

Disadvantages: you don’t get to be you and you have to handle two names and any work you’ve done for your own self-promotion doesn’t carry over and also you have to adopt a second personality and then that second personality becomes a serial killer.

Wait maybe not that last part.

Note, that I’m finding pseudonyms are often expected of women more than they are of men. This is likely because of sexism both in an audience (they won’t follow a ‘romancey’ author to a new genre because ew girl germs) and because of sexism in the industry (the same industry that leads to very distinct gendered book experiences which is frequently bullshit).

Branding And Platforms And — *Barfs*

I’m going out on a limb here and say that, as an author grows into a career, that author starts to realize that a lot of the branding and platform talk he listened to early on is at least half a sack of monkey shit. What I mean is this: your writing career is predicated on writing books — it’s very seductive to believe that Our Every Movement Online will somehow be The Crucial Detail that sells our books. So we curate a persona and work very hard to say the Right Things and not the Wrong Things and to Demonstrate Our Social Value As A Content-Delivery-System but at the end of the day people want a book they like. They want a book they enjoy for whatever definition they have for “enjoy.” The author matters, but the author is secondary to the book. It has to be that way. You’re not an online personality. You make stories for a living. And it’s tantalizing to assume the story you should be making is YOUR OWN, but I find that at the end of the day, it’s a very big distraction and will pull you away from doing the thing you should really be doing.

Two rules here prevail:

Don’t be an asshole (and if you are, try to fix it).

And be the best version of yourself online.

That’s it. Beyond that, write books. The best you can.

Also Something Something Marketing And Self-Promotion

Another myth that gets shattered is that the author is somehow fully responsible for turning her book into a smash-bang hit. The marketing is on our shoulders and we should be self-promoting to hell and back and if we’re not then our book is doomed to the Hell that is obscurity.

We should self-promote, yes. Author Stephen Blackmoore just said it very well on Twitter — “All we can really do is make people aware of it. We’re not moving used cars.” A writer can sell 10s or 100s of copies of his book. Selling 1000s is a marketing job that requires more than just getting on social media and waving your arms like a drowning swimmer. It’s the publisher’s job, really, to move that number. (Note: if you self-publish, you’re now the publisher so you should be treating marketing like its very own department inside your brain.)

Here’s where it starts to matter — it starts to matter in the industry. Your self-promotion isn’t always about reaching an audience of readers, but also about reaching a community of writers, editors, publishers, buyers, agents, bloggers, reviewers, and so forth. (Bemoan gatekeepers all you like; they exist everywhere, and are often not appointed to the role.) Now, to be clear, “self-promotion” here is not the narrow view of SELL YOUR BOOK, but rather, SELL YOURSELF BY BEING A COOL, UNSHITTY PERSON TO TALK TO. MAYBE EVEN FUNNY OR SMART OR INTERESTING. It’s not about shoving your book in a cannon and pistoning it into people’s faces. It’s about you being nice and useful and connected to that world.

That’s not branding. It’s not about platform.

It’s just about being you.

This is also necessary outside social media.

Take meetings.

Introduce yourself.

Go to festivals and cons and parties — not like, all the time, because again your role is BOOK WRITER, not LITERARY GADFLY, but meeting people matters.

Bookstores Still Matter, Too

Meet booksellers and be nice to them. (Librarians, too.) Meet book buyers and library buyers. Again, not just for the crass BOOK-PEDDLING, but because these people are vital parts of the book-to-reader ecosystem. Physical book sales are up (though don’t trust anyone who tells you e-sales are down, as those metrics fail to recognize sales from self-published digital releases).

Support bookstores and libraries. Go to them. Be awesome to them. They are the drug dealers peddling your narrative narcotics. Ignore them at your peril.

Your Authorial Community Is Extra-Meaningful

Networking has its limits. The writer’s career is not all that. And yet –

The community of authors around you is super useful. I don’t necessarily mean the sum total of it, but Jesus on a bicycle, get some friends who are writers. Here’s what that nets you:

- Commiseration and celebration.

- The sharing of information that may otherwise be difficult to come by (info on advances, royalties, contract clauses, publishers, editors, agents, whiskey, that one jerk on Twitter, whiskey, more whiskey, and coffee).

