Michael Montoure's Blog, page 12

VIDEO: Halloween Reading 2011: "REMAKE"

My first video! Here I'm performing "Remake," one of the stories from Slices, at the Reading Room in Seattle last Halloween. It's a little over thirteen minutes long. I've got a couple more of these from another reading that I'm going to post soon — let me know what you think. Thanks!

Watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3xr88Fw7hpk

Elizabeth Twist reviews "Slices" — "Mind-blowingly good"

Ye cats and little fishes!  Fellow writer Elizabeth Twist asked me a few questions about Slices and then let me know that she'd posted "a brief review" of it on her blog.  Now, when I read the words "brief review," I was expecting something like, "Hey, I read this book, it was totally awesome, you should check it out," full stop.

But this wonderfully glowing review is sharp, insightful, and in just a couple paragraphs, lays bare what the book is all about.  So, while I'm not vain enough to link to this just because she liked it — oh, who am I kidding, I totally am — I will say you should go check this out just to see her so clearly express what I'm trying to do with my writing:

The failures and beauties of human relationships are at the core of Michael's work. Few of his characters work on a solo basis, and those that do are drawn into unusual or regrettable positions. The fantasy and horror elements feel familiar in the sense that a recurring nightmare or a story heard in childhood feels familiar. These tropes resonate powerfully with the emotional problems at the heart of each tale. In my opinion, Slices is at its strongest when considering the many permutations of men's relationships, most sadly and beautifully in the context of male friendship, brotherhood, and love.

She also asked me questions about why I write short stories, how I approach world-building, and what's next, so you should definitely check that out as well:

ET: What draws you to the short story as a form? As a writer of horror and dark fantasy, what are the advantages of writing shorts as opposed to novel length works?

MM: For me, horror is such a concentrated emotion that I think it works better in short, sharp shocks. You can take a relatively simple idea, a few clear images, and express them in a very direct way, whereas that effect might be diluted if you were to take those ideas and stretch them out over the canvas of a novel. I think the short story lets you take more risks — and puts your characters at more risk, as well. [...]  Novels rarely kill everyone. Whereas in a short story, you have no idea who's safe, or if anyone is.

– Elizabeth Twist: Recommended Reading: Slices by Michael Montoure.

She's told me that she's also posted a longer review to Amazon.  (My first Amazon review!) I'm definitely looking forward to seeing that.  Thanks, Elizabeth!

You Were Warned: What To Expect From Me in 2012

Hey there, good morning. On Friday, I posted a few words about setting goals, and about what it means to do that. I told you I was going to sleep on it over the weekend, and come back and tell you what I'm setting out to accomplish this year.  This is the post-bullshit, scrap the New Year's Resolutions, cold-slap-of-reality version. This list looks pretty reasonable to me.  You can hold me to this — if I don't live up to these by December 31st, I'll buy you a drink. Yes, you.

Get back to a better blog posting schedule. For a while there, I was doing really well with Bloodletters — I had a routine of putting together three posts over the weekend, and timing them to go live during the week. That was working out quite nicely, and like all good habits, it was really easy for me to let it slide. However I want to end up scheduling things on my end, I want to make sure I don't end up going silent for a whole month again like I did in December. "Better" is a very subjective term, and I'd have a hard time holding myself publicly accountable for that, so let's turn that into a nice, concretely quantifiable goal: Maintain an average of posting at least twice a week throughout 2012.

Post video content. So I have this spiffy high-definition digital video camera I bought back in April of last year. Since then, I've filmed a couple of my readings, and taken some behind-the-scenes footage during filming for Causality. Have I bothered to put any of this cool stuff online? No — no, I have not. In fact, I never even sat down and figured out how to get any of this footage off of my camera and onto my computer until last night. This is more than slightly ridiculous, and I need to fix that. So, let's say: Post at least half-a-dozen readings and at least one book trailer in 2012.

