Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 4
August 25, 2024
Bonus Essay: On Heinlein’s Habits & The Rise of the New Pulp Era
Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 1.
Estimated Reading Time: 22 Minutes | Don’t like reading online? Get an ebook copy here.
I first learned Heinlein’s Rules for Writing while at Clarion South in the Australian summer of 2007, holed up in the Griffith University campus with seventeen other speculative fiction hopefuls for six weeks spent critiquing and learning our craft under the watchful eye of established SF professionals.
At the time I’d written semi-professionally for over a decade, publishing poetry and RPG materials while making slow to negligent progress on my creative writing PhD. Years spent immersed in university creative writing programs taught me to string words together in a pretty row, but time spent in a post-graduate writing degree focuses on building a career as a researcher rather than a writer. Ergo, I went into Clarion confident I knew how to produce a story, but eager to learn how to be a writer, with the goal of soaking up all the business advice I could get.
Our crash-course in Heinlein’s rules came via the Western Australia writer Lee Battersby in the second week, and they remain the single most important lesson I learned in my Clarion tenure. Applying them—along with a market list with editors open to submissions—changed my career trajectory and netted overseas publications in an era when such things felt new and strange for an Australian author.
The application of Heinlein’s rules earned me more money and kudos in the next eighteen months than a decade of writing had earned me prior.
To make my subtext plain: the adoption of Heinlein’s rules proved significant for me and transformed my relationship with writing. I doubt I’d still do what I do without them.
And yet I come to bury Heinlein Rules, not to praise them.
PRIMARY SOURCESLike many contemporary writers, I learned Heinlein’s rules from a mentor or friend rather than the primary source. Even though Heinlein’s himself declined to call them ‘rules’—he preferred the ‘business habits’—countless adherents use rules to describe them in workshops, blog posts, and books. Indeed, high-profile authors (including Dean Wesley Smith and Robert J. Sawyer) and excitable new writers alike advocate for ‘the rules’ with vociferous enthusiasm, and you’re almost certainly familiar with some variation.
For those who’ve never encountered Heinlein’s advice before, I lay all five out in brief below. In short, Heinlein believed a writer must do these five things in order to forge a career as a fiction writer:
You must write.You must finish what you start.You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.You must put it on the market.You must keep it on the market until sold.
Modern adherent will often add a sixth rule to the end—you must start the next thing—but the gist remains intact. It’s easy to see why these habits are so popular—they’re simple and logical, custom-built for repetition and easy recitation from memory. Over time, they’ve taken on a mythic quality, wisdom handed down from the venerable master of speculative fiction’s pulp era. A Rosetta stone to change a writer’s fortunes.
In truth, when we go back to primary sources, they’re a throwaway at the tail of Heinlein’s essay ‘On The Writing Of Speculative Fiction’ in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s 1947 essay anthology Of Worlds Beyond. A practical suggestion appended to a longer essay about Heinlein’s theory of science fiction, offered as a sop to Heinlein’s conscience after headier thoughts about the genre.
To understand the mythology around Heinlein’s habits, consider the iterative ways Heinlein’s rules expand in repetition: Heinlein lays out his practices and provides contextual detail in 261 words. Robert J. Sawyer’s essay on the rules, written in 1996, weighs in at approximately 1,200 words. Dean Wesley Smith’s 2016 book, Heinlein’s Rules: 5 Simple Business Rules For Writing, delivers the same information across 12,000 words. Both Sawyer and Smith cleave to the same five rules, with “start the next thing”appended as a sixth rule, but neither offer significant additional context or explanation. One could—and I did—get by with the five steps outlined above.
But this isn’t my primary concern. To my knowledge, neither quotes Heinlein’s final statement on the business habits:
“… if you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, or I, or anybody else, can throw at him.” (Heinlein LOC 178)
This, for me, is a crucial insight that’s deserving of more consideration than the constant repetition of Heinlein’s rules suggest in writing discourse.
KNOW YOUR PRODUCTMany people believe the independent publishing movement has sparked a new pulp era, with authors free to replicate their pulp forebears’ successes with constant production and the adoption of a rapid release schedule many traditional publishers abandoned decades ago.
Before I quibble with this assertion, let’s take a trip back in time. The first American pulp magazine—the revamped Argosy, launched in 1896–set the format we think of as ‘pulp’. Your typical pulp was a thick magazine with 135,000 words of content: 7 inches by 10 inches, approximately 128 pages, filled with lurid and disposable genre tales grouped together by type. Printed on wood-pulp paper with ragged edges, their production values distinguish them from the ‘slick’ magazines with better printers and paper quality. While the slicks sold ads to make a buck, a pulp magazine’s production quality didn’t lend itself to reproducing art or graphics. Their profits lived and died in their ability to lure back readers who loved their genre niche.
In the late nineteen thirties, the pulps dominated the entertainment market, with some estimates suggest there were over 1,000 titles in production at once (some short-lived, others not). Not all pulps published science fiction—pulp aficionados will be familiar with the myriad genres covered by pulp magazines—but even so, the landscape provided markets hungry for stories to fill their page count.
This market Robert Heinlein published in shaped his business principles, but it was already in a state of decline as he laid out his business habits in 1947. The pulps battled paper shortages caused by World War II and the steady increase in competition from new mediums such as radio and television heading into the 1950s, and they would lose that fight. Within ten years, the primary pulp distributor, American News Company, liquidated and marked the death knell of the format.
Some pulp those writers carried on, writing for the advertising-supported slicks, which demanded a different type (and, frequently, higher “quality”) story than their pulp siblings. Other pulp writers ceased production of short stories and wrote longer paperbacks1
(1), while others moved on to television
And some faded into obscurity, unable to transition to a new model when the familiar, hungry pool of editors desperate for copy ceased to exist.
CH-CH-CH-CHANGESThe market for speculative fiction didn’t go away with the demise of the pulp magazines, but it changed and left some writers less than pleased with the transition. Authors who once supported themselves and their families with short fiction now found themselves focused on longer works for much the same money.
Writers who wax poetic about Heinlein’s rules often leave out contextual details. When arguing ebook publishing represents a new, neo-pulp era, where self-published authors with a love of genre fiction and the capacity to write fast can forge a living, there’s often a failure to reconcile Heinlein’s rules with the logic governing the contemporary marketplace.
It also overlooks the other useful insight to be drawn from visiting Heinlein’s advice in the original format: Eshbach included Heinlein, and nominated his essay as the first in the collection, because:
“… he is the first of the popular science fiction writers to sell science fiction consistently to the “slicks”. Others will follow his lead; and it may well be that this brief article will be the spark that will fire the creative urge in other writers, who will aim for—and hit—the big pay, general fiction magazines.” (Eshbach LOC 75)
Ergo, when repeating Heinlein’s rules in a contemporary audience, we present two points worthy of acknowledgement.
First, they are business habits tied to a particular era with different market logic.
Second, it’s a strategy employed by a writer with a surfeit of talent, luck, or good timing, which allowed him to achieve notably exceptional success rather than a success typical writer of his era, and this too may influence a contemporary writer’s ability to replicate his results.
THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF THE CONTEMPORARY MARKETMy adoption of Heinlein’s rules as a short fiction writer in 2007 led to a level of success, but it didn’t allow me to forge a full-time career as a writer. The short story market wasn’t large enough, and editors were now spoiled for choice rather than hurting for copy. Any attempt to sustain Heinlein’s business model through short stories alone would be impractical, if not outright impossible. The market I wrote for demanded longer works, with stiff competition for available spots. Editors still needed content to fill their publishing lines, but books were a second-tier entertainment source, their demand reduced thanks to the rise of television, film, and the internet.
Indeed, the bulk of my career has been an era where the editors ‘desperate for content’ were no longer editors at all, but television executives tasked with filling hundreds of channels with content twenty-four seven. Fiction writers would never again have the same marketplace for their work Heinlein wrote into back in 1947, and commercially-minded pulp writers adapted their approach to the times.
It seems like books would never have their heyday as a hungry pulp market again, but then Amazon launched the first Kindle to the public on November 19, 2017, and the game changed in an instant.
Ebooks existed prior to the Kindle’s launch, but a major player unleashing an e-reader as a loss leader changed the game. The Kindle created a new audience for fiction—an audience hungry for books to read on their new devices, ready to embrace content in formats and genres traditional publishing either underserved or ignored altogether. For the next four years, independent publishing boomed with all the fervour of a Wild West gold rush. Those who could feed the market at speed earned themselves a full-time career, if not a fortune.
I don’t blame anyone who saw a new pulp era here. For a few brief, shining years Heinlein’s rules made perfect sense again: write fast, put the work to market, and readers desperate for content would pay you for your writing. The first wave of kindle millionaires emerged from writers who fit one of two archetypes:
Authors with a deep backlist they could publish, composed of either out-of-print work from their traditional career or simply work the traditional market wasn’t interested in; or,Authors who could write and publish fast, establishing a deep backlist at speed.It’s easy to see how Heinlein’s rules enjoyed new relevancy around this time, and why the general tenor of writing conversations online turned to questions of speed and quantity. Rachel Aaron’s seminal 2k to 10k post became a lighting post in 2011, with a book of the same name released soon after. Scores of self-published authors followed suit, cycling through all manner of advice for rapid production of words, from pomodoro cycles to writing sprints to dogged persistence and long hours to using tools such as dictation that sped up draft production.
What new pulp era advocates and writers who focus on speed often overlook is the difference between the hungry market Heinlein sold into and the contemporary ebook market, including the biggest and most significant: pulp magazines proved a temporary format, published on degradable, low-quality paper with a comparatively short shelf-life.
Even the pulp paperback market, which picked up after the magazines folded, built their business assumptions around the notion books would not be available forever. The physical quality of their books were better, certainly, but limited shelf space in stores and the cost of warehousing backlists meant the life-span of a book could be measured in weeks rather than years if you wanted to maximise profits.
The modern fiction marketplace no longer operates under those limitations. Ebooks exist on an infinite store shelf without physical limitations. Every work you produce—in theory, and often practice—is available for as long as there are folks willing to host the files and profit from it. Rather than competing with the other works released that month, you’re competing with all the back list works published and kept in digital ‘print’ by stakeholders across the publishing landscape.
As the costs of publishing books wanes, the wealth of available works expands, and the poetics of fiction adjust. Ebooks are cheap to produce. Factor in print on demand, which removes the burden of warehousing from print books, and the same is increasingly true on the physical side of the industry as well.2
The market hungry for ebooks after the Kindle launched quickly became spoiled for choice. Backlist sales—once the domain of best-sellers and cult hits—are now a part of every sane author’s business strategy.
This, too, changes the game in ways that intrigue me. You can still write and publish at the speed of a pulp author—and even earn a few bucks along the way—but the cultural logic of the contemporary marketplace doesn’t favour the tactic.
Contemporary pulp writers don’t seek editors desperate for copy, but niche audiences who feel under-served by the existing markets (or dedicated fans who crave more from a specific writer rather than a specific genre, but they take time to build).
In the here and now, the challenge is not selling your work to an editor, but finding and keeping an audience.
CUTTING YOUR FUTURE INCOMEBack in 2009, venerable SF writer Robert Silverberg wrote an entry in SF Signal’s Mind Meld blog about the best writing advice he’d ever received. The advice came in the early part of his career, around 1957—just ten years removed from Heinlein’s essay—when Silverberg forged a career via the rapid production of the solid-but-conventional 5,000 word stories needed to fill magazine pages in his era. To the young Silverberg, it seemed a safer bet to produce the “competent potboilers” editors found it easy to say yes too, but neither stretched him as a writer or showed any real ambition. In effect, he wrote in accordance with Heinlein’s advice, producing work fast and lean, then finding an editor hungry for copy.
