Steven W. Booth's Blog, page 5

It’s Just Publishing, Folks

A while back, I saw a blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch which discusses the divide between self-publishing authors and those who are traditionally published (e.g. published by someone else). It’s a great article, and you should read it. The general gist, however, is that somewhere in the timeline of publishing history, the publishing world fractured into two camps, and the chasm between the self-published and the traditionally published continues to grow. Well, it’s time someone put their foot down.

It’s just publishing, folks.

It turns out that all publishers, from the big “legacy” publishers to the meekest self-publisher, have to do the same things. They must find and develop work that they believe in, create book-like experiences (physical books, ebooks, apps) from the work, distribute the books to retailers with customers who might actually buy the books, and market to and build an audience who will eagerly continue to buy the books that publisher produces now and into the future. That’s it. Some people are better at certain aspects than others—I’m pretty damned good at building physical books and ebooks, for example—but that doesn’t mean that the next guy can’t also be good at what I do. Self-publishing advocates like Dan Poynter and John Vorhaus want you to believe that everyone can and should be good at everything (does anyone remember Don Novello’s character on Saturday Night Live in the ’70s, Father Guido Sarducci, and his declaration that “All men are Pope”? It’s kind of like that). I use John as an example because I used to build John’s books for him, and when I saw him speak at a conference a few months back, he used my service as an example of why the authors in the room didn’t need a service like mine! If John could build his own books—a trick he learned from his experience with me, and I am not making that up—so can anyone. But the funny part is, traditional publishers don’t think like that. Mike Shatzkin just wrote a blog post that discusses how “traditional” (or “legacy” or “full-service”) publishers specialize in what they are good at, and farm out the work that they don’t do as well, but that there is room for innovation. Mike’s article talks about how the big publishers are starting to think more like self-publishers. It makes sense, therefore, that the self-publishers started thinking like the big guys.

By the way, I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the difference between self-publisher who publishes exactly one author and the bigger publishers who publishes more than one author. Monogamous and polygamous have the wrong connotations. Monograph and polygraph? Both used. I have a hunch that the answer lies in the use of an obscure foreign language, but so far I haven’t found it.

What does a publisher of many authors have that a publisher of one author doesn’t have? Money? Not necessarily? A lot of titles? That depends on how long they’ve been publishing. I know of some best-selling authors who own all their titles and only publish their own work, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are making 6 figures each year, and a couple make more in one month than I made in a year working for other people. These authors have large fan bases and at least 10 titles, and they are constantly turning out new material to feed their audience’s appetites for their writing.

So let’s do away with this siren call for Do-It-Yourself publishing. That’s not the point.

From what I can tell, the “line in the sand,” as Kristine Rusch calls it, is not between the self-publishers and the traditional publishers. It’s between new publishers with one or two titles—the newbies, the inexperienced—and established publishers with many titles and a large audience. Either you have a successful business, or you don’t. Simple as that.

For those of you playing along at home, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t talked about authors very much. And really, isn’t publishing really about the authors? I’m going to have to say no to that. Publishing is about content. Most authors I know don’t want to be business people. They don’t want to take risks with their egos and with their dollars. They “just want to write” (which is something I hear about once a week from just about every author I know). Authors, as content providers, should be paid well for their contribution to the publishing process. I mean that. And most would love to be picked up by one of the big publishers so they don’t have to worry about all that ugly business stuff.

But the problem with the big six publishers is they have so much fixed overhead—buildings, salaries, printing equipment, etc.—that they have to take the lion’s share of the money from the sale of a book just to stay in business. Those big six publishers are coloring the perceptions of authors everywhere. Authors have a love-hate relationship with the big six—they want to be “recognized” by these big publishers, but they also want to get paid a lot of money. And when the authors can’t get what they think they’re worth—or can’t get picked up at all, at any price—many of them decide to “take their share” by publishing themselves. But often when they see how much work becoming a publisher is, they take shortcuts—on quality of editing and production, usually—and wind up with questionable content and poorly designed books. And then they wonder why self-published works still have a bad reputation. This isn’t a wholesale condemnation of DIY publishing any more than it is a condemnation of bloated businesses with budgets so big that can’t get out of the way of their own success.

If we really are going to draw a line in the sand, let’s draw it on the quality side of publishing. If you are publishing quality content, you are making money from those endeavors, and you are paying your authors well for it (even if you, yourself, are the author), you are a publisher. If not, then you’re not a publisher.

How hard was that?