Do everything I can to get Causality Season One finished. Okay, see what I did there? I originally wrote, "Finish Causality Season One," and then I remembered what I said last week about goals being things you have the power to accomplish on your own, and I realized I was being a tremendous hypocrite. We have a pretty amazing team working on Causality, and I feel pretty sure we will have it done by then. But all I can promise myself is that I will try my hardest and do everything I can do.

Finish and release Still Life. This is the big one. Still Life is the novel-length continuation of the story "One Last Sunset," which appears in my collection Slices and which many people have told me is one of their favorites. If it's one of your favorites, and you've wondered what happens to Nikki Velvet after the events of that story — well, the answer to that has been sitting on my hard drive for years now. There's quite a bit of work that needs to be done on the manuscript still, but I think it's entirely doable to rewrite it, edit it, format it, and have it online in time for this year's Christmas season. (And now that I've said that in public, I'm going to sit over here in the corner and hyperventilate for a while.) I love this story too much to keep neglecting it, and I owe to Nikki to get her story out there.

Get my individual short stories up online. That's what I meant to have done in time for this Christmas season, but it fell by the wayside. I'm going to release some of the stories from my collections as stand-alone e-books, as well as several short stories that haven't seen the light of day anywhere else. Let's say I'm going to have at least twenty short stories available for sale in 2012.

Submit to at least half-a-dozen anthologies. This seems to work for me — I see a call for stories for an anthology, I get an idea from the requested theme, and it actually gets my butt in the chair to get some writing done. And if it doesn't get accepted, well, I still have a new short story. That went well last year a couple of times — one of those stories did end up in the anthology, and it will be out this month. It's a good habit and I need to keep it going.

Release another collection of short stories. Kind of a no-brainer. People do seem to like them. I like them.

Publish a new edition of Counting From Ten. By this point, the original has been out of print long enough that the rights have reverted to me. (And if my original publisher has any argument with that, he should answer my e-mails every once in a while.) I have a few copies of the original edition left, but not a lot of them. It's time to dust it off, polish it up, revise the stories in it a little, maybe add a new story or two, and definitely some bonus content, and get it back out into the world.

Actually promote things once in a while. This is another big one. I've been doing all this cool stuff, and I've been doing a lot of research about how an indie writer like myself can promote his work on the Internet, and now I need to start doing some of it. I need to come up with a more detailed marketing plan, which I'll tell you about when I've done it, but for now let's say I'm going to approach at least fifty book-bloggers and buy advertising in at least three places in 2012.

Okay. Umm, that all looks like a lot. I'd better get to work. Talk to you soon.

Setting Your Writing Goals for 2012

… Good grief, has it really literally been an entire month since I last posted?  Sorry, everyone — my birthday is in early December, and between that, Christmas, and New Year's, I was running on maximum distraction mode.  I did manage to get a few things done last month, but blogging apparently didn't make the list.

Anyway, if you're anything like me, you've finally caught up on sleep after New Year's Eve, and the hangover might be starting to fade.  You're looking over that list of New Year Resolutions you made and thinking, hell, I've blown half of those already.  This might depress you enough that you might even be looking in the back of the fridge to see if there's any of that pitcher of sangria left.

Okay, stop.  Let's back up a second — toss out that list of resolutions and let's start over.  Let's start thinking about our actual goals.

No, wait, keep backing up.  Let's make sure first we know what a "goal" is.

I've always had the same definition as Dean Wesley Smith, who says that a goal is something that is within your control.  If you have a "goal" in mind that relies on someone else — an editor, an agent, anyone else — then that's not a goal:

So when some writer talks to me about a goal of selling a book to a traditional publisher by the end of the year, I just snort and they walk away insulted. I wasn't laughing at their ability to write. Not at all. I was laughing at the goal they set and put a deadline on that was out of their control completely. Such goals are guaranteed to create disappointment.

via Dean Wesley Smith » New World of Publishing: Failure is an Option. Quitting is Not.

He calls these not-goals "dreams", which I think sounds a little dismissive.  I'd call them "ambitions," maybe.