This approach lasted until the magazine editor Lester Del Ray gave Silverberg some advice:
(Lester) pointed out to me that I was working from a false premise. “Even if all you’re concerned with is making money,” he said, “you’re going about it the wrong way. You’re knocking out penny-a-word stories as fast as you can, and, sure, you’re pulling in the quick bucks very nicely. But you’re shortchanging yourself, because all that you’ll ever make from what you’re writing now is the check you get for it today. Those stories will die the day they’re published. They won’t get into anthologies and won’t be bought for translation and nobody will want you to put together a collection of them. Whereas if you were writing at the level that I know you’re capable of, you’d be creating a body of work that will go on bringing in money for the rest of your life. So by going for the easy money you’re actually cutting your future income. (Silverberg 2007)
Silverberg hesitated to push himself, as his experience showed his ambitious projects never sold as easily as the potboilers, but Del Ray argued this would be a temporary phenomenon. Eventually Silverberg did as advised, and the approach transformed his career. He won awards, had work reprinted, and collections followed suit. Rather than produce disposable stories, Silverberg shifted to stories that rewarded re-engagement, which became the cornerstone of his income.
Our era resembles the pulp paperback age Silverberg wrote into than the pulp magazine era in which Heinlein formulated his rules. Shifts in the market—especially how and where we read new work—made it necessary. As editor and author Nick Mamatas argues in his essay, How To End A Story, the pulp magazines (and many slicks) favoured stories with neatly tied denouements over those which provoked further thought. Magazines needed disposable content, so a reader would pass the magazine around (a tactic used to boost the circulation numbers pitched to advertisers) and make way for the next issue (61). That was the logic of the market at the time.
The creative economy of the internet age is different. Magazines need unique rather than disposable, something to pull readers towards their websites. They want stories destined to be shared, discussed, unpicked, and broadcast via online channels. An ending with a ragged edge, which leaves the reader thinking, is a stronger choice than something easily forgotten. As Mamatas notes, the genre’s elder statesmen still offer editorial advice informed by the pulp era, but the economy around short fiction has changed under their feet (62). We are writing into a new publishing economy (and, in fact, a very different market landscape to the one Mamamtas was writing about in his essay).
HUNGRY MARKETSSo where are the copy-hungry markets Heinlein wrote for to be found in the current marketplace? Where should an aspiring pulp author, eager to cleave to Heinlein’s rules, seek to find an editor so desperate for content they’ll buy the complete dogs of our back catalogue? It doesn’t lie in short fiction anymore, and may not lie in long-form fiction either.
On the surface, a contemporary neo-pulp writer might search for what indie phenomenon Chris Fox has dubbed a Hungry Market, or “a genre that loves to read, but isn’t being supplied with enough books.” (8). This often translates to a highly specific sub-genre or trope, rather than a broad market, and indie publishing has forged whole subgenre movements by deploying this approach. In the last decade we’ve witnessed the rise of niche sugenres such as dinosaur erotica, academy romance, litRPG, technomagic sci-fi, reverse harem romance and erotica. By now, sub-genres trends that rise, crashed to shore, and recede in popularity are an ongoing part of the indie conversation as writers share what works and what doesn’t in online spaces.
The curse, of course, is any hungry market will soon be overfed by other neo-pulp writers swarming the profitable niche. After a rapid rise in available content, the subgenre ceases to be hungry, satiated by the rapid emergence of backlist titles and a pseudo-cannon of “must read” titles that form a common language among fans.
I would argue the most compatible hunger for content to Heinlein’s day isn’t books at all, but social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, et al have the voracious need for content, constantly putting new material before users to promote engagement, then niche and categorize their audience data based on those interactions.
Alas, these platforms are notoriously difficult for creators to monetise. Social media sites trained creators to engage with them for free, trading access to an audience for much needed content. For most platforms, paying a creator for their work is not a feature, but a tool to be deployed when attempting to capture market share or threatened by competitors. Their philosophy is to get as much content for free, then pay for the most popular when it becomes clear the creators may leave.
Platforms often deploy a communal creator fund—an arbitrary amount bequeathed by the organization running the platform—in lieu of straightforward exchanges of financial capital for artistic content. They spread this monthly fund among content creators on a proportion-of-content-consumed basis, with X minutes of content consumed equating to Y cents.
These funds are frequently disconnected from revenue generated, which means they can be inflated in the early stages (to draw creators in when a revenue share wouldn’t pay out as much) and then allowed to stagnate as profits rise. The funds disconnect the value creators provide from their compensation, which leaves the system ripe for abuse.3
The Kindle Unlimited program—aimed at voracious readers willing to subscribe for ten dollars a month—is similarly hungry, and there’s a subset of neo-pulp writers who forged strong careers there, working at speed and tickling Amazon’s algorithms with constant new releases. Like the social media platforms above, authors are paid from a creator fund, and while their work is not generating ad revenue, it is providing considerable value to Amazon above and beyond the creative product, allowing them to run the Unlimited program and lock in exclusive content, which then pulls reader into an exclusive relationship with the Amazon shopping ecosystem.4
In all these examples, the revenue a creator can earn is supported by speed and the willingness to unleash a deep backlist. Alas, said revenue is not proportionate to the value they provide to the platform in question.
While one could argue this is true of the pulp magazine model, said magazines at least paid on delivery rather than waiting to see how ‘successful’ a story proved to be with their readership. The potential value of a story was easy to predict.
THE NEW PULP ERAThere are still authors who earn good money cleaving to Heinlein’s principles. Some even make significant money, for the moment, but it’s worth considering the publishing landscape here in 2022. Heinlein’s business practice assumes there’s always a market for a competent-but-unspectacular story, an assumption reliant on a surfeit of hungry markets cycling through disposable content at speed.
I argue the contemporary writer, producing work in systems with deep access to back list and a greater need to build their own audience, face the opposite problem. Our markets are not hungry for long—increasingly, they’re picky eaters, with broader genres giving way to specific tropes and subgenre preferences. In this terrain, a writer is arguably better off crafting more ambitious, better-quality work than the churn implied by Heinlein and his more vocal contemporary advocates.
It doesn’t mean we should eschew Heinlein entirely—in a world where back list titles hold almost as much value as new work, the ability to work fast still holds value—but I think reasserting Heinlein’s rules as habits rather than commandments is a good first step. Like much advice from the previous century, the assumptions that underpin Heinlein’s Habits are ripe for re-examination.
Embracing speed at all costs starts from a false premise. Sheer weight of production can still generate an income, just as thousands of tiny tributary dribbles may eventually form a river, but it strikes me as an approach requiring more effort for less reward. In a marketplace where the primary challenge is discovery, repeat customers and word-of-mouth are a writer’s most valuable resource.
It’s tempting to see this as a callback to hackneyed concepts around ‘quality’ art versus the commerce-driven genre, but I think the key word to focus on is ambition rather than quality. As a fan of B-grade movies and cult literature, in addition to years of teaching writing to undergraduate students, I know ambition is an endearing quality in an artist. It’s far more pleasurable to watch a creator strive—stretching beyond the limits of their time, budget, or skill—than watching an artist play it safe. A brilliant failure is far more interesting than a stultifying success.
To echo Del Ray, ambition is a strength in the 21st century writing landscape. You’re competing for a reader’s attention against your contemporaries, but also the greats, the very goods, and the merely competent authors from many generations who came before you.
After all, Robert Heinlein’s novels are still right there, ready to be purchased in multiple ebooks, print books, and audio. And I promise you the works keeping him prominent aren’t the worst old dogs he fired off to editors desperate for copy to fill their pages. Those works only have longevity and value as a backlist because the best of Heinlein’s works elevated his profile and expanded his readership.
CONTEMPORARY PRINCIPLESFor all I see flaws in Heinlein’s rules, especially when read against his original essay, the adoption of all five in moderation can still help writers push their career forward. You must still write, after all, and finish what you start. While I believe in redrafting and editing, I believe there’s a point where you must declare the work done, and not tinker with it any further.
Where I diverge from Heinlein most is the final two steps, for putting the work to market is no longer enough. The desperate editors are not there and the hungry markets are too short-lived, and there are now enough books to feed even the most gluttonous of readers. There is more space for ambition and reworking your craft in this landscape. Your back list matters considerably more and you want to build it fast, but always question whether three okay stories are more valuable than a single great work.
The contemporary pulp writer doesn’t simply put work to market because they understand each new work builds up value around their other creations. They produce works aimed at engaging a reader long-term, across multiple works, rather than focusing their relationship on a single tale. They ask for investment across their entire career, not a single storyline. They engage their audiences directly, rather than editors, and extend beyond the parasocial relationship of author and reader.
And they keep building up their back list, one ambitious story at a time, searching for new readers because those books are still available.No mouldering wood-pulp magazines will steal away our work , wiping away our worst and our best stories alike as the paper decomposes. Everything we do is still available and may well be for decades to come.
To eschew the immediate appeal of hungry markets might sting in the short term, when the first books are harder to sell, but we build careers off the stories folks still read years after release.
NEW PULP“I always wanted to be a pulp writer,” Kameron Hurley writes in her introduction to Future Artifacts (6), citing an affection for fantasy tales such as the Conan stories and Elric of Melnibone. Future Artifacts collects Hurley’s short stories produced for her Patreon over the last six years. Like the pulp writers, she knocked out stories in a couple of days in order to make regular cash, rather than stretching royalty cheques for longer works, which arrived twice a year.
And yet, Hurley works at a slower pace than the pulp writers of old, producing a single short story per month (albeit at a higher fee than she’d earn from most magazines; At time of writing, Hurley’s Patreon will pay her over $3,000 Australian for each new story, and she averages one a month). Those who cleave to Heinlein’s rules and the pulp ideology around fast production may hesitate to embrace Hurley as a New Pulp writer, but I often fear those folks miss the forest for the trees.
Hurly makes her Patreon income off the stories she produces, but they’re a fraction of the total content generated for her patrons. She supplements story production with broader outreach, much of it story-adjacent without becoming new fictional works. This outreach includes a monthly podcast, behind-the-scenes videos, craft advice, and one-on-one skypes with fans. Hurley repurposes these secondary works after an exclusive period: posting videos on her website; making the Get To Work Hurley podcast available through multiple podcast streams. Even the stories have a second life—Future Artifacts is published by Apex Publishing, rather than Hurley’s Patreon funds, and exists as a separate product to the works sold to her most ardent fans. While Hurley writes for her most ardent fans on Patreon, those same works spread and extend her reach into other content-hungry parts of the internet.
In this respect, at least, the pulp era hasn’t left us—the philosophy has simply mutated to adapt to a new era. Stories and novels, increasingly, are the high-end prestige products in an author’s arsenal, while the hungry markets desperate for content have become social media streams where the payday is less, but the reach is considerable.
The spirit of Heinlein’s rules remains valuable, but the blind application of the practice or exhortation of its virtues without consideration for the market in which we operate does a disservice to creators. The wood pulps are gone, and the hungry social streams won’t pay for stories, but smart writers can still leverage that hunger if they hustle. They create fewer works, but the increased reach and long life-span elevates the value of what they produce through repeated, deepening engagement.
The goal is no longer feeding a hungry periodical market with easily forgotten stories, but to write stories which reward those who come searching for more.
We may well be in a new golden age of pulp fiction, but the logic of our market demands more from us than the simple repetition of habits from decades ago.
REFERENCESAaron, Rachel. “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day.” Pretentious Title: Official Writing Blog of SFF Author Rachel Aaron/Bach, June 2011. http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.htmlEshbach, Lloyed Arthur. “Editors Preface.” Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Advent Publishing, 1947. Kindle edition.Fox, Chris. Write to Market: Deliver a Book that Sells, Self-Published, 2016.Heinlein, Robert A. “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Advent Publishing, 1947. Kindle edition.Hurley, Cameron. Future Artefacts. Apex Book Company, 2022.Mahatmas, Nick. “How to End a Story.” Starve Better, Apex Book Company, 2013.Sawyer, Robert J. “On Writing: Heinlein’s Rules.” SF Writer, 1996. https://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm#:Smith, Dean Wesley.Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. WMG Publishing, 2016Silverberg, Robert. “MIND MELD: Shrewd Writing Advice From Some of Science Fiction’s & Fantasy’s Best Writers.” SF Signal, January 2009. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/01/mind_meld_shrewd_writing_advice_from_some_of_science_fiction_and_fantasys_best_writers/Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.FOOTNOTESInterestingly, many pulp paperbacks were distributed through the same magazine networks who once distributed the pulp magazines.