Sockpuppetry and Other Sleight of Hand

Back in July, I wrote a blog post called Audience Building is Not For Sissies. The post centered around a popular British author named Stephen Leather—who is particularly famous for self-publishing much of his current works—and the comments that he made at a writer’s conference called Harrogate. To recap briefly, Mr. Leather claimed that an author with a large fan base could write short fiction (about one story a week), sell it for $0.99, and the resulting royalties from his sales (which he calculates at around 500 a month) is well over $100,000 per year. All well and good. But I contacted him and asked him where he got his “large fan base.” I suggested that it was from his traditional publisher (Harper), who built him the fan base with which he walked away and which is producing his 500 sales a month. His response was, shall we say, non-responsive: He chose not to give his publishers credit for helping him build his fan base, and instead pointed to self-publishing authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke who did not have a traditional publisher build them an audience.

However, it turns out that Stephen Leather (and, for that matter, John Locke) has been playing both sides against the middle. The Guardian (the UK newspaper) has reported that Mr. Leather has recently admitted to creating what are now called “sock puppets,” false accounts on retail sites like Amazon, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and using them to write many, many favorable reviews of his own work, thus skewing both the promotion algorithms at Amazon (which likes lots of reviews, particularly positive ones) and confounding the average reader’s ability to make an informed decision. John Locke, one of the authors Mr. Leather pointed to as an example of a self-made self-publishing author, has admitted to paying a service to write favorable reviews of his books with exactly the same results. Another successful self-published author, RJ Ellory, has admitted to creating sock puppets to leave negative reviews on the Amazon pages of authors he considered rivals. There are other blogs reporting all this.

I find all this disturbing and amusing at the same time. Stephen Leather confidently tried to convince me and his readers that selling short fiction at $0.99 is the magic bullet for self-publishing success and wealth. He left out the part about his publisher helping him build a fan base, and he also left out the part about him padding the reviews so that it seemed that everyone loved his work.

Is Stephen Leather a good writer? Sure, why not. I haven’t read him, but there’s no reason to think he can’t write. After all, he was picked up at one point or another by a Big Six publisher, so he’s at least commercial. But would Stephen Leather, or John Lock, or RJ Ellory be as successful today if they hadn’t gamed the system? Probably not.

You see, it’s really hard to get real readers to leave real reviews, even if they like your work. Like any publisher or author, I’ve asked people for reviews—honest reviews, always—and so have my authors (Brian Knight recently wrote a very good blog post on this exact subject). But it can take weeks or months for the reviewer to get around to it. You have to remind, cajole, and otherwise make yourself a pain in the butt to some of these people to get them to review your work. Why do we do this? For exactly the same reason Leather and Locke cheated! The system (by which I mean, Amazon) is built on the citizen reviewer singing the praises or talking trash about new products. Google spends a lot of time and energy weeding out the false voices to get the best, genuine reviews to base their algorithms on. Amazon, on the other hand, has no such incentive. They are there to make money, and integrity is not exactly their first priority.

I recognize that I spend a lot of words in these blogs giving Amazon grief, but here’s the reality: If Amazon wanted to have an honest, transparent system, can you imagine it would take them more than a few weeks to implement that system? They’re Amazon, for heaven’s sake. Jeff Bezos, whatever else you might think of him, is one of the business geniuses of our time. If only he would use his gifts for good instead of evil. But Jeff Bezos is not an altruistic savior of the retail world. Instead, he has a very plain agenda: Dominate the market. If having honest reviews helped him do that, we would already know the exact identity of each reviewer, and spam reviews, good or bad, would be a thing of the past.

Does that mean we shouldn’t hold cheaters like Stephen Leather accountable for taking advantage of an inherently flawed system? No, of course not. What Leather did was unethical (or at least immoral). He is taking money from people on the basis of skewed data that he himself skewed. If he were the officer of a corporation selling stock, I would say that he is guilty of insider trading—or at the very least, plain old fraud. But there is no SEC for Amazon reviews, and I don’t expect there will be one anytime soon.

What do we do in the meantime? I don’t have a good answer for that. Prayer comes to mind. Pray for the end of apathy, the end of dishonesty, the end of monopoly (sorry, I had to get that in there). What am I going to do? The most effective solution that I have is to not engage in sockpuppetry, and hope that there will soon be legitimate, available ways for authors to promote their books. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

The Real Reason for the Zombie Craze

What’s up with all the zombies?

I hear this question a lot. As the author of successful zombie novels, people seem to think that I have an explanation for this phenomenon.