- A community willing to back each other up, whether that’s regarding publisher disputes, contract issues, or again, that one jerk on Twitter.

This is also one reason to join a professional writer org. (In genre, SFWA is an example.) It’s not a necessity, but it’s one way toward that community.

Your Books Might Not Sell

Every week a nuclear megaton of books drops on the reading audience — it is a lot of books for not a lot of audience. A great many of books sell less than we’d like. I’ve had books sell really well. I’ve had books where you look at the numbers and want to ask, “Shouldn’t there be another zero on there?” And the publisher quietly shakes its head and then pushes you down an elevator shaft.

Your book may not sell.

Many of your books may not sell. Or they’ll sell well but not well enough. Or you won’t earn out — “earning out” is of course a wonderful thing where sales outpace your advance and then you start getting those precious royalty checks, which often begin embarrassingly small (“With this check I can afford the gas it will take to go cash it, huzzah!”) and then ideally begin to climb in number and begin to represent a slow-but-steady roll of incoming quarterly cash.

If your books aren’t selling, there is only one piece of advice that is true, I’d say:

Keep writing.

Books do not sell for an unholy host of reasons. It might be you. It might be the publisher. It might be the marketing department of the publisher. It might be the audience, or the retailer, or the fact that your genre is overloaded, or the fact it’s a weird genre, or, or, or. Some books land well. Many land nngyeah, okay. More than a few are flung bricks landing in puddles of shit.

Some authors drop three pooch-fucker books and then the fourth comes out of the stable like a magnificent stallion. Some authors hit big on the first and then sales descend every book thereafter. Others build a slow and steady career over decades. It’s rarely ideal, but you can almost always make it work. If you do one thing: survive.

All you can do is hang on. Be like the little cat dangling from the branch — just hang in there, delicate writer kitten! BECAUSE WINTER IS COMING AND YOU ARE A VULNERABLE LITTLE THING AND SOON THE SNOW GOBLINS WILL HUNT YOU FOR YOUR TENDER MEAT.

Ahem.

Survival is the most vital success an author can engineer for herself. Simply staying in the game — emotionally, mentally, productively — is huge. It counts for a lot and it is the way to a stable writing career. Again: this is a career of peaks and valleys. A lot of writers love the peaks but can’t hack the valleys. Learn to love the valleys for their ability to let you rethink and reframe your careers and give you a new peak to which you can look forward.

This Is Only The Tip Of The Iceberg

Sweet crickets, I could keep on going.

And I probably will — but in another post. This one has gone on too long.

At the end of the day, the most fundamental advice is the same as it is for anybody: don’t get mired in drama, do your best work, sell it for what it’s worth, and try to improve with every iteration. Do not base that improvement purely on sales or reviews, because both of those are the result of a thousand wildly spinning compasses. Sometimes it’s on you, sometimes it’s on the publisher, sometimes it’s on the fates themselves. You control what you can control, which is the work. Write. Edit. Publish. Repeat. Survive. Look to a career that is not just the few books and the few years you’ve invested but is an ongoing carousel of the weird wonder that is a writing career.

* * *

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Macro Monday: The Lightbulb

The other day on Twitter I went on a bit of a tear about how I’d gotten away from photography over the last few years. Since the TINY HUMAN was born and with deadlines out the no-no-hole, it’s been tough securing say, an hour or two just to wander in the woods and take random-ass photos. I’m not a professional photog (though I do have a few lucky pro credits to my name, surprisingly), but I find there is intrinsic value in having creative outlets that aren’t writing. Not only does it clear my head from writing and give me a low-pressure mode of expression, but for me photography triggers the visual side of the creative spectrum, which can only (I hope) accentuate the written one. Macro photography in particular is a passion: itty-bitty worlds writ large! A simple waterdrop on top of a shampoo cap can look like a whole other world.

As such, I thought, well, fuck it. I’m gonna get back into it. I’ll make the time. I’ll take the time, rather — I cannot excrete hours from my pores. ONLY THE DREADED CHRONOVORE CAN DO THAT. Plus, I’m upgrading my camera game a little bit. New camera, new photos, a new year.