︎At this stage, fewer indies publish their work in print than ebooks, leaving print-on-demand the platform of choice for small presses more often than indie authors. The long-term implications of this technology are less obvious as a result. ︎The sole platform offering creators a profit percentage based on the ad revenue their content generates is YouTube, who made the choice while fending off new challengers in the video space. Sadly, this only applies to some content—at the time of writing, they’re monetization for the short-video offshoot they’re hoping to use as a challenge to emerging competitor has fallen back on the creator fund model. ︎4. In recent years, changes on Amazon have limited organic search for books, leaving many Kindle Unlimited authors reliant on the Amazon advertising systems in order to find their readership. It’s a deft way of recouping royalties paid out to artists via the creator fund by asking authors to reinvest their profits. ︎
On Heinlein’s Habits & The Rise of the New Pulp Era
Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 1.
Estimated Reading Time: 22 Minutes | Don’t like reading online? Get an ebook copy here.
I first learned Heinlein’s Rules for Writing while at Clarion South in the Australian summer of 2007, holed up in the Griffith University campus with seventeen other speculative fiction hopefuls for six weeks spent critiquing and learning our craft under the watchful eye of established SF professionals.
At the time I’d written semi-professionally for over a decade, publishing poetry and RPG materials while making slow to negligent progress on my creative writing PhD. Years spent immersed in university creative writing programs taught me to string words together in a pretty row, but time spent in a post-graduate writing degree focuses on building a career as a researcher rather than a writer. Ergo, I went into Clarion confident I knew how to produce a story, but eager to learn how to be a writer, with the goal of soaking up all the business advice I could get.
Our crash-course in Heinlein’s rules came via the Western Australia writer Lee Battersby in the second week, and they remain the single most important lesson I learned in my Clarion tenure. Applying them—along with a market list with editors open to submissions—changed my career trajectory and netted overseas publications in an era when such things felt new and strange for an Australian author.
The application of Heinlein’s rules earned me more money and kudos in the next eighteen months than a decade of writing had earned me prior.
To make my subtext plain: the adoption of Heinlein’s rules proved significant for me and transformed my relationship with writing. I doubt I’d still do what I do without them.
And yet I come to bury Heinlein Rules, not to praise them.
PRIMARY SOURCESLike many contemporary writers, I learned Heinlein’s rules from a mentor or friend rather than the primary source. Even though Heinlein’s himself declined to call them ‘rules’—he preferred the ‘business habits’—countless adherents use rules to describe them in workshops, blog posts, and books. Indeed, high-profile authors (including Dean Wesley Smith and Robert J. Sawyer) and excitable new writers alike advocate for ‘the rules’ with vociferous enthusiasm, and you’re almost certainly familiar with some variation.
For those who’ve never encountered Heinlein’s advice before, I lay all five out in brief below. In short, Heinlein believed a writer must do these five things in order to forge a career as a fiction writer:
You must write.You must finish what you start.You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.You must put it on the market.You must keep it on the market until sold.
Modern adherent will often add a sixth rule to the end—you must start the next thing—but the gist remains intact. It’s easy to see why these habits are so popular—they’re simple and logical, custom-built for repetition and easy recitation from memory. Over time, they’ve taken on a mythic quality, wisdom handed down from the venerable master of speculative fiction’s pulp era. A Rosetta stone to change a writer’s fortunes.
In truth, when we go back to primary sources, they’re a throwaway at the tail of Heinlein’s essay ‘On The Writing Of Speculative Fiction’ in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s 1947 essay anthology Of Worlds Beyond. A practical suggestion appended to a longer essay about Heinlein’s theory of science fiction, offered as a sop to Heinlein’s conscience after headier thoughts about the genre.
To understand the mythology around Heinlein’s habits, consider the iterative ways Heinlein’s rules expand in repetition: Heinlein lays out his practices and provides contextual detail in 261 words. Robert J. Sawyer’s essay on the rules, written in 1996, weighs in at approximately 1,200 words. Dean Wesley Smith’s 2016 book, Heinlein’s Rules: 5 Simple Business Rules For Writing, delivers the same information across 12,000 words. Both Sawyer and Smith cleave to the same five rules, with “start the next thing”appended as a sixth rule, but neither offer significant additional context or explanation. One could—and I did—get by with the five steps outlined above.
But this isn’t my primary concern. To my knowledge, neither quotes Heinlein’s final statement on the business habits:
“… if you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, or I, or anybody else, can throw at him.” (Heinlein LOC 178)
This, for me, is a crucial insight that’s deserving of more consideration than the constant repetition of Heinlein’s rules suggest in writing discourse.
KNOW YOUR PRODUCTMany people believe the independent publishing movement has sparked a new pulp era, with authors free to replicate their pulp forebears’ successes with constant production and the adoption of a rapid release schedule many traditional publishers abandoned decades ago.
Before I quibble with this assertion, let’s take a trip back in time. The first American pulp magazine—the revamped Argosy, launched in 1896–set the format we think of as ‘pulp’. Your typical pulp was a thick magazine with 135,000 words of content: 7 inches by 10 inches, approximately 128 pages, filled with lurid and disposable genre tales grouped together by type. Printed on wood-pulp paper with ragged edges, their production values distinguish them from the ‘slick’ magazines with better printers and paper quality. While the slicks sold ads to make a buck, a pulp magazine’s production quality didn’t lend itself to reproducing art or graphics. Their profits lived and died in their ability to lure back readers who loved their genre niche.
In the late nineteen thirties, the pulps dominated the entertainment market, with some estimates suggest there were over 1,000 titles in production at once (some short-lived, others not). Not all pulps published science fiction—pulp aficionados will be familiar with the myriad genres covered by pulp magazines—but even so, the landscape provided markets hungry for stories to fill their page count.
This market Robert Heinlein published in shaped his business principles, but it was already in a state of decline as he laid out his business habits in 1947. The pulps battled paper shortages caused by World War II and the steady increase in competition from new mediums such as radio and television heading into the 1950s, and they would lose that fight. Within ten years, the primary pulp distributor, American News Company, liquidated and marked the death knell of the format.
Some pulp those writers carried on, writing for the advertising-supported slicks, which demanded a different type (and, frequently, higher “quality”) story than their pulp siblings. Other pulp writers ceased production of short stories and wrote longer paperbacks1
(1), while others moved on to television
And some faded into obscurity, unable to transition to a new model when the familiar, hungry pool of editors desperate for copy ceased to exist.
CH-CH-CH-CHANGESThe market for speculative fiction didn’t go away with the demise of the pulp magazines, but it changed and left some writers less than pleased with the transition. Authors who once supported themselves and their families with short fiction now found themselves focused on longer works for much the same money.
Writers who wax poetic about Heinlein’s rules often leave out contextual details. When arguing ebook publishing represents a new, neo-pulp era, where self-published authors with a love of genre fiction and the capacity to write fast can forge a living, there’s often a failure to reconcile Heinlein’s rules with the logic governing the contemporary marketplace.
It also overlooks the other useful insight to be drawn from visiting Heinlein’s advice in the original format: Eshbach included Heinlein, and nominated his essay as the first in the collection, because:
“… he is the first of the popular science fiction writers to sell science fiction consistently to the “slicks”. Others will follow his lead; and it may well be that this brief article will be the spark that will fire the creative urge in other writers, who will aim for—and hit—the big pay, general fiction magazines.” (Eshbach LOC 75)
Ergo, when repeating Heinlein’s rules in a contemporary audience, we present two points worthy of acknowledgement.
First, they are business habits tied to a particular era with different market logic.
Second, it’s a strategy employed by a writer with a surfeit of talent, luck, or good timing, which allowed him to achieve notably exceptional success rather than a success typical writer of his era, and this too may influence a contemporary writer’s ability to replicate his results.
THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF THE CONTEMPORARY MARKETMy adoption of Heinlein’s rules as a short fiction writer in 2007 led to a level of success, but it didn’t allow me to forge a full-time career as a writer. The short story market wasn’t large enough, and editors were now spoiled for choice rather than hurting for copy. Any attempt to sustain Heinlein’s business model through short stories alone would be impractical, if not outright impossible. The market I wrote for demanded longer works, with stiff competition for available spots. Editors still needed content to fill their publishing lines, but books were a second-tier entertainment source, their demand reduced thanks to the rise of television, film, and the internet.
Indeed, the bulk of my career has been an era where the editors ‘desperate for content’ were no longer editors at all, but television executives tasked with filling hundreds of channels with content twenty-four seven. Fiction writers would never again have the same marketplace for their work Heinlein wrote into back in 1947, and commercially-minded pulp writers adapted their approach to the times.
It seems like books would never have their heyday as a hungry pulp market again, but then Amazon launched the first Kindle to the public on November 19, 2017, and the game changed in an instant.
Ebooks existed prior to the Kindle’s launch, but a major player unleashing an e-reader as a loss leader changed the game. The Kindle created a new audience for fiction—an audience hungry for books to read on their new devices, ready to embrace content in formats and genres traditional publishing either underserved or ignored altogether. For the next four years, independent publishing boomed with all the fervour of a Wild West gold rush. Those who could feed the market at speed earned themselves a full-time career, if not a fortune.
I don’t blame anyone who saw a new pulp era here. For a few brief, shining years Heinlein’s rules made perfect sense again: write fast, put the work to market, and readers desperate for content would pay you for your writing. The first wave of kindle millionaires emerged from writers who fit one of two archetypes:
Authors with a deep backlist they could publish, composed of either out-of-print work from their traditional career or simply work the traditional market wasn’t interested in; or,Authors who could write and publish fast, establishing a deep backlist at speed.It’s easy to see how Heinlein’s rules enjoyed new relevancy around this time, and why the general tenor of writing conversations online turned to questions of speed and quantity. Rachel Aaron’s seminal 2k to 10k post became a lighting post in 2011, with a book of the same name released soon after. Scores of self-published authors followed suit, cycling through all manner of advice for rapid production of words, from pomodoro cycles to writing sprints to dogged persistence and long hours to using tools such as dictation that sped up draft production.
What new pulp era advocates and writers who focus on speed often overlook is the difference between the hungry market Heinlein sold into and the contemporary ebook market, including the biggest and most significant: pulp magazines proved a temporary format, published on degradable, low-quality paper with a comparatively short shelf-life.
Even the pulp paperback market, which picked up after the magazines folded, built their business assumptions around the notion books would not be available forever. The physical quality of their books were better, certainly, but limited shelf space in stores and the cost of warehousing backlists meant the life-span of a book could be measured in weeks rather than years if you wanted to maximise profits.
The modern fiction marketplace no longer operates under those limitations. Ebooks exist on an infinite store shelf without physical limitations. Every work you produce—in theory, and often practice—is available for as long as there are folks willing to host the files and profit from it. Rather than competing with the other works released that month, you’re competing with all the back list works published and kept in digital ‘print’ by stakeholders across the publishing landscape.
As the costs of publishing books wanes, the wealth of available works expands, and the poetics of fiction adjust. Ebooks are cheap to produce. Factor in print on demand, which removes the burden of warehousing from print books, and the same is increasingly true on the physical side of the industry as well.2
The market hungry for ebooks after the Kindle launched quickly became spoiled for choice. Backlist sales—once the domain of best-sellers and cult hits—are now a part of every sane author’s business strategy.
This, too, changes the game in ways that intrigue me. You can still write and publish at the speed of a pulp author—and even earn a few bucks along the way—but the cultural logic of the contemporary marketplace doesn’t favour the tactic.