There are a number of philosophies on why zombies are so popular. Some people think it is because the economy of the planet has been struggling for so long (regardless of your political bent, everyone seems to agree that the economy could improve), and thus the zombie apocalypse is actually a metaphor for the collapse of society and the inevitable brutality of humanity when the system comes apart. Some people think that the zombies represent the corporate interests, with their mindless desire to consume those that feed their coffers. Some believe that zombies are really representative of the current state of the world, with its uncaring willingness to allow the downfall of its neighbors while looking out for numero uno. And then there are those who feel that zombies are a caricature for rampant consumerism.

I like writing about zombies because I want to explore what I call “the end of the infrastructure.” What happens when all the niceties that modern civilization provides go away: Roads, electricity, the Internet, clean water, abundant food, safe medicines (although there are many who would argue that the medicines aren’t safe to begin with), opportunities to succeed and become wealthy (or at least keep the bill collectors at bay)? I depend on all of that and more. I’m not an ex-Navy SEAL with a cache of weapons, the ability to kick above my head and pilot anything from a motorcycle to a helicopter to a tank, and a panic room with a years supply of food, a big screen TV with requisite Wii, and four foot thick steel walls, so I’m going to be in a lot of trouble when the apocalypse comes. I’m much more likely to end up as an extra in zombie horde scene than as the hero. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how ordinary people with ordinary skills could survive in a world without infrastructure. Frankly, it scares the [expletive] out of me!

But that’s not what I think is “up with all the zombies.”

No, my hypothesis is that the zombie craze is just a smokescreen for the inevitable robot uprising.

I’m serious. Robots taking over the world is a lot more likely than the advent of zombies. Hell, robots are everywhere. You get your money from them (ATM machines), you buy movie tickets from them, they wash your car, they even sell you groceries. What, you didn’t realize that the self-checkout at the grocery store is actually a robot? You were probably picturing Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still (“Clatu beratta nicto!”), or Arnold Schwarzenegger in any one of the Terminator movies, or Yul Brynner in Westworld, or even that lovable pair, C-3PO and R2-D2 from the Star Wars franchise. But that’s all science-fiction, kind of like the zombies. And while they do have humanoid robots out there, they’re not the ones to be concerned with. Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles and set on autopilot while the guy in the trailer in Wisconsin goes to take a leak… That’s what you should be worried about.

See, robots exist, and they are getting smarter. Someone out there, right now, is working on a self-programming expert system—what most people call an Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pretty soon, they’re going to come up with a system that can not only pass a Turing test, but also defeat a captcha, one of those little scrambled combinations of letters and numbers, both of which are supposed to prove that you are a human and not a robot. The likelihood of sentient silicon-based AI is far greater than the probability of dead flesh reanimating and seeking to consume us all with untold malice. Zombies are the poor man’s Frankenstein’s monster. Robots are exploring Mars right now. Think about that.

When I say the inevitable robot uprising, I’m not really picturing a situation like in The Matrix or Terminator movies, with an active hostility or even open war between the two camps. I’m picturing something more along the lines of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, where humans are the Eloi, and the robots are the Morlocks. In that story, the Eloi were complacent in their dependence on the Morlocks for their lifestyles, and complicit in allowing the Morlocks to devour them like cattle.

Zombie stories focus around strong, well-trained, motivated people who, in dire circumstances, rise above the worst possible scenario and triumph, while the weak join the ranks of the enemy and suffer eternal damnation. Zombie stories are inherently empowering.

The robots, on the other hand, sap our strength as humans. Robots are not, as Douglas Adams once put it, “Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with!” They are machines designed to do the work of a man. They are conveniences that allow humans to concentrate on intellectual endeavors—which sounds pretty good until you realize how dependent we are on those conveniences. Dealing with robots rarely requires use of a shotgun, crowbar, or chainsaw. When the robots take over, we may not even have those tools to use. It’s pretty scary stuff.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a Luddite who is against technology and advocates going back to a simpler time when we grew our own food and lived off the land. Like I said, I rely on the infrastructure of the modern world to make a living and stay healthy. And I’m not a character in an Isaac Asimov story, with an overplayed Frankenstein complex and a desire to enslave those that I fear.

But the next time you pick up a zombie novel, remember that the lesson of the zombies is to be strong and to fight to keep yourself and your loved ones from becoming a statistic. And the next time you go through the self-checkout line at the grocery, say hello to the real threat.

I, for one, do not welcome our new robot overlords.

[Apologies to Ashley Stroupe. -SB]

THE MODERN READER: The modern reader’s power to influence

One of my least favorite parts about launching a new story into the world is the necessity for reviews.  I’m not talking about magazine, ezine, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, or Library Journal reviews, which I have no control over.  The publisher sends out review copies, and they either review it or they don’t.  With my books it’s mostly a case of they don’t, or at least if they do I never hear about them.  The one exception is a pretty decent review Library Journal gave me for Broken Angel.