Every Monday for the foreseeable future, I’ll pop in here and post a macro photo.

Maybe I’ll add commentary sometimes.

Some weeks I probably won’t.

If you want to use the photo for story inspiration, go for it.

If you want to ignore it entirely, I dig that.

But this will be here, I think, as a fixture this year of reminding me to get off my ass and go wander the world a little bit with a camera in my hand. Sometimes I’ll post new photos. Sometimes I’ll dig back through the archives to find some cool ones. You’ll see a lot of macros, I think: waterdrops, fungi, flowers, random shit, foodie shit, and most definitely, bugs.

I won’t post any spider ones directly for you arachnophobes.

But I may offer links to them, like to this little lady right here.

I own all photos. I took them all. Copyright me, goddamnit.

Today’s photo:

The Lightbulb.

Really, just a waterdrop hanging from a withered nubbin of poison ivy vine.

But to me, it looks like a goddamn waterdrop.

It’s not the greatest photo. Clarity could be tighter. But I like it just the same.

Please to enjoy.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Choose Your Title And Write

I went to a website and asked it to generate five random book titles for me, and it did. And then I had it generate five more for giggles. (I didn’t just as this of some random website, by the way — I didn’t like, go to CNN or Amazon and yell at it to give me titles. I used this website right here.)

That gives us ten random titles.

You will choose one of these titles and write a story using it as the title.

You have, mmm, let’s say 2000 words this go-around.

Write it. Post it at your online space. Drop a link here so we can all see it.

Due by next Friday, Jan 22nd, noon EST.

Your ten titles are:

The River’s Mask

The BookFeet

Future Graveyard

Across the Parlour and the Exile

Out of the Carnival and the Soul

The Crow of Nine-World

To Dance Beyond The Hand

The Living House’s Rabbit

Muddy Stars

The Goblet of Lost Chicago

Now go write!

Death Becomes Us

That dragonfly is dead.

David Bowie is gone.

So now is Alan Rickman (who probably would’ve done a bang-up job playing Bowie), too.

Shit goddamnit shit.

And also the familiar, oft-repeated refrain:

Fuck cancer. Times a thousand. Times a million. Times infinity.

Art at its core is, I think, driven by death. It’s there to help us look away from death. Art is there to help us understand it. Art is there to romanticize death — or to stare it square in the face.

And death is also something that motivates artists.

When we’re born, we’re guaranteed two things: one breath and death. Everybody who lives gets those two certain narrative beats to their story, birth, death, born, died. It is not a morbid fantasy to note that I’m going to die and so are you. It’s not a threat. It’s a promise earned by life — that grim balancing of the scales is not reserved for one person over the next, for you but not for me, for the under-served but not the privileged. We all have wildly different journeys but when our time is up it’s like game design: we are all funneled toward the same ending, the same inevitability. Some of our life is about ignoring death and pretending it isn’t there. Some of our life is geared toward trying to prevent death — or, for some, running headlong toward it.

The fear of death can destroy you.

But the epiphany of it can also motivate you.

People ask why I work so hard or why I’ve been so single-minded to be what I want to be and that’s because I don’t want deathbed regrets. I don’t want to get there and then look back over my shoulder and look at all the closed doors I wanted to open. I don’t fear death; I fear purposeless death. My work, my writing, is very explicitly motivated by the reality that I could get gored by a moose tomorrow, I could get crushed by a bulldozer in ten years, I could get prostate cancer and die in my 60s like my father, I could get pneumonia (again) and die when I’m 99. It’s coming. I know it. And so I cleave to the act of creation both to spite and to make sense of the ineluctable destruction. I don’t know what happens after we go. That’s an adventure either of realms beyond life or becoming food for trees and worms (both of which sound very nice in their own special way). Concentrating on what’s past the mortal gates, though, is a very bad way to live.

As such, I’ll say here what I said on Twitter this morning:

Everybody dies.

Love those that you have while you have them.

And do what you love while the world has you.

Bowie did that. Rickman did that. Be like Bowie. Be like Rickman.

Live. Make. Love. And then, only then, die.