Contemporary pulp writers don’t seek editors desperate for copy, but niche audiences who feel under-served by the existing markets (or dedicated fans who crave more from a specific writer rather than a specific genre, but they take time to build).
In the here and now, the challenge is not selling your work to an editor, but finding and keeping an audience.
CUTTING YOUR FUTURE INCOMEBack in 2009, venerable SF writer Robert Silverberg wrote an entry in SF Signal’s Mind Meld blog about the best writing advice he’d ever received. The advice came in the early part of his career, around 1957—just ten years removed from Heinlein’s essay—when Silverberg forged a career via the rapid production of the solid-but-conventional 5,000 word stories needed to fill magazine pages in his era. To the young Silverberg, it seemed a safer bet to produce the “competent potboilers” editors found it easy to say yes too, but neither stretched him as a writer or showed any real ambition. In effect, he wrote in accordance with Heinlein’s advice, producing work fast and lean, then finding an editor hungry for copy.
This approach lasted until the magazine editor Lester Del Ray gave Silverberg some advice:
(Lester) pointed out to me that I was working from a false premise. “Even if all you’re concerned with is making money,” he said, “you’re going about it the wrong way. You’re knocking out penny-a-word stories as fast as you can, and, sure, you’re pulling in the quick bucks very nicely. But you’re shortchanging yourself, because all that you’ll ever make from what you’re writing now is the check you get for it today. Those stories will die the day they’re published. They won’t get into anthologies and won’t be bought for translation and nobody will want you to put together a collection of them. Whereas if you were writing at the level that I know you’re capable of, you’d be creating a body of work that will go on bringing in money for the rest of your life. So by going for the easy money you’re actually cutting your future income. (Silverberg 2007)
Silverberg hesitated to push himself, as his experience showed his ambitious projects never sold as easily as the potboilers, but Del Ray argued this would be a temporary phenomenon. Eventually Silverberg did as advised, and the approach transformed his career. He won awards, had work reprinted, and collections followed suit. Rather than produce disposable stories, Silverberg shifted to stories that rewarded re-engagement, which became the cornerstone of his income.
Our era resembles the pulp paperback age Silverberg wrote into than the pulp magazine era in which Heinlein formulated his rules. Shifts in the market—especially how and where we read new work—made it necessary. As editor and author Nick Mamatas argues in his essay, How To End A Story, the pulp magazines (and many slicks) favoured stories with neatly tied denouements over those which provoked further thought. Magazines needed disposable content, so a reader would pass the magazine around (a tactic used to boost the circulation numbers pitched to advertisers) and make way for the next issue (61). That was the logic of the market at the time.
The creative economy of the internet age is different. Magazines need unique rather than disposable, something to pull readers towards their websites. They want stories destined to be shared, discussed, unpicked, and broadcast via online channels. An ending with a ragged edge, which leaves the reader thinking, is a stronger choice than something easily forgotten. As Mamatas notes, the genre’s elder statesmen still offer editorial advice informed by the pulp era, but the economy around short fiction has changed under their feet (62). We are writing into a new publishing economy (and, in fact, a very different market landscape to the one Mamamtas was writing about in his essay).
HUNGRY MARKETSSo where are the copy-hungry markets Heinlein wrote for to be found in the current marketplace? Where should an aspiring pulp author, eager to cleave to Heinlein’s rules, seek to find an editor so desperate for content they’ll buy the complete dogs of our back catalogue? It doesn’t lie in short fiction anymore, and may not lie in long-form fiction either.
On the surface, a contemporary neo-pulp writer might search for what indie phenomenon Chris Fox has dubbed a Hungry Market, or “a genre that loves to read, but isn’t being supplied with enough books.” (8). This often translates to a highly specific sub-genre or trope, rather than a broad market, and indie publishing has forged whole subgenre movements by deploying this approach. In the last decade we’ve witnessed the rise of niche sugenres such as dinosaur erotica, academy romance, litRPG, technomagic sci-fi, reverse harem romance and erotica. By now, sub-genres trends that rise, crashed to shore, and recede in popularity are an ongoing part of the indie conversation as writers share what works and what doesn’t in online spaces.
The curse, of course, is any hungry market will soon be overfed by other neo-pulp writers swarming the profitable niche. After a rapid rise in available content, the subgenre ceases to be hungry, satiated by the rapid emergence of backlist titles and a pseudo-cannon of “must read” titles that form a common language among fans.
I would argue the most compatible hunger for content to Heinlein’s day isn’t books at all, but social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, et al have the voracious need for content, constantly putting new material before users to promote engagement, then niche and categorize their audience data based on those interactions.
Alas, these platforms are notoriously difficult for creators to monetise. Social media sites trained creators to engage with them for free, trading access to an audience for much needed content. For most platforms, paying a creator for their work is not a feature, but a tool to be deployed when attempting to capture market share or threatened by competitors. Their philosophy is to get as much content for free, then pay for the most popular when it becomes clear the creators may leave.
Platforms often deploy a communal creator fund—an arbitrary amount bequeathed by the organization running the platform—in lieu of straightforward exchanges of financial capital for artistic content. They spread this monthly fund among content creators on a proportion-of-content-consumed basis, with X minutes of content consumed equating to Y cents.
These funds are frequently disconnected from revenue generated, which means they can be inflated in the early stages (to draw creators in when a revenue share wouldn’t pay out as much) and then allowed to stagnate as profits rise. The funds disconnect the value creators provide from their compensation, which leaves the system ripe for abuse.3
The Kindle Unlimited program—aimed at voracious readers willing to subscribe for ten dollars a month—is similarly hungry, and there’s a subset of neo-pulp writers who forged strong careers there, working at speed and tickling Amazon’s algorithms with constant new releases. Like the social media platforms above, authors are paid from a creator fund, and while their work is not generating ad revenue, it is providing considerable value to Amazon above and beyond the creative product, allowing them to run the Unlimited program and lock in exclusive content, which then pulls reader into an exclusive relationship with the Amazon shopping ecosystem.4
In all these examples, the revenue a creator can earn is supported by speed and the willingness to unleash a deep backlist. Alas, said revenue is not proportionate to the value they provide to the platform in question.
While one could argue this is true of the pulp magazine model, said magazines at least paid on delivery rather than waiting to see how ‘successful’ a story proved to be with their readership. The potential value of a story was easy to predict.
THE NEW PULP ERAThere are still authors who earn good money cleaving to Heinlein’s principles. Some even make significant money, for the moment, but it’s worth considering the publishing landscape here in 2022. Heinlein’s business practice assumes there’s always a market for a competent-but-unspectacular story, an assumption reliant on a surfeit of hungry markets cycling through disposable content at speed.
I argue the contemporary writer, producing work in systems with deep access to back list and a greater need to build their own audience, face the opposite problem. Our markets are not hungry for long—increasingly, they’re picky eaters, with broader genres giving way to specific tropes and subgenre preferences. In this terrain, a writer is arguably better off crafting more ambitious, better-quality work than the churn implied by Heinlein and his more vocal contemporary advocates.
It doesn’t mean we should eschew Heinlein entirely—in a world where back list titles hold almost as much value as new work, the ability to work fast still holds value—but I think reasserting Heinlein’s rules as habits rather than commandments is a good first step. Like much advice from the previous century, the assumptions that underpin Heinlein’s Habits are ripe for re-examination.
Embracing speed at all costs starts from a false premise. Sheer weight of production can still generate an income, just as thousands of tiny tributary dribbles may eventually form a river, but it strikes me as an approach requiring more effort for less reward. In a marketplace where the primary challenge is discovery, repeat customers and word-of-mouth are a writer’s most valuable resource.
It’s tempting to see this as a callback to hackneyed concepts around ‘quality’ art versus the commerce-driven genre, but I think the key word to focus on is ambition rather than quality. As a fan of B-grade movies and cult literature, in addition to years of teaching writing to undergraduate students, I know ambition is an endearing quality in an artist. It’s far more pleasurable to watch a creator strive—stretching beyond the limits of their time, budget, or skill—than watching an artist play it safe. A brilliant failure is far more interesting than a stultifying success.
To echo Del Ray, ambition is a strength in the 21st century writing landscape. You’re competing for a reader’s attention against your contemporaries, but also the greats, the very goods, and the merely competent authors from many generations who came before you.
After all, Robert Heinlein’s novels are still right there, ready to be purchased in multiple ebooks, print books, and audio. And I promise you the works keeping him prominent aren’t the worst old dogs he fired off to editors desperate for copy to fill their pages. Those works only have longevity and value as a backlist because the best of Heinlein’s works elevated his profile and expanded his readership.
CONTEMPORARY PRINCIPLESFor all I see flaws in Heinlein’s rules, especially when read against his original essay, the adoption of all five in moderation can still help writers push their career forward. You must still write, after all, and finish what you start. While I believe in redrafting and editing, I believe there’s a point where you must declare the work done, and not tinker with it any further.
Where I diverge from Heinlein most is the final two steps, for putting the work to market is no longer enough. The desperate editors are not there and the hungry markets are too short-lived, and there are now enough books to feed even the most gluttonous of readers. There is more space for ambition and reworking your craft in this landscape. Your back list matters considerably more and you want to build it fast, but always question whether three okay stories are more valuable than a single great work.
The contemporary pulp writer doesn’t simply put work to market because they understand each new work builds up value around their other creations. They produce works aimed at engaging a reader long-term, across multiple works, rather than focusing their relationship on a single tale. They ask for investment across their entire career, not a single storyline. They engage their audiences directly, rather than editors, and extend beyond the parasocial relationship of author and reader.
And they keep building up their back list, one ambitious story at a time, searching for new readers because those books are still available.No mouldering wood-pulp magazines will steal away our work , wiping away our worst and our best stories alike as the paper decomposes. Everything we do is still available and may well be for decades to come.
To eschew the immediate appeal of hungry markets might sting in the short term, when the first books are harder to sell, but we build careers off the stories folks still read years after release.
NEW PULP“I always wanted to be a pulp writer,” Kameron Hurley writes in her introduction to Future Artifacts (6), citing an affection for fantasy tales such as the Conan stories and Elric of Melnibone. Future Artifacts collects Hurley’s short stories produced for her Patreon over the last six years. Like the pulp writers, she knocked out stories in a couple of days in order to make regular cash, rather than stretching royalty cheques for longer works, which arrived twice a year.
And yet, Hurley works at a slower pace than the pulp writers of old, producing a single short story per month (albeit at a higher fee than she’d earn from most magazines; At time of writing, Hurley’s Patreon will pay her over $3,000 Australian for each new story, and she averages one a month). Those who cleave to Heinlein’s rules and the pulp ideology around fast production may hesitate to embrace Hurley as a New Pulp writer, but I often fear those folks miss the forest for the trees.
Hurly makes her Patreon income off the stories she produces, but they’re a fraction of the total content generated for her patrons. She supplements story production with broader outreach, much of it story-adjacent without becoming new fictional works. This outreach includes a monthly podcast, behind-the-scenes videos, craft advice, and one-on-one skypes with fans. Hurley repurposes these secondary works after an exclusive period: posting videos on her website; making the Get To Work Hurley podcast available through multiple podcast streams. Even the stories have a second life—Future Artifacts is published by Apex Publishing, rather than Hurley’s Patreon funds, and exists as a separate product to the works sold to her most ardent fans. While Hurley writes for her most ardent fans on Patreon, those same works spread and extend her reach into other content-hungry parts of the internet.
In this respect, at least, the pulp era hasn’t left us—the philosophy has simply mutated to adapt to a new era. Stories and novels, increasingly, are the high-end prestige products in an author’s arsenal, while the hungry markets desperate for content have become social media streams where the payday is less, but the reach is considerable.