I still think those big reviews are important, but in today’s world of shared information and the rise of e-commerce, Amazon.com specifically, those big reviewers have a little less clout than they once did.  Now that readers can share their opinions and experiences with a book they’ve read and make their words a part of public record, they are able to more directly influence other potential readers.  This isn’t a new thing, word of mouth has always been important, but now that word of mouth can become a part of the public record, forever attaching itself to a book’s list of particulars and statistics, it often becomes a deciding factor for other potential readers.  Those five stars and glowing review, or one star and scathing deconstruction, you gave a book that you really enjoyed, or really hated, will help others viewing that book’s page to decide to buy it, or not as the case may be.

Some sites that exist to highlight books and bring new reading material to the attention of potential readers won’t even consider listing a book, even if it does happen to be #13 on Amazon’s best-selling Hard-Boiled crime list, if it doesn’t have enough reader reviews (A Face Full of Ugly – From The Misadventures of Butch Quick for example, had around three hundred downloads in the first day of its release, not amazing, but not bad, and zero reader reviews).  So when I’m told We need reviews ASAP, I know it’s a fact, but there’s a problem.  Most readers don’t bother to review a book they’ve purchased, read, and maybe even loved.  They aren’t being neglectful; they are in no way required to review anything they buy.  It’s not their problem. They did their part by paying for it. We shouldn’t ask more of them. But, things in the book business being what they are, we now do.  It’s almost required.  Hell, give it another few years and we’ll be contractually obligated to make sure our books get a minimum number of five star reviews.  You think I’m joking.  Maybe I am.  Maybe I’m not.  I guess time will tell.

So, I have one new story, a novella called A Face Full of Ugly, and a novel from the same series, The Misadventures of Butch Quick, called Sex, Death & Honey coming out on Friday.  I’m excited as hell.  I’ve been writing about Butch Quick for a long time, and he’s just starting to meet the reading public.  I love it, and I love that people seem to be enjoying him as much as I do, but I’ve arrived at that uncomfortable part of the release that makes me squirm.  The necessary pimping to make sure that people are aware Butch Quick has arrived, and to try to make him stand out in the crowd.  There are probably hundreds of other books coming out at the same time, and all their authors jumping up and down and waving their arms in the air to get some attention.  So, after annoying friends, family, and social media contacts with my continuous pimping, I go after the hard core of people who have shown me the most loyalty, the friends and readers who seem genuinely excited about my new project, who have bought copies, read them, fed my ego on praise, and I inconvenience them further buy asking for reviews.

I try not to be too pushy about it.  I say only if you’re up to it, and only honest reviews, if you didn’t like it, say you didn’t like it.  Neither my publisher nor I would ever stoop to soliciting dishonest reviews.  I may be a writer, but I do have some standards.

One thing I’m finding, and much to my surprise, are readers feeling surprised and flattered to be asked.  As if they don’t think their opinion matters … no one cares what they think … who are they, a reader, to post commentary about the work of a published author?

For all of you doubt the importance of the reader in the world of publishing, I would like to correct you, gently though, right here and now.

You, the reader, are the most important person in the writer’s working life.  You, the reader, are the most important person in the publisher’s working life.  You, the reader, are reason there is a book to buy.  Without you, there would be no point.  I might as well be composing symphonies with kazoos and armpit farts.

You, the reader, through word of mouth, your praise and criticism, can lift a book onto the bestsellers list or sink it only feet from the dock that launched it.  You have always had that power, and now you have more of it than ever before.  By making your opinions known in shared information space, making your words visible to more people than will probably actually read the book you’re sharing information about, you can convince other readers to try something new.  You can lift a new author or character from the obscuring white noise of a million competing releases.

It’s not an obligation.  It is a power; a power no other generation of readers has had quite as much of as you.

Now that you know you have this power, it’s up to you to decide to use it.

I won’t give you the With great power comes great responsibility speech.  I’ll leave that one to Steven, who would probably do a much better job of it anyway.

Brian Knight

Audience Building Is Not For Sissies

One of my authors, Brian Knight, sent me a link to a blog post from an author named Stephen Leather in the UK. It was a very interesting article—I recommend that you read it (go on, I’ll wait).