The point is to think about and focus on what you can do.  You can't say, "I'm going to sell 500 books on Amazon next month," because that literally relies on what 500 other people do, and that's not something you get to beat yourself up over.  You can say, "I'm going to finally buy that ad space on Kindle Boards like I keep thinking about," and with any luck maybe that will help you sell those 500 books.

You can set goals for your writing.  Maybe you can decide you're going to write a thousand words a day.  Not bad, totally reasonable.  But then you start thinking, but wait, what if I don't manage to write those thousand words every day? What if I fail?  And then we're back to the sangria again.

Okay, look, if you don't manage to write anything at all after setting such a goal, then maybe you can say you've failed.  But if you're actively reaching for your goal and you fall short of it –

Well — so what?

How many of you took part in NaNoWriMo this past November?  Did you make it all the way to 50,000 words?  No, huh?  Petered out at 38,000 and you've been kicking yourself ever since?

Look, you may not have hit your target, but if you've written a substantial chunk of a probably perfectly salvageable novel, that is not a "failure" by anyone's definition except yours.  Think of that one friend of yours who hasn't written a damn word since English class ten years ago but keeps saying he's "going to be a writer someday."  Him?  He's a failure.  (Although you might not want to say that to his face.)

You didn't hit the target, then you stop, reload, take aim again.

This weekend, think about what exactly you want to take aim at throughout this next year.  I'll be doing the same, and we'll meet up again on Monday.

Speaking to Dragons

When I was a little kid, Star Trek was one of my favorite things in the world. I loved the idea of computers you could talk to. In one episode, they showed an apparently ordinary typewriter that took dictation. A character from the 20th century was very startled by it — "it's typing everything I'm saying!" she said.

"Man," I thought, "if I had that typewriter, I'd be able to get so much writing done."

You see, the problem is, like many writers, I'm inherently lazy. (It's true! We really are. Why do you think so many of us refuse to find proper work?) And there are some days when my mind is clear and the ideas are flowing, and I would love to get some writing done, but the idea of just sitting down and actually typing something seems like way too much work. Also, as I think I've mentioned before, I have a cat who loves to curl up in my lap, who makes it a little difficult for me to type. He's doing it right now, in fact.

So I've been keeping an eye on speech recognition for a while. For a long, long time, the state-of-the-art was pretty primitive. There is a book about the subject that has a title I've always loved: "How To Wreck A Nice Beach." (If you don't get it, say it out loud, really fast.)

I tried buying some speech recognition software, oh, probably about a decade ago. It didn't go very well. I had to spend a long time "training" the software to understand the peculiarities of my voice. And once I was done doing that, well, the results were not too good. Sentences would start well, but then trail off into random strings of deranged rambling. (Any smart remarks about how this is no different from my normal writing style will be summarily ignored.)

After that, I pretty much ignored any advances made in the field until recently, when I noticed that the speech recognition of my Android phone's search feature was actually pretty damn good. Huh, I thought, I wonder if the desktop software equivalent has gotten any better?

I started seeing reviews from other writers talking about the very same software that I had abandoned years before — Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The reviews ranged from "hey, this is not bad," to, "this has changed my life."

I was more than willing to give it another try, even though I was slightly annoyed to realize that I couldn't just buy it online with a credit card and download the damn thing. I had to actually buy a CD of it and have it shipped to me in a box. But, when Black Friday came along, I decided to see if Amazon had it on sale. Turns out they did. I got it for less than 40 bucks.

As the more clever among you may have guessed, this very post you're reading was created using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (If you didn't guess that, jeez, try to keep up.) I have a really decent USB microphone, the same one I bought back when I thought I was going to start podcasting, and I'm sure that helps the accuracy here. But the software itself has definitely gotten a lot better too.

All in all, this post probably took me a little longer to compose using this software than it would've if I had just typed it. And, yeah, I did have to go back over it all by hand and correct some of mistakes that I made. (Especially in that last sentence, ironically enough.) But once I get used to it, I can see this actually being easier than typing.

Will this actually make you more productive? Hard to say. But it does remove one more barrier of laziness, and quite frankly, I need all the help in that respect I can get.