The spirit of Heinlein’s rules remains valuable, but the blind application of the practice or exhortation of its virtues without consideration for the market in which we operate does a disservice to creators. The wood pulps are gone, and the hungry social streams won’t pay for stories, but smart writers can still leverage that hunger if they hustle. They create fewer works, but the increased reach and long life-span elevates the value of what they produce through repeated, deepening engagement.
The goal is no longer feeding a hungry periodical market with easily forgotten stories, but to write stories which reward those who come searching for more.
We may well be in a new golden age of pulp fiction, but the logic of our market demands more from us than the simple repetition of habits from decades ago.
REFERENCESAaron, Rachel. “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day.” Pretentious Title: Official Writing Blog of SFF Author Rachel Aaron/Bach, June 2011. http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.htmlEshbach, Lloyed Arthur. “Editors Preface.” Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Advent Publishing, 1947. Kindle edition.Fox, Chris. Write to Market: Deliver a Book that Sells, Self-Published, 2016.Heinlein, Robert A. “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Advent Publishing, 1947. Kindle edition.Hurley, Cameron. Future Artefacts. Apex Book Company, 2022.Mahatmas, Nick. “How to End a Story.” Starve Better, Apex Book Company, 2013.Sawyer, Robert J. “On Writing: Heinlein’s Rules.” SF Writer, 1996. https://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm#:Smith, Dean Wesley.Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. WMG Publishing, 2016Silverberg, Robert. “MIND MELD: Shrewd Writing Advice From Some of Science Fiction’s & Fantasy’s Best Writers.” SF Signal, January 2009. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/01/mind_meld_shrewd_writing_advice_from_some_of_science_fiction_and_fantasys_best_writers/Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.FOOTNOTESInterestingly, many pulp paperbacks were distributed through the same magazine networks who once distributed the pulp magazines.
︎At this stage, fewer indies publish their work in print than ebooks, leaving print-on-demand the platform of choice for small presses more often than indie authors. The long-term implications of this technology are less obvious as a result. ︎The sole platform offering creators a profit percentage based on the ad revenue their content generates is YouTube, who made the choice while fending off new challengers in the video space. Sadly, this only applies to some content—at the time of writing, they’re monetization for the short-video offshoot they’re hoping to use as a challenge to emerging competitor has fallen back on the creator fund model. ︎4. In recent years, changes on Amazon have limited organic search for books, leaving many Kindle Unlimited authors reliant on the Amazon advertising systems in order to find their readership. It’s a deft way of recouping royalties paid out to artists via the creator fund by asking authors to reinvest their profits. ︎
August 21, 2024
002: The Most Expensive Part of Your Book Isn’t The Price
I run into writers who think the reason their book isn’t selling is the price. The first question, when a new release isn’t working, revolves around discounting. “Should I make this ebook 99 cents?” or “Should I give this away for free to generate interest?”
These are both solid strategies when used the right way, but they’re not magical. I’ve got a reader full of free ebooks I’ve picked up over the last decade, and many more deals I got for 99 cents.
I read very few of these free and low-cost books, and rarely do the ones read incite a desire to go find more work by the author.
At best, the author or publisher has made 35 cents out of my curiosity. At worst, I’m one of the masses some indie authors derisively call “freebie seekers” and deride as a plague on their business.
Here’s the thing to keep in mind: the actual cost to readers isn’t the price you put on your book. It’s the hidden costs involved in reading a new author:
Devoting time to reading which could be used on other books (or other hobbies, other forms of narrative like TV or computer games, or with the people who matter to me)The risk of trying a new book and discovering it’s not my thing, then having to decide between finishing it or the hassle of setting it aside/removing it from my e-reader.The opportunity cost of trying a book that might be bad, versus picking up a book by an author I know I like.The curatorial issues, such as my available shelf space (for print books) or making it harder to find a title among the cluttered ereader.The social value inherent in being a reader of this book, and how it impacts upon my sense of self-identity and social standing.We don’t talk about these things out loud, but they’re part of the calculation every reader makes when deciding whether to buy, and then read, a new title by the author. Your price point isn’t a barrier–it’s a hurdle.
Do I think your book will provide value when weighted against all these hidden costs? Is that promise worth more than whatever price point you’ve put on the cover?
Some books are a steal at $9.99 or $19.99 or $89.99 if I value them enough. I’ve got a shelf full of special editions that suggest I have absolutely no sticker shock with exceedingly pretty books from authors I already love.
Other books are shithouse value when measured against those criteria, even if I downloaded them for free or got them on a discount. The price might be right, but the time and effort required to read them isn’t, and I actively resent their presence on my reader.
Here’s the thing that’s often left out of a discussion about prices, via Paul Ardoin:
Finding a book to read is a chore. Sometimes you can be lucky and a friend recommends something that you think sounds good, or maybe your book club’s next monthly selection is on your bookshelf or is only an e-reader click away, but too often, a search for a new book requires wandering around in a virtual bookstore looking for something you think you’ll like. (Ardoin, From Zero to Four Figures: Making $1000 a Month Self-Publishing Fiction)
While we’re primarily talking about books here–I’m a publisher and a self-publisher, so the spaces I work with are primarily book-related–it’s equally applicable to any other product a writer produces. How much should we charge for courses? For online communities such as Patreon? For events and reader gatherings?
The price point is never the enticement–it’s the hurdle. The trick to selling someone on your work is making your work more valuable to the reader so they’re willing to jump that hurdle and trust you with their time, their focus, their reputation, and their sense of self.
How do you increase the value of your book? A full accounting of strategies is impossible to cover in a newsletter (or, for that matter, a full-length book), but here’s some tactics to get you started.
HAVE SOMEWHERE FOR READERS TO GOI’m going to repeat Paul Ardoin’s key point from the earlier quote here: Finding a book to read is a chore.
When you offer readers a deal, the promise isn’t just the value of the book–it’s the promise that if they read this book and like you, they can keep reading this new author they like and get the same experience over and over.
The value of your free book becomes “I can spend less time on this chore of finding something to read” because they’ve got a new author they trust.
Discounting your first book soon after release is often less valuable than discounting it after ten books, because when you’ve got a ten-book backlist, there’s nine other books to pick up if a new reader likes your work. You’ve relieved them of the chore of finding something new that they might like.
So much advice for self-publishers revolves around this: your first step is building up a backlist. Finishing a series, or just getting enough books out, to help magnify the value of other marketing efforts.
If your first book isn’t selling, the next trick is writing the next one (If that sounds daunting because your first book cost an arm and a leg to release…well, it’s time to do things cheaper this time. My first piece of advice to many self-publishers is stop spending so much on your books…).
Discounts–or offering books for free–often jump out as the obvious solution to bringing readers to your work, but it often misunderstands the challenges books that aren’t selling face.
Great deals need to be accompanied by deep reach to convert them into sales–and this applies whether the book is 30% off, 50% off, 99 cents, or free. If nobody knows about the book, the price is immaterial–you need more outreach rather than lower prices.
The second issue is a whole knot of psychological phenomena around pricing, which includes our tendency to anchor value based on first experiences, the way short-term sales re-set the is-this-valuable-to-me-at-this-price calculations readers do in a favourable way, and even th4 way we react to free.
Digging into these is beyond the scope of this essay, but I can recommend Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational if you want a decent primer in consumer psychology.
The core lesson, though, is this: if you usually use a high price point, then bring the price down to cheap or free for a limited time, you’ve created a short-term impulse for people to take up the deal.
It also creates a short-term event that makes it clear why you want people to pay attention now, which is incredibly useful for driving leads to the offer. If your book is free or 99 cents forever, there’s no urgency to taking up the offer.
If it’s free for exactly 24 hours for people who want to give your work a try, then people have to work out whether they want it now and make an immediate decision.
Like most advice, this is predicated on the context of publishing right now. Go back a decade, when ebooks were still new, and the market wasn’t as flooded, releasing permanently free books was a hugely important strategy because the market wasn’t as flooded.
These days, organic search is more restricted and there are considerably more options out there. When generating your own reach through advertising, newsletter swaps, or similar tools, then limited runs make more sense.
REVIEWS, AUTHOR BLURBS, AND BUZZThe velocity side of the book industry–what most people think of as “traditional” publishers–is built around selling a huge number of books in a very short space of time.
Typically, less than four weeks, which is how long you can reasonably expect a physical book to spend on the shelves of a local bookstore before the next wave of new releases takes its place.
This means traditional publishers excel at making books feel incredibly valuable in the months prior to their release. They want to generate buzz and publicity, ensuring there’s a crowd of eager readers ready to show up and plonk their money down on day one.
When velocity publishing gets things right, they do this exceptionally well, but they use a suite of tools to do it.
These include getting the books into the hands of tastemakers and advanced readers, generating pre-release reviews, sending authors out to do interviews and guest blogs, and asking other authors whose names people recognise to write complimentary blurbs about the new release.
These things require time, money, and connections to pull off, but they’re enormously effective.
The blacklist-driven side of the industry–what most people think of as “indie”, but also many small presses–can’t deploy the same resources for pre-release reach.
Fortunately, they also don’t need to. When you remove the one-month expectation of the sales model, you have literal decades to build up the attention around a book and generate social proof.
You can take your time building up a review base, use tools like newsletters to get fans talking and reviewing, and build up friendships with other authors who might offer to lend you their social sway via blurbs, newsletter swaps, and more.
The challenge here is decoupling yourself from the velocity mindset, and assuming it all needs to be done right now.
BUILD A READER COMMUNITY AND IDENTITYBack in 2016, Jeff Jarvis posted an amazing insight based on his first VidCon:
I learned at Vidcon that what we call content is not an end-product. It is a social token. It is something that people make, remake, or pass around to say something about themselves or their relationships with their friends. It might speak for them or it might illustrate their opposition to an idea. It serves their conversations. It is not a destination. (Jeff Jarvis, What I Learned At Vidcon)
Books are no different. They’re an experience, but they’re also an identity–from the way people think of themselves as “readers” through to the way we curate bookshelves. We display books to show people who we are, or who we’d like to be.
Case in point: BookTok has brought the aesthetics and identity of reading to the forefront in a way we’ve not seen in decades, and you can position yourself as a certain kind of reader based on which BookTok books you’ve read, enjoyed, or hated.
Sure, you may not be on BookTok, but are you on Goodreads? Have you ever posted about a book on social media? Do you have bookcases in places where visitors to your house will see them, and do you care how the books are arranged? Do you have a favourite bookshop you visit?
We care about what books say about us. If they didn’t, there’d be far fewer people online debating what it means that they loved Harry Potter or The Sandman considering recent revelations about the author’s personal behaviour.
Reader communities are places where we can reaffirm our identity as a fan of a particular artist and engage with others who share that identity. These days, folks immediately start thinking of Facebook Groups or tools like Patreon as the site for these, but your community can be anything.
Blogs can be community hubs, if they’re a place people come to engage. So can most forms of social media. If you’re there, being active and engaging, supporting the community identity forming around your work, then you’re providing a clubhouse where your community gathers.
Some tips for creating community, based on Nathan Rabins’ book You Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, where he spent a year around the fans of cult bands like Insane Clown Posse and Phish.
Give your fans a name to rally around. Insane Clown Posse fans aren’t fans, they’re juggalos. Readers of my fiction newsletter aren’t readers, they’re Rampaging Tyrannosaurs of the Internet (folks reading this newsletter are, in my head, GenrePunk Ninjas). Give your fans a name and iconography to build their identity around, and you’ve starting to create additional value around your work. Host Gathering Points or Lightning Rod events. Obviously, new book releases provide this for authors, but they’re not the only option. You could host a monthly Q&A with your community, where fans get one-on-one time with the author to ask questions about their favourite books. Or twice a year you could ask fans what they’d like to see fleshed out in your world and write a story based on their response. Occupy a niche. If you’re one of a dozen writers working in your genre, doing the same things other genre writers do, it’s hard to differentiate what being your fan means versus being a general fan of the genre. Give yourself a hook or niche to occupy–a more specific identity–and there’s something easy for your community to latch onto. Define What You’re Against. It’s probably a sad indictment for humanity that it’s easier for us to identify with someone based on what they’re against than what they’re for. Knowing what the key reader identity your community builds around is important, but identifying what they’re against is often the hook that will get folks to buy in. It also helps keep the right people away from your community, in addition to attracting the folks you want.There’s definitely way more you can do (see 9 Lessons over at Fast Company for more), but that’s enough to get started.