Meet the Bookburners! Four Authors Talk Fighting Demons

So, here’s the deal. Bookburners is a piece of serial fiction about demon hunters — and it just wrapped up its first season. It’s published by Serial Box in weekly episodes (in both e-format and audio). With the whole first season done, that primes the series for binge reading via SerialBox.com, their app, or an e-retailer of your choice. 

Thing is, while I am a sucker for serial fiction, I’m extra-suckery for serial fiction written by several of my favorite people. Like, for real. Mur Lafferty? Max Gladstone?! Margaret Dunlap?!? And Brian Francis Slattery, who, admittedly, I don’t really know? But if he hangs out with these three, then it is safe to assume he is similarly made of the same awesome meteor-forged metal. 

They wanted to pop by and do a guest post, and the idea for said guest post was too good to pass up — four authors offering up their take on what would happen if they personally had to do the job of “demon-hunter.” Thus it is time to meet the Bookburners – the real ones, at least. Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead and the Craft Sequence), Mur Lafferty (The Shambling Guide to New York City and the I Should be Writing podcast), Margaret Dunlap (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and The Middleman), and Brian Francis Slattery (Spaceman Blues and Liberation).

Mur Lafferty

Max is our fearless leader, strategy is his game and he’s good for swinging a 2×4 to knock off a zombie’s head. I’ve seen it.

Brian, him I don’t trust. If you read the very weird shit he writes, you know that he’s got to have some inside knowledge. Dude writes scary-ass demons so well because he drinks with scary-ass demons on Tuesday nights down at the Wild Wings (Monday night is Ladies’ Night, Tuesday is Demons’ Night. Although some demons who identify as ladies do visit both nights.)

Margaret is our quartermaster, she keeps all of the weapons cleaned, sharpened, and ready to go. She always knows who has what weapon, and who put a scratch on the silver sword. * But don’t touch her gun. She can drop a vampire at 100 yards with a wooden bullet, and was the cause of last year’s Halloween Eve riot down at the Wild Wings. You see, this face-eating demon, who is also fond of mild wings, got her order switched with Margaret’s super hot wings. That lady was very offended that Margaret had eaten half of her basket of wings without batting an eye. Demon tried to eat her face. Margaret wasn’t having any of it. That was a big clean up night at the Wild Wings.

Then there’s me. I’d be considered the fool, the Zeppo, the Xander, the bait. I am the one who is an ethics test for new recruits; when doing their first field test of running away from demons, I have to fall down and hurt my leg. If they come back for me, they pass. If they don’t, they fail, and I get eaten. Luckily we’ve only recruited ethical people so far, but new Season 2 writer for the team, Andrea Phillips, nearly failed when she paused to consider before she turned around and helped me up. I also moonlight as a bartender down at the Wild Wings and manage to get my team discounts when they come in on Ladies’ Night and Demons’ Night.

* I said I was sorry!

[murverse] [@mightymur]

Margaret Dunlap

Okay, first of all, I don’t know who decided it was a good idea to put together a demon-hunting team made up entirely of writers, but if you’re looking for someone who is secretly trying to sell out humanity to the forces of evil, magic, and hot wings, that’s where I’d look for suspects first. When I signed up for this gig, we were just trying to revolutionize serial fiction on the internet. That’s what they told me anyway.

Of course Max is our fearless leader. Partially, this is because he is the tallest, and it turns out that all of those studies that say tall people tend to get ahead in life are actually on to something. Plus, it seemed like a good idea at the time. We had already put in him in charge of the writing team, and it saved us having to work out the hierarchy again to just go with that when fighting demons got added to the mission brief. Since none of us have died yet (I totally had a bead on that demon if Andrea hadn’t come back for you, Mur!), I’d say he’s doing a pretty awesome job.

Mur is our chief intelligence officer. She wrote a series of guidebooks for supernatural creatures. She knows where they go, how they take their coffee, how spicy they like their hot wings. She can *blend.* Not that this makes us question her loyalty. The guidebooks are obviously a clever double-blind. Make the monsters think that you’re on their side, tell them where they can gather, and then use that information to keep an eye on them. She’s playing a very deep game.

(That’s why I won’t accept her apology for scratching the silver sword. Because I know she didn’t do it. I’m not sure why she’s taking the fall for Max. Maybe he put her up to it, maybe this way he’ll owe her a favor later on. But it was obviously Max. I mean, he fences. Who else in this crowd would even pick up a sword?)