In Defense of Klout

I really, really try not to talk too much about blogging and social networking on here — mainly because I think that kind of navel-gazing can quickly become kinda pointless and meta and irritating — but as I've been trying to reach out and build a following online this past year, one of the tools I've found useful is Klout.  The tide of public opinion seems to be turning against them lately, so I thought I'd take a minute to talk about what I get out of it.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me bring you up to speed: Klout is a site that tries to examine your activity on various social networking sites, and analyze how people respond to that activity, and assigns you a "Klout score" from 1 to 100 to indicate how influential they think you are.

Several people have expressed concerns over privacy issues, largely because Klout was creating "accounts" for people who had never signed up for the service, and because some of those people were minors.  I agree that this is problematic, but I think their response has been appropriately swift and contrite.  (When they realized they were pulling in information about minors, they made changes to their system within two hours.)  People called them on this issue, and they said, "yeah, you're right, we screwed up," like grown-ups.

Other people started complaining when Klout recently changed the way that they calculate their scores, and several users found that their score had dropped dramatically overnight as a result.

Me, for example.  My score dropped by fifteen points.  Now, I can totally get why some people would take this way too personally, but I'm not one of them.  It's their ranking system; if they decide they want to change their methodology and the number that comes out of that revamped system is a little different, I don't see how that's worth losing sleep over.  I'm still just as "influential" as a I was the day before they made their changes.  It's like getting a different grade in a class based on, say, a certain number of right answers vs. giving some answers more "points" than others, vs. grading the entire class on a curve — none of that changes how well you actually did on the test.

But some people aren't comfortable with Klout doing the grading at all, and one of those people is author John Scalzi:

Who made Klout the arbiter of online influence, aside from Klout itself? [....] I'm sure Klout has what it considers an excellent rationale for whatever stew of algorithms it uses to assign you a number, but neither you nor I know what it is, or (more importantly) why it's valid as an accurate determiner of your online influence and popularity.

I'm not sure I get this argument at all, and Scalzi's certainly not the only one making it lately.  Let me ask you the same question about someone else:

Who made Google the arbiter of what web pages are the most important and relevant on their topics, aside from Google themselves?

Nobody on the Internet who steps forward and says "I'm an expert!" is democratically vetted, put through due diligence, and given some official stamp of approval.  People either believe them or ignore them.

From everything I can see, the people behind Klout seem like pretty smart guys.  Their system may not be perfect yet, but I can tell they genuinely care about it and are working to make it as accurate as they can.  They have talked about what goes into their rankings, without going into any detail that would give away their trade secrets, and I think it makes sense.  I don't need to know exactly how the sausage is made.

But that aside, it leaves one main concern — what is your Klout score for?  What good is it?  Scalzi writes:

Aside from the occasional quid pro quo freebie, it seems that what Klout exists to do is create status anxiety — to saddle you with a popularity ranking, and then make you feel insecure about it and whether you'll lose that ranking unless you engage in certain activities that aren't necessarily in your interest, but are in Klout's. In other words Klout exists to turn the entire Internet into a high school cafeteria, in which everyone is defined by the table at which they sit.

– DeKloutifying – Whatever.

Oh, huh.  Okay.  I can see why it might seem like that.  And I can see why a lot of people might treat it like that, even, and I can see where that would create an issue.

I don't think of it that way.  I am not my Klout score, and my Klout score is not me.  I am not the thing being measured.  Not even my "popularity" is the thing being measured.

What is being measured, as best as I can tell, is — how well am I engaging with people?  How many conversations am I starting?  How much of the information I put out there is interesting and relevant enough to people that they're sharing links to it with their friends?  Am I communicating enough, and does that communication have any effect?

All of that is very important to me — it tells me whether or not I'm doing my job.  I can see it fluctuate based on how active I am — if I go too long without posting to this blog, starting conversations on Twitter, talking to people — I can see my Klout score drop.  When I get back into making more of an effort to engage in conversation — I see it go back up.

That's why Klout is valuable to me — not as a metric of my "popularity," but as something that reminds me to keep putting myself out there and getting in conversations with people like you.