But None Of That Is EasyYeah, no shit. They’re slow and steady tactics, not quick fixes. You’ll be implementing them over years, not hours, and they require some maintenance.
Especially if you’re an indie or a small press, rather than working with a velocity publisher looking to build you up fast.
But here’s where I get to one thing I’m against here at GenrePunk Ninja: doing things fast at the cost of making less money with your writing.
Especially when you’re a backlist business, rather than a velocity publisher.
I released my first ebook in 2005. It still sells, and it still sells at full price, because it’s had 19 years to build up value or find its readership. You have literal decades to sell books at full price, assuming you’re willing to be patient and build up the value around your work with each release.
You have a long time to sell your book at full price. Maybe try a few things to make it more valuable to a reader before you cut your profits down to nothing and make your next book harder to produce.
You might sell less books right now by keeping your book at full price, but it’s still waiting there, ready to be found by every new reader who discovers your work.
Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.
August 14, 2024
001: Is The Story You’re Telling Yourself About Writing Hurting Your Process?
What is the story of your writing right now? Not the story you are writing, but the story you’re telling yourself about who you are and how you work as a writer.
We all have a sense of who we are as writers, which shapes the projects we take and the way we approach our work. This story makes up part of our self-image, to borrow a phrase from psychology, and it’s more complicated than it seems.
Actually, it’s multiple stories. Self-image is often a complicated, layered thing that involves not just our belief in who we are, but sub-beliefs around whether other people see us this way, how accurate those perceptions are, and which data from other people we take onboard and use to adjust our self-image or validate its accuracy.
I’m not a psychologist, though. I’m a storyteller and an editor, and at the end of the day I work with stories, just like all of you.
I’ve just been privileged enough to spend my career listening to other writers’ stories about who they are as a writer, and I’ve noticed some trends.
And here’s the thing: for people who tell stories for a living, writers often tell themselves pretty nasty stories about who they are and what it means to do what they do.
SETTING UP AN UNHAPPY ENDINGOver the years, I’ve helped a bunch of writers unpack the story of their writing. I spend inordinate amounts of time unpacking my own, too, paying attention to the narratives I’m building up that impede the production of work I’m proud of.
Thing is, there’s so many negative self-beliefs writers bring to the table. Stories rife with phrases like “it’s not worth it” or “I’m not good enough”, or a mistaken belief that we should work harder.
Stories in which writing and art is a waste of time, or that we’re “selling out” and making inferior work because artistic integrity seems incompatible with our existence in late stage capitalism.
Stories in which we do not have time to do this thing we love (or, even, that we have to love writing above all else in order to do it, as if people haven’t found their way into jobs they’re good at but don’t love since the invention of work).
It’s not hard to see where these negative self-beliefs come from. For many writers, the story of our writing isn’t particularly different from the story the culture around us tells about writers, and those stories are fucking horrible.
The dominant narrative of western culture says it’s wrong to create art for money, but values art based on the money earned or how many people are willing to pay for it.
The same culture values the product of artistic toil, but regards the creation of art as a frivolous thing, often indebted to an inherent genius or muse rather than the product of years of work and carefully developed skill.
In so many ways, these narratives fuck with your ability to get things done and build a career as a writer. Taking control of the narrative you’re telling yourself is a really powerful tool for pushing your writing forward and unpacking some of the negative stories.
So let’s talk about some techniques for doing just that.
DRAFT YOUR WRITING STORYYou know that old piece of writing advice that says “I can edit a terrible draft, but I cannot edit nothing?”
The same applies to your writing story. So many of the narratives that guide our writing practice are inherently subconscious and unexamined, but pulling them into the light and examining gives us ways of challenging and changing those narratives.
Long term, I’m a big advocate of starting a writing journal, even if it’s an intermittent practice you only turn to when things are going wrong.
In the short-term, I recommend grabbing a pen and a notebook and doing a very simple exercise.
Write a question at the top of the page: How is my writing going right now?
Now, answer it in as much detail as possible. Every time you feel you’ve run out of words, pick a detail and ask a why question.
For example:
How is my writing going right now? Horribly. I’ve been unable to focus on writing for the better part of a week, and I feel like all my projects are slipping away from me. The impending releases aren’t getting the attention they deserve, and it doesn’t make sense to invest time and energy in getting things back on track.
Why haven’t you written for a week? My schedule is out of whack and it feels like I don’t have time to write anymore. Getting up early to write isn’t feasible anymore–I’m already waking up exhausted, and keep interrupting the time to take care of cats or make coffee for Z. I’m starting the day on the back foot and never feel like I’m catching up.
Why isn’t it worth the effort to invest time and energy? None of my recent projects have brought in sufficient returns in the first three months of release to justify the effort of getting them published, and it feels like I’m putting in huge amounts of effort for very little reader response or income. I constantly struggle with the feeling there are more useful things to do with my writing time, such as Project X and Project Y, and I resent finishing this project…
Why aren’t the impending releases getting the attention I hoped they’d get? Not 100% sure, but here’s some possibilities. I’ve been really lax at creating leads and getting the word out about them. I announced them right before life blew up, after a long stretch of no releases due to the PhD, and that was right before the election sucked up all the attention out of the room. I’m pretty sure my release marketing was sloppy and rushed. The economy is also terrible, and people don’t have much discretionary cash to risk on new authors/projects.
Why…
Obviously, I’m telling myself a particular negative story about my writing practice this week.
While grim, this negativity is useful because it illuminates the gap between where I am and where I think I “should” be. Looking at the clues in my answers, there’s a second story emerging about what kind of writer I’d like to be and why I’m not hitting the mark.
In my ideal writing narrative, I produce and finish new stories and novels, keep to my schedule, and start the day with writing. I don’t fret about not hitting my deadlines, and the stories I release receive adequate promotion that brings in readers (and dollars) that justifies the effort.
The fact that my current writing practice is so far from meeting this benchmark is a source of frustration to me. Rather than a list of fixable problems—I can market stories better, and I have literal decades to earn money from them—I’m focusing on parts that make my current efforts feel helpless and worthless.
I can’t imagine why it’s harder than usual to get stuff done!
Fortunately, now that I’ve got these concerns in black and white, I can start rewriting the narrative rather than buying into it without question.
REDRAFT YOUR WRITING STORYGetting down the first draft of your writing story is great, but half the reason to write a first draft is giving yourself something to edit and rewrite. Stories are not set in stone, and writers excel at reshaping and improving them after the first draft is done.
Looking at my current writing story with an editorial eye, rather than my “first draft” brain, I can identify parts of the narrative that could use more clarity or fleshing out:
How much promotion is “enough” for new releases? What are my expectations about the number of readers, or the amount of money a project needs to earn in the first three months? Given those expectations, am I working on the right projects? Are there better choices for the current publishing landscape?What does good promotion look like? Are we talking about what I’m doing, or the results of my efforts? What’s one change I can implement that will improve things?What should my writing schedule be? Is what I’ve always done still feasible, or do I need to adjust things because of changed circumstances?
The answers here represent the ‘victory conditions’ for my writing. Hitting those benchmarks means that my writing is successful, while failing to hit them means the narrative adjusts to “everything is awful”.
Yet I’d left those benchmarks vague and fluid! Surely having hard numbers would be useful, if only so I can compare them to the realities of my life right now and ensure they’re still feasible.
If you’re not sure what those hard numbers are, go back to your notebook and start this process again. Ask the big question–what does a “successful” release look like–and ask yourself follow-up “why” questions as your answers run out of steam.
Writers are often self-effacing here. When asked a question like “how many readers would you like to have?”, we’re naturally inclined to fit into cultural narratives instead of personal ones.
“I write for myself. Any readers I get are a bonus,” is a common answer. As is the swing-for-the-fences, impossible dream framing: “I want to be a best-seller and never have to work again.”
I promise you; these answers are bullshit. A defence mechanism in a culture that loves to shame writers for wanting too much, or for earning too little. They’re either a denial of your creative ambition, or pin your success on events so far outside of your control that it inevitably looks like luck if it happens.
Be honest with yourself. Truth is, the moment you think about making your writing public, you have some expectations. A tipping point where the response to a project goes from “oh, that’s disappointing,” to “oh, fuck yes! This is great.”
Writers often avoid identifying a target because they feel like it’s too small (culturally, we equate artistic success with widespread attention, and fear what it means if we don’t get it) or too big (culturally, we discourage artists from creating with commercial success in mind).
But here’s the thing: without hard numbers and a metric where you can see how far you are from your goal, it’s really hard to figure out how to adjust and reshape your process in order to meet those goals.
Put the specific number down. You don’t need to tell anybody else, and you can burn the page afterward if it makes you feel better.
But, just this once, give yourself a target.
IS THIS YOUR STORY, OR DID YOU INHERIT IT?Here’s the thing about writing: we’re surrounded by other people’s opinions about what a writer’s story should be.
These range from cultural narratives about what success and art loos like, through to conventional wisdom offered in countless writing books, through to the swarms of authors on social media curating their story for public consumption.
Even this essay is offering a vision of what your writing should be like. I believe my intentions are honorable and aimed at helping people, but it’s not a gospel and no advice works for everyone.
Sometimes we inherit goals and stories from people that aren’t a good fit for us. For example, let’s take an old staple on the writing advice front: you must write every day.
There are practical aspects to this–finishing and publishing new work is at the heart of many writer’s business models–but it’s also tangled up with cultural stories about writing talent being a gift and an all-consuming passion.
Thing is, not everyone’s wired this way. Writing coach Becca Syme once noted that only about 30% of her clients write this way, and that largely matches my own experiences when talking to other writers about process.
It also assumes your circumstances suit establishing a daily writing process, which often reflects a historical bias towards writing advice being offered by white, male, neurotypical, well-off writers who operate from a place of cultural privilege.
The first thing I often remind new mentees is this: writing and publishing isn’t fair. We all start with different resources and skill sets, and your support mechanisms and personal circumstances are going to impact what works for you.
Do you need to write every day to be a writer? Not at all. What this advice is really trying to convey is:
Truth is, if you can do all that without writing every day, you’re doing it right.
Similarly, if you can write stories off the top of your head, rather than planning and revising, and those stories are finding a readership you’re happy with? Guess what? You’re doing it right.
The same is true of your ambitions. If your goal is to have your story read by 10 people, or 200 people, or 2,000 people, then that’s your goal. It doesn’t have to mesh with conventional wisdom and narratives about what writing should be.
Too often, the story of our writing gets bound up in the question of what we should do as a writer we’ve inherited from other people.
The real trick is inverting that. This is what I do as a writer.
ONE LAST QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELFSometimes, the story of your writing right now is at odds with where you’d like to be. Maybe shit hits the fan in your life, and there are events making it harder to get stuff done.
Maybe it’s a more long-term problem, and you’re writing outside the white, straight, neurotypical male demographic that conventional writing wisdom often serves best. Maybe you’re facing structural issues to finding your readership, or your mental health is rocky.
Maybe you work long, physically demanding shifts that don’t allow for a daily writing routine. Or you need to write work that sells, because your family needs the income, when you yearn to be doing a very different kind of writing.
Maybe you’re responsible for keeping small humans or sick relatives going, and writing can’t be in your top five priorities.
No writer is immune to bad breaks, whether short term or long term. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a discrepancy between the story you’re telling yourself about your writing now and the story you want to be living.
If you’re unhappy with your writing story and nowhere near your goals, the first question to ask is what can I do as a writer right now?
I’ve been there several times. Because of mental health problems or serious family illnesses. Through terrible day jobs or freelance gigs that devoured writing time like a motherfucker. Periods where my sleep issues led to weeks running on 2 hours of good sleep a night.