And then there’s Brian. Brian knows how to live off the grid, chops wood, and has a stockpile of olive oil cans in his kitchen. Sure, he says it’s because he “cooks Italian” a lot. Riiiiiight. Personally, I’m not sure what’s up with Brain, I’m just glad that he’s on our side. At least, I’m pretty sure he is. I do know one thing for sure: I wouldn’t want to cross a man who knows how to transform an accordion into a guitar.

What do I do around this joint? Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that. Whatever needs doing. I was worried the demon fighting was really going to cut in on the writing time, but it turns out I just watch less HGTV. So, if that’s all you needed to know, would you mind passing the hot wings?

[] [@spyscribe]

Max Gladstone

First, if I’m the leader, we’re all in deep trouble.  Which we might be!  But under my leadership we’re definitely going to give the demons a bit of an easier time.  In point of fact I’m probably more like the tip of the phalanx.  Let’s charge into the problem!  Tackle the big thing with the thorns and the seven eyestalks head-on, even though the head is where all the teeth are.  Never tell me the odds!

(Actually, please do tell me the odds.  Odds are helpful for decision-making and not getting eaten.)

I figure it’s Margaret actually keeping the team together—quartermastering, sure, but also coordinating from behind the lines.  She’s the one who knows the demons’ weak spots, while the rest of us bash in and flail about.  “Let’s try silver!” says I.  “Guys, silver doesn’t—“ “Too late, trying it anyway.” *roars, crashing of trees, people tossed through walls* “That didn’t work at all.”  “I TOLD you,” says Margaret.  “Just cut off the head, it’ll be fine.”

Of course, cutting off the head is easier said than done.  ‘Coz the head, to repeat, is where all the teeth are.

Mur’s team ninja.  It’s the humor that disarms—she’s all calm and collected on the surface, nothing weird here, no problem whatsoever, got a great joke or three—and then the knife slides in.  She’s most likely to take out the critter in the end.  Making it look easy, all the way along.

Brian’s the one who will doom us all.  He’s great for dealing with demons—maybe even too great.  Because if you summon a bigger demon to eat the demon you’re currently fighting, then you’re stuck with the new, even more enormous demon hanging around.  And then where are you?

In deep trouble.

Which, to be fair, is where we started off.  So it’s probably all for the best.

[MaxGladstone] [@maxgladstone]

Brian Francis Slattery

Maybe this is giving in to the consensus, but I agree with Mur and Margaret that Max is our leader. How can he not be? If you saw him at our meetings, you would agree, too. I also agree with Max, Margaret, and Mur that Margaret and Mur are the real brains of the operation, in addition to being the most effective, funny, and organized. And they are all being a little too modest. Against the three of them, few demons stand much of a chance.

But I guess I’m wondering why we’re fighting the demons in the first place. I know it’s our assignment and all, but haven’t we all read I Am Legend? I’m serious. I know the demons are horrible for us. Terrible things happen when they’re around. But what if we’re even more horrible for them than they are for us? What if the unholy power they unleash in our world, which boils people’s brains and destroys cities, is nothing compared to the havoc we wreak on them? For all we know, every time a human summons a demon from its realm, a toxic, gelatinous substance is left behind where the demon was standing, and that toxin spreads and infects everything it touches, so that no other demons—not to mention the nine-legged food they eat, or the spiraled castles they live in, or the very purple soil they walk on—is safe. For all we know, we have caused their ancient metropolises, once so vast they looked like mountain ranges from a distance, to melt into piles of poisonous slag. Their continents are slipping into the orange oceans that surround them, and the demons are crowded on the few spots of dry land left, begging for some power even higher than they are to intervene, even as the earth softens beneath their feet. We have ruined an entire plane of existence, and all become we’re lonely, or bored, or greedy, or we want revenge, or some other small human concern. Who are the demons now, you know?

So Max is right: Maybe it’s better to just be where we started off in the first place. Pass the wings. Extra spicy.

[BFSlattery]

* * *

Magic is real, and hungry — trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.

Bookburners: Serial Box | The App! | Amazon