So now that we're having a conversation — what do you think?  Do you pay any attention to Klout scores, either your own or other people's?  Let me know in the comments.

Self-publishing, Pricing, and Print-on-demand

So this morning over on the Twitters, @elkoholick asked me a question:

. . . I said I thought that was a slightly wide-ranging question to answer in 140 characters, and promised that I would write up a blog post about it instead.

I suppose first off, I'd point you to a couple of things I've written before: "Making the Leap" is the introduction to my latest book, and it goes into some detail about my history with writing and publishing, and the road I took to making the decision to self-publish said book. You might also want to check out "Saying No to Ninety-Nine", where I talk about why some writers are pricing their e-books at 99 cents, and why I don't think it's a good idea.

. . . Okay, you've read those? All right, so, let's talk actual advice.

1. Figure out if you're honestly going to be satisfied with self-publishing.First off, I have to give the caveat that I don't have a ton of experience with traditional publishing — I've sold to some on-line markets, and had some small-press success, but the only time my work has appeared in what you'd call a Real Actual Goddamn Book was my story for "How the Doctor Changed My Life."

But, well, I've never really had a lot of interest in the idea of traditional publishing, either.  Real publishing moves too slowly for me; I'm way too impatient. It can take years to place a book with a publishers, and maybe a couple more years after that to actually get your finished book into bookstores. Also, all the promotion that publishers used to do to advertise your books? Yeah, they don't really do that anymore, not in this economy, not unless you're Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer. New traditionally-published authors, and even established midlist authors, have to hustle just as hard as indies to make sure people find out about their books. So the way I figure it is, if I'm going to be the one doing all the work, I am sure as hell going to be the one keeping all the profit.

So that's my "victory condition" — making the most money off of my work, keeping all the control over the product. But that might not be your victory condition. You might end up deciding that what you really want is to have a "real" book, to have the legitimacy and respect of having a big publishing house behind you, to maybe see your book in bookstores. If you decide that's what you want, don't let anyone talk you out of it. You're playing your game, and no one else can decide for you if you're winning or not.

2. Keep your e-book prices down.99 cents is too low — you don't make any money and people are going to think your work isn't worth more than that. But they're not going to pay a lot more than that, either, not for someone whose name they don't recognize. You're going to want to publish through Amazon's Kindle store — that's really where all the action is — and $2.99 is the lowest price point where their royalty rate switches over from chicken feed to a decent 70%. Price your novel at $2.99. If you ever have a series of novels someday, a lot of people have had success at pricing the first one at 99 cents and the rest of them at $2.99 or higher. Something to keep in mind someday.

3. Print-on-demand is awesome. But don't expect to make any money at it. POD books used to be crap– cheap paper, a binding that would fall apart, a cover whose glossy plastic surface would start to peel at the edges. Those days are gone. The books you get from somewhere like CreateSpace look and feel practically indistinguishable from anything you'd pick up in a bookstore. And there is nothing like holding a physical book in your hands that has your name on it. They're wonderful. And people are not going to buy them.

If you suspect people might think twice about spending as much as $2.99 on an e-book from an unknown writer, then you know they're not going to plunk down $12-$15, plus shipping charges, for a physical book from said same writer. But, on the other hand, setting up your book on CreateSpace is free. So why not? Think of it as being there to be available in case anyone who loved your novel decides they have to have a copy to grace their shelves. Think of it as something that might make a nice present for your Aunt Millie. Or, if you do want to really sell a few of them, you can do what I do: order copies for yourself, at cost — it's pretty cheap to go that route — and sell them by hand. Sell them to your friends, sell them at readings, sell them at conventions.

4. People do judge books by their covers. If you're not an artist/designer — and I mean a good one — then you need to find someone who is. Your cover absolutely has to look good enough to compare favorably with a cover from a major publisher. People scrolling through lists of books on Amazon glance at each cover for literally less than two seconds before moving on. (They've timed it.) If your cover doesn't make them go, "Oh, hey, what's this?" then it's never going to matter how good your book is — people aren't going to look at it. Some cover that you think is just merely "good enough" is going to look like amateur hour to your potential readers. Get a good cover.