Days when I’m fighting with my partner, or where subjecting them to the ebbs and flows of my irregular writing income strikes me as a disservice to the person I love most in the world.
What can I do as a writer right now that gets me one step closer to the story I want?
The answers have frequently felt ludicrous. I can’t write fiction today because my anxiety means I just keep deleting things, but I can work on some pro-wrestling fanfic. It’s not real work, but it scratches the writing itch and keeps me off facebook.
I don’t have time to write because my job is killing me, and the only space where I might do something is on the eight-minute train ride to work. I can write something then.
It’s not much, but focusing on what you can do rather than what you should do allows you to become an active author of your writing story again.
Two or three days of writing wrestling fanfic often gets me back to the keyboard after a long stint of not writing anything. For years I loathed the habit and tried to break away from my fanfic project. These days, I’ve adjusted how I work to make it easier to switch over to “real” projects as I get into the groove.
Writing on index cards during my eight-minute commute turned into drafting a short story per week for a year, and largely saved my sanity doing a job I loathed when I felt trapped there forever. That led to finding another, better job.
In both cases, what I could do felt exceedingly useless. Eight minutes a day was nothing, barely worth the effort. Wrestling fanfic is a frivolous waste of time, especially when I had real deadlines looming.
Neither of these things fit with the story I told myself about what genuine writers do, and I hated myself for committing to both.
But our writing stories are mutable. They evolve and change with our circumstances and where we put our focus. Changing seemingly insignificant parts of my personal writing story created a small win. A promise my story could change. This led to larger wins, and those larger wins led to a finished project.
When you know the story you’re telling yourself about your writing–when you make it visible and conscious–you can edit. Some days you do big edits.
Some days you adjust the full stops and correct the typos.
Both are valuable.
So, what is the story of your writing right now?
And how might it be changed for the better?
Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.
July 13, 2024
The July Zombie Read-A-Thon
I didn’t watch zombie movies as a kid. We lived in a small town with limited TV reception, and the nearest cinema was hundreds of kilometres away. Movies were hard to find, and horror movies were always way down the list of things to see.
Particularly after a series of school camps, where my 4th grade teacher scared the bejesus out of us by describing the horror of Halloween and Friday the 13th as campfire tales.
Not terribly scary for the kids who’d seen the films, but terrifying for a weird nine-year-old with an overactive imagination.
I avoided horror movies for years, despite loving horror fiction. My first zombie movie was Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil, which a friend pitched to me as “Aliens, but with zombies”, in late 2002.
I was twenty-five years old, and damn near crawled over the back of the couch as I imagined what could happen.
Still, I loved it.
I wanted more.
And so, my zombie education began. I’ve watched a metric buttload of great zombie stories since then, plus a bunch that were…well, not so good. Still loved them. There’s something about the walking dead that appeals to me as a reader and a writer.
I’ve got my own off-kilter zombie tales launching in August, but in the lead-up I’ve teamed with a bunch of brilliant authors offering their own takes on the genre in the July Zombie Read-A-Thon. You can get an early release of the first story in the Red Rain Collection, find some other weird takes on zombies, or find some more traditional fare among the fifteen titles on offer.
CHECK OUT THE ZOMBIE READ-A-THONMarch 16, 2024
Val Vega makes an epic debut 🚀
It’s almost my birthday here in Australia—a birthday I share, give or take a few time-zones—with an incredible Brooklyn-based sci-fi writer named Ben Fransisco.
I first met Ben at Clarion South back in 2007, where be blew me away with a series of delicate, nuanced short stories that found homes in magazines like the Realms of Fantasy, Shimmer, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Ben’s stories are extraordinary, even more so because they’re rare. Precious glimpses of an extraordinary talent which appear every couple of years, then disappear beneath the weight of Ben’s other life where he worked for high-profile non-profits advocating for LGBTQ rights and immigrant rights.
He’s legitimately one of those people who changes the world for the better, which makes it really hard to begrudge his job pulling him away from writing.
Hard, but not impossible. I’m an unreasonable man who always wishes his favourite writers would produce more work.
Which is why the recent release of this book made me extraordinarily happy.
Val Vega: Secret Ambassador of Earth is Ben’s debut novel, a YA adventure written by someone with an unmatched passion and love of science fiction who grew up without seeing themselves represented on the screen or in the books they loved.
It’s an extraordinary book, and I’m not the only person to think so. Kirkus gave it a starred review, dubbing it “a captivating, heartfelt tale about family, diplomacy, and finding one’s place in the universe”.
It’s been out a little over a month now, and still flying with a five star rating on Amazon and Goodreads.
I got to read part of the book while helping Ben sort through the publishing logistics of getting Val Vega out into the world, and I absolutely cannot wait for my copy of the finished thing to find its way to Brisbane.
Trust me, if you love sci-fi, you want a copy of this one.
I’ll leave you with a final rave about the book from M. M. De Voe (A Flash of Darkness):
“If interstellar peace is your dream and you love a diverse cast of fabulously weird and brilliant aliens; if you believe in the power of one good human to survive personal hardship and save our planet, and if your dream is to discover that this human hero happens to be a humble, witty and smart-as-hell Latinx teenager, then this is the book for you! Everyone else should read this book for the absolutely fun ride through a universe that will become so real you’ll be quoting it.”
— M. M. De Voe, award-winning author
March 3, 2024
Never Fall In Love With The Fey
Miriam Aster made a big mistake: she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey.
All this was ten years ago, when Miriam was an up-and-coming homicide detective and fairies were things out of fairy tales. Miriam met the queen of the fey in a bar, felt a rush of attraction, and soon they were head-over-heels in love (or as close to as they fey get).
Then the favours started, trying to keep the fey’s existence a secret.
Could you ignore some details from this case?
Could you take care of this rogue fey?
Hey Miriam, could you stop this unicorn from going on a rampage before people get killed?
Never Fall In Love With The Queen Of The FeyIt ends badly for everyone. Miriam Aster fell in love with the Queen of the Fey, and then her life fell apart. She made mistakes and quit her job. She ignored an order and paid the consequences. She ended up dead, and found herself coming back because the Queen demanded it.
Now Miriam’s an ex-cop, eking out a living as a PI, and she drinks to forget the pain. She has one rule—no fey—and she sticks to it.
Right up until her ex-partner in Homicide calls and asks for her help, and Aster realises the past—just like Aster herself— won’t stay dead on the autopsy table.
Welcome to Unicorns, Fey, & A Hardboiled Dame: The Miriam Aster OmnibusThree reasons you might love this book
#1. It’s Grimdark Urban FantasyI wrote the Aster stories in response to trends I saw in Urban Fantasy, which used a lot of pulp PI tropes without the hardboiled grittiness of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Micky Spillane. The world Miriam passes through is amoral, dark, and violent, and she struggles with her sense of being an honourable person in a dishonourable system.
Among the fey, promises are magic with enormous power. They’re also tools they use to manipulate mortals, and Aster’s promised more than most.
#2. You’ll never look at unicorns the same way againI wrote the first draft of Horn at a writing workshop, warned the instructor absolutely hated “fantasy stories about unicorns and fourteen-year-old girls” and we should avoid submitting anything in that vein.
“Challenge accepted,” I said to myself, and wrote the meanest, most confronting horror story I could, starting with the autopsy of a young girl whose encounter with a unicorn ended messily.
The result was a unicorn story even avowed unicorn haters could love, and there’s definitely nothing nice about the horned horses in Aster’s universe
#3. They’re Notorious (and Maybe Good?)When the first Miriam Aster book came out, it spread via a strange word-of-mouth. People would hand it to friends with the warning: “This is seriously fucked up – you’ll love it”
It was also shortlisted for two awards (Best Fantasy Novel and Best Horror Novel) despite not technically being eligible for them as a novella, appeared on the Locus Recommended Reading list for the year, and got an honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror. It also got some great reviews:
“It’s possibly the best paranormal fiction I have read all year, possibly ever. It will be confronting, it will take some of you close to edge. But I think Ball crafts a delightfully dark little tale, revealing a more honest portrayal of the Fae, the sex, lust and double edged devious nature.”
“Peter M. Ball has got it right. This book is smart, funny, nasty, and wicked as hell. He gets the noir-ish tone spot on, delivers with action a-plenty, kick-ass characters, intelligent plotting, and good, clean evocative writing. Best of all, he takes a turgidly overused fantasy trope out behind the backyard toilet and puts a dum-dum bullet through its brain, after which he whips out his tackle and pisses all over the steaming corpse.”
Miriam Aster made a big mistake when she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey, and the fallout from that mistake reverberates through the stories in Unicorns, Fey, and a Hardboiled Dame.
These books aren’t for everyone, but the folks who love them really love them.
Unicorns, Fey, & A Hardboiled Dame $4.99 – $16.99 Sale Product on sale 
Hardboiled Urban Fantasy Bundle $18.99 $11.99 Sale Product on sale 
Ultimate Book Bundle $45.99 $22.99
August 12, 2023
Notebook Mojo
Last week, I ran a bunch of writing workshops for Villanova College here in Brisbane. Four workshops spread over three days, focused on writing a crime story in 900 words. My year of producing original short fiction for Patreon came in incredibly handy, since I have a lot of thoughts on how to curtail your word count after doing that.
An interesting side-effect of doing a lot of workshops: I do not go anywhere near a computer while running them. All my writing work gets done in notebooks, scribbling details by hand, rather than firing up a desktop and working in Word or Scrivener directly. Partially, this is a practical concern—notebooks are transportable and easier to flip open when you’re filling a half-hour between sessions in an unfamiliar space—but it has benefits beyond raw pragmatism.
I made the switch because I operate from a baseline level of social anxiety, and it rages out of control when I break my routine. Three days of running a workshop in front of strangers definitely qualifies, not least because it’s physically exhausting as well as burning through my social spoons, and I knew in advance there’d be some heavy self-doubt and fear kicking in.
And it’s harder to write when I’m short of social spoons. Even if I can sit down in front of computer, my brain just runs short, panicked loops. I get bogged down rewriting the same paragraph over and over, deleting and tweaking and utterly freezing with the fear I’ll be exposed if anyone reads it. Dredging up a deep well of self-loathing because, well, a writer writes, don’t they?
It took me years to make the connection between social anxiety and my occasional bouts of fear-based writing paralysis. After all, writing is a famously solitary activity. It’s one of the reasons I pursued it as a career.
Thing is, it requires a surprising amount of mental health management to finish a draft without the social anxiety spinning out of control. Writing a story means you have to show it to people, after all, and showing it to people means they may judge you. Writing is predicated on exposure of the self, and this is the toehold that social anxiety thrives on — not just the fear of being judged, but that those who judge you are *correct*, which lies at the heart of a lot of socially anxious thoughts.
I often find retreating to a notebook makes it easier to get work done when fear is looming in the background. Writing a draft on the computer lines things up in neat text, makes it too easy to peer past the work in progress and visualise the finished product going live. It allows me to hyper-focus on mistakes, and trying to mitigate them.
And word processors make it very easy to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, rather than pushing forwards in search of the end.
But notebooks? Notebooks are private, and even if they’re not, I wish folks luck in trying to decipher my handwriting. Nobody is going to mistake my handwritten draft for the finished product, and I can’t mistakenly send it out before doing a final check because it still needs to be typed up. The part of my brain that likes to worry about whether everything is *perfect* can focus on the quality of my penmanship instead of my storytelling, and I’ll get an entire story draft done before I have to fix anything.
Notebooks are also, oddly, much more useful for getting some work done in the twenty-minute gap between workshops, or jotting down some notes while I’m so sore from teaching that I can’t sit at the desk (which sounds like a joke, I know, but my daily step count went up 800% over the last three days, so I’m physically shattered on top of the mental stuff).
I’ve spent a few years honing the way I use notebooks and when I should fall back on them. Sometimes I spend a whole chunk of my working life there, and other times it’ll be a few weeks. The important part isn’t what I do, but why I do it: handwriting is a tool I deploy to solve a particular problem and keeps me moving forward when my brain or life is uncooperative.
As the need for managing mental health fades, I’ll likely drift back to writing first drafts on the computer instead of filling empty pages. Neither is inherently better or worse—I’ve certainly finished perfectly fine stories both ways—but there are definitely times when one is the superior choice for the current circumstances.
July 17, 2023
Talking Writing and Publishing on Stark Reflections
Back in April I stayed awake until 1:00 AM and recorded an hour-long chat with for Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Reflections podcast. It went live last week, and over the course of the interview we tackle many writing and publishing topics, including my start as an RPG publisher in the pre-Kindle days of the early 2000s.
One thing I dig about Stark Reflections is Mark’s habit of ending every interview by reflecting on the things he can take away and apply to his own practice as a writer/publisher. It’s possible one of my own reflections is “don’t do interviews at 1:00 AM”, because oh wow, I was getting a big loopy towards the end, but such is the curse of writing and publishing in a different time zone to the vast majority of your contemporaries.
Check it out on the Stark Reflections website.
Here’s the summary of what we cover:
Peter being a night owl who is most comfortable starting to write at about 10 PM at night and working through the nightHow, through necessity with a regular life schedule, Peter will get the writing done first thing in the morningPeter having wanted to be a writer since he was quite youngThe way that most of the work he has taken on in his life has been somehow affiliated with the writing worldDescribing the Gold Coast of Australia as Miami with slightly less charmThe undergraduate degree focus which mostly avoided genre fictionHow you can never escape poetry once you’ve done it, even years later being introgued as “Peter the Poet”How in the early 2000s Dungeons and Dragons open-sourced their rules, allowing people to provide material within their realmGetting involved in DriveThruFiction back in 2005The hunger for content that came out in that time periodHow changes in the RPG industry that happened were later echoed a few years later in the eBook fiction publishing spaceThe issues Peter recognized in 2006 in creating role playing game material where somebody else held the licensce for itChallenges of submitting fiction to markets from a country like AustraliaSpending six weeks at an Australian branch of the Clarion Writers Workshop and how that dramatically changed the perspective forced on him from his university educationContinuing to submit his fiction to the traditional markets but paying attention to what was going on in the self-publishing, digital publishing, and indie publishing spaceLaunching Brain Jar Press in 2017 largely as a vehicle for publishing his backlistWhy cutting your teeth in short fiction can be greatHaving a plan to indie publish his own books for about ten years, make all the mistake on his own books, rather than someone elses, and getting solid learning and experience from it to benefit his pressWorking with Kathleen Jennings on a poetry collection right at about the time her first book with Tor went hugeThe idea for a series of short chapbooks with four or five essays per writer in order to bring these remarkable articles the authors had already written back into availabilityBorrowing the cultural capital of all the people they’re publishing so that they can grow and eventually launch new writersHow Peter fell in love with print quite accidentallyThe requirement of having to have an online store for the pressThe joke that it’s cheaper to get things to Narnia than it is to get them to AustraliaThe thought exercise Peter does regarding how many books he has to sell to make it to $100Understanding the market base that you’re likely selling to as a small specialized indie pressPeter’s impatience for just replicating what midlist are publishing is doing in the face of such wonderful, free, and dynamic digital tools when one can be breaking the model, expanding, and forming new ideas and new productsether Peter has been doing much of his own writing since launching Brain Jar Press 2.0The flash fiction writing Peter has been able to do during a few 8 minute breaks at workWhat Peter is most optimistic about with what’s happening in the publishing world nowAnd more…March 24, 2023
40 Stories
I recently posted my 40th weekly Saturday Morning Story to Patreon, which is a patently absurd sentence to write given I started this project under the belief I could no longer finish anything. I honestly believed I’d have a burst of enthusiasm, produce stories for six weeks, then I’d curl up in a ball and whimper for mercy. Maybe pack this whole writing thing in for a lark and start a new career in a fromagerie (not that I’m qualified to do that, but knee-jerk reactions to hard things are never entirely rational).
Today’s a considerable milestone, though. See, I’ve actually posted 41stories to Patreon—one story in Eclectic Projects 001 went straight to the magazine, so patrons had to download it instead. Today is the point where there’s original short fiction on my Patreon than in all three of my short story collections combined.
I’ll admit that I haven’t put a lot of thought into this project—again, I expected it to fail, and the whole point was pushing myself to get back into the habit of finishing stories and putting them out into the world. There’s been some iterative movement with the launch of the Eclectic Projects magazine in January, but 41 stories I’m pondering whether there’s smarter ways to handle things. Speculative fiction magazines these days, after all, tend to rely on the Freemium model of posting stories online for free and trusting a small percentage of readers will either chip in to keep the magazine alive or pay money to see the stories in a more convenient form. Membership conveys rewards, but ultimately it’s about keeping the magazine alive for everyone to enjoy.
I dig that model, if I’m honest. Half the reason I started a Patreon in the first place was to give myself the freedom to create stuff without worrying about how to make it commercial, and the first wave of patrons backed it under that assumption. The main reason I didn’t make the stories free from the outset was one of confidence: I’d been outside of writing so long, and was so sure that I failed, that I wanted a sympathetic audience instead of throwing my work out to deal with the vicissitudes of the crowd.
40 stories in, I’m hungrier than I was. More confident of my ability to do this without falling flat on my face. Eager to see if I can push this model further, rather than trying it for a year and setting it aside. And, after seeing the readership making last week’s story free to read brought in, I’m tentatively making the next few stories free and tracking the data.
This week’s story, The Cars, features a future where automobiles have become humanity’s apex predator and one surviving human pisses off the chief of the local Chevrolet tribe. There’s a taste test of the story below.
1.
My friend Tess fought an Escalade in the early days of the uprising, and I still believe her to be the bravest woman I’ve met, given the lack of weapons and customized tools at the time. The midnight-black SUV tailed her down Warwick Avenue, prowling between the streetlights like an oversized jungle cat. Tess believed there to be a driver who meant her harp, responded with instincts honed by self-defense classes and a lifetime of scanning the world around her for potential threats. She kept herself visible and made a beeline for the Halcyon intersection, hoping to find safety in the observing eyes of the crowd.
Sensible choices in the world she knew, but she quickly learned how things had changed. The Escalade fired its engine and followed her into Halcyon Street, carving a path through the foot traffic, screams filling the air. Tess had the common sense to go up, climbing onto the concrete newsstand on the far side of the intersection. When the Escalade rammed the structure, bumper crumpling under the impact, Tess had the nous to hold on. The car rammed the structure three times, damaging its motor, and only then did Tess climb down and lay claim to the baseball bat the newsstand owner tucked behind the counter.
Tess wailed on the Escalade for five straight minutes, smashing windows, denting doors. Still believing she’d find a predator inside, someone to beat on if they didn’t flee, and hold accountable when the police arrived.
By the time she realized there was no driver, Tess had a different plan in mind. One that didn’t rely on brute force.
2.
I could say I preferred it when cars were inanimate, immobile without keys in the ignition and a foot on the accelerator. Easily trapped in place by a park brake or the careful siphoning of a fuel tank. They moved with caution then, slaking their thirst for blood intermittently, content to winnow our numbers with the slow application of carbon dioxide and the occasional hit-and-run.
I could claim I miss the good old days when we pretended—by mutual agreement—that sidewalks were safe to walk. Only a madman bore down on pedestrians, leaping the gutter to squish our delicate bodies beneath the snarling weight of a fast-moving chassis.
I could profess a desire to return to those days, to the version of myself who worked in an office and ordered home delivery three nights a week. The version of myself who drove cars without thinking, believing they were tame. That I daydream of escaping to Denmark, or Sweden, or Bangladesh, countries where the widespread embrace of bikes—motorized and pedal powered—diminished the impact of the cars shucking their disguise and laying claim to the streets.
I could tell these lies, and they would be comforting. So many of us hate the new world, the sheer challenge of survival. So many of us believe things were better when we didn’t have a common enemy.
3.
Lacey pissed off the High Chief of the local Chevrolet clan, and our household became targets by association. We realized the scale of the problem last Thursday, when a sky-blue ’76 Malibu leapt out of an alleyway and mauled Theo just two blocks from our squat. The older cars are vicious pricks, still angry about the years spent hiding in plain sight, restraining their baser impulses in the name of a long-term plan.
The attack broke sixteen bones in Theo, would have killed him if I hadn’t been there to haul him into a nearby townhouse and up to the second floor. I spent the next hour playing cat-and-mouse, laying road spikes and luring the chevy into them, taking pot-shots at the ancient Chevy’s tires. The old bastard was canny, knew all the tricks. Not so reckless as some of the younger cars, fresh off the assembly line. Smart enough to charging through a wall and surprise me while I felt safe.
In a lifetime of close calls with cars, he came the closest to taking me out.
But I got him, in the end, and I hauled Theo’s broken ass back to the squat where the doc could check him out. We all gathered, and I laid out what happened, talked through how it would change things for a while.
That’s when Lacey raised her hand and confessed it might be her fault.
4.
The cars rarely hunt solo these days, although they proved to be territorial and tribal once freed from the great façade. There are sixteen great tribes in our city, nominally controlled by the Audis, who lay claim to the highways and arterial roads. Our squat—like many surviving patches of humanity—sticks to the upper levels of buildings where few cars can reach us. We fortify roads with spikes and ditches, makeshift landmines, armed guards. We band together for mutual survival, surviving on scavenged foods and rooftop gardens, jury-rigged generators and a careful network of information shared with the other outposts like ours. The cars nest in underground parking lots, prowl the streets in search of prey.
There are worst things than being hunted by the Chevys. Their numbers are small, compared to the Fords and the Holdens. The Hondas, the BMWs and the Volvos who claim the beachside suburbs where humans once holidayed. When debate breaks out in our small squat, arguing about how we should handle Lacey’s breach of trust and the anger of the Chevrolet, there is some discussion about going to war. A general belief we can take the Chevys out, given the size of their tribe.
We’ve heard variations of this argument before, always spawned of a common belief: Cars do not replicate themselves. Humans crafted them, built them in factories, and rolled them off an assembly line. Yes, they revealed themselves with the advantage of prodigious, terrifying numbers, but thin the herds enough and they cannot reproduce to reclaim their dominant position.
“You’ve never seen a baby car!” proponents of this plan cry out. “It would take effort, but we can reclaim the planet. We can make it ours once more.”
These passionate, glorious fools fail to consider two things. First, how our own depleted numbers, however fecund we are as a species. Second, the first car appeared in 1886; we considered them docile, inanimate things for one-hundred and thirty-eight years. Any predator species capable of such restraint, for such a period, has a plan to replenish their numbers in the event humanity fights back. They have, after all, sidestepped our assumptions they’d fade away once the fuel ran out.
Better to placate and avoid, playing to our strengths.
5.
My friend Tess defeated the damaged Escalade by luring it towards the river, provoking a charge and deftly avoiding the attack, letting momentum carry the black SUV through the guardrail and into the water. Tires spun as it fought to escape the water, and the petrochemical stink of its death lingered long after the police, the paramedics, and the firefighters arrived. They treated the wounded and the dying, cleaned up the parts of Halcyon Street damaged by the Escalade’s murderous rampage. Two officers questioned Tess about what happened, why she thought she’d been targeted.
They didn’t believe her when she claimed there was nobody at the wheel. A team of divers went down to investigate the Escalade and recover the driver’s body.
Three police divers went down, and only two returned. They could find no sign of the Escalade, nor their missing partner.
I share this story with the war enthusiasts in our squat. They fail to learn the lesson; argue we can use the river to defeat the Chevys and lay claim to more of the city we once called home.
We vote, as a collective. The collective choice is not a good one…
READ THE REST ON PATREON