5. Oh, yeah, and your words matter, too. The words inside the book, natch — someone other than you will need to edit and proofread the damn thing, and you'll probably have to pay them. Having another set of eyes is crucial — believe me, I've done proofreading professionally for years, and I can't catch all the mistakes in my own prose.

The words in your book description matter, too. Again, just like your cover, a flat and uninteresting description on your Amazon listing will make a reader's eyes glaze over almost faster than they can hit the back button. Go look at some listings of your favorite books, see how their descriptions are written, study and replicate their structure.

6. Get ready to hustle. Remember all that promotion I was saying traditional publishers don't do any more? You have to do it. Don't worry, you don't have to buy ads in the New York Times and go on a multi-state book tour. But you do need to build a following, using every bit of social networking you can — Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and more. A lot of people put their book up on Amazon and sit back and wonder why it's not selling. Simple — it's not going to sell unless people know about it. And that's your job.

Well — that's about all I can think of off the top of my head, and probably enough rambling out of me for one day, anyway. Any questions?

Tim Ward reviews my story, "Cold Season"

I'm really pretty psyched about this — I'd asked Timothy C. Ward if he'd be willing to review "Slices" for me if I sent him a copy, and he said that he would, sure — but that his reading list was so stacked right now, he wouldn't be able to get to it immediately.  No worries, I told him, and sent him a copy anyway.

Turns out that he read at least the first story, and he liked it so much that he's starting a new column on his blog just to spotlight short stories, and mine was the first he's reviewed!

"The premise of a hypochondriac mom turning a whole city on its head is layered with intrigue and suspense, as her son tries to figure out how to stop a plague that might or might not really be happening. Michael's details and present tense first person create a tactile experience of the chaos to come when people start getting sick. Great psychological horror like this puts the reader in terrifying circumstances where one has to get a little dirty in order to survive. I really enjoyed seeing the character arc in motion, and was completely engaged to discovering the solution to his epic problem. The mythos of his mother's powers creates layers within the story that make this a story you can read over and over. The ending is perfect, and keeps you wanting more."

You should definitely go check out the rest of the review at his site — he asked me a few questions about the story, and you can read my answers there, and listen to the exclusive audio excerpt he managed to sweet-talk me into doing.  (Creepy piano music in the background is courtesy of Kevin McLeod.)

If you haven't had a chance to read "Cold Season" yet, and this review talks you into it — since it's the very first story in "Slices," you can read it for free by downloading the Kindle sample of the book.  Just go to the Amazon listing and look for the box on the right that says "Try it free."

Technorati Claim Code post

Please feel free to ignore this post, fellow humans, this is meant for the robots at Technorati, so they know this is really my blog:

SBKF4XQBNUME

That's apparently how you say "Hello" in robot.

Coffin Hop Winner

Man, I just realized — I never announced the winner of my Coffin Hop giveaway, did I?  Here I made such a big deal about it, and then I left you hanging.  Sorry!  I'd already mailed the winner directly, and I made an announcement on my mailing list, but I never posted about it here.

Okay, well, let's correct that — the winner is J.C. Martin — writer, kung fu instructor, and fellow creepy doll enthusiast.  Congrats, J.C.!

I've also contacted the other entrants and offered them copies of "Slices" in exchange for a review of same, so no one had to walk away empty-handed.  I think all of them enthusiastically agreed — I don't think anyone's unaccounted for.  So, yeah, I will be dropping those books in the mail sometime this week.

Now I bet you wish you'd entered, don't you?  Well, take heart — if you'd be willing to review "Slices," I'm always willing to hand out free coupon codes for an e-book version.  Just drop all the way down to the bottom of the page and you'll find my e-mail address — just let me know you're interested and I'll be happy to set you up.

Many thanks to everyone who entered!  Hope you all had a great Halloween.  (I'm still not quite ready to admit Halloween is over, myself, although the calendar tells me otherwise.)