One of Mr. Leather’s major points is that an author with a large fan base can sell a $0.99 ebook, which can then be purchased as many as 6,000 times per year over 10 years, and will make him $21,000, or about $4,250 per day for 5 days of work writing the thing in the first place. Since a $0.99 ebook has the potential to make so much money per year (and since potentially an author, writing 5 days out of every 7, can produce 50 such ebooks a year), an author doing nothing but writing short fiction can make over $100,000 per year. (For those of you who are math challenged, $0.35 x 6,000 x 50 = $105,000.) What outstanding (I dare not say, incredible) numbers. I want some of that, and you should too.

He also goes into detail about how publishers, agents, editors, and large booksellers are becoming increasingly irrelevant. After all, if an author can become a millionaire working for themselves, what in the world do they need to voluntarily give up much if not most of their profits to a publisher for? As an author, I couldn’t imagine giving away $52,500 to a publisher when they are (or, more importantly, aren’t) doing something that I can do for myself.

But I am also a publisher, so I have a separate and distinct point of view that needs to be included in the discussion. I’ve already talked about authors publishing before they are ready, so let’s skip that part. What I feel is important here is the subtext of Mr. Leather’s statements. Remember, an author with a large fan base can see those kinds of numbers. But what is an author with a small or non-existent fan base to do?

I’m going to use Brian Knight as an example here (sorry, Brian). His Butch Quick novella, Big Trouble In Little Boots, is available at Kindle for $0.99. It is an excellent story, well told and funny… and not one copy has been sold this month. Mr. Leather implies that he should have sold 500 copies by the end of the month. Where’s the problem?

The problem is that Stephen Leather has a “large fan base,” and Brian Knight does not. Mr. Leather’s debut novel was published by Collins (before they became Harper Collins), and I’ll bet you a dollar that the publisher put in more of its own money and effort to promote the book than Mr. Leather did. It used the review and media contacts it had developed over the years to get an audience interested in his books, his writing, and him. And now, Stephen Leather can go around the world telling authors that they don’t need a publisher, using the money that his large fan base provides him to finance his continued efforts.

I think Stephen (may I call you Stephen?) isn’t being hypocritical so much as simply displaying selective memory. His talent gave birth to a writing career that is paying him well, but he has forgotten the midwife (the publisher) who got him through the birth in the first place.

The fact of the matter is, building a large fan base—or any fan base—is not for the weak-hearted. It takes time, effort, contacts, and most of all, a lot of money to be successful. Publishers, if they do nothing else, have the resources to build a large fan base for an author. If the author tried to do that by themselves, they could end up spending far more time and money than they can reasonably anticipate receiving from selling their writings in the foreseeable future. Also, most publishers are in the business of publishing, whereas authors are often just in the business of paying their bills by any means necessary—including working at a straight job for a living. Authors are at a disadvantage when it comes to aggregating the resources necessary to build that ever elusive “large fan base.”

When I finished reading Stephen’s blog post, I posted a response… and Stephen replied back. Here is his reply in its entirety:

“It’s complicated, Steven. There’s no doubt that having an established fan base helped sell my self-published eBooks. But there have been plenty of writers who started with a zero fan base and have sold hundreds of thousands. You have Amanda Hocking in the US, we have Kerry Wilkinson and Nick Spalding in the UK. You’d need to ask them what they did to go from nowhere to stellar stellar sales in a matter of months but my view is that if you write good books and a lot of them and offer them at a reasonable price, they will sell. My advice to any writer is that they should first approach a publisher. As you say publishers can do a lot to promote an author and to help with the production process. But if the closed club that publishing has become won’t let you in, then you should try self publishing. If you want to lean about my career, drop by www.stephenleather.com ”

Honestly, I think that is a very balanced response. Stephen doesn’t seem unreasonable or defensive. And I agree, if you have tried everything to get published by every publisher you can find, and you still can’t get a contract, self-publishing may be the way to go (again, see my post, Don’t Publish That Book!). But to dismiss the entire publishing industry because there’s money to be made out there without publishers/agents/editors and even booksellers just seems a little too narrowly focused to have a good correspondence to reality.

Stephen says something else that is, in my opinion, inaccurate. He names authors who have successfully built a fan base for themselves without the intervention of a publisher. Undoubtedly this is true. But those authors, again in my opinion, owe their success to “going viral.” Basing one’s career on going viral is like expecting to win the lottery every month when the bills come due. Yes, it can and does happen. Someone will win the lottery every time they turn that big wheel. But, honestly, what are the odds of it happening to me, you, or anyone we know. So, the allure of going viral may always be there, but for an author who wants to make a living writing stories, there should be something a little more tangible to their plans than, well, hope.

So before you burn your publishing contract like a draft card in the 1960s, consider that a decent publisher is marshaling their resources to help you become the uber-successful author you always knew you could be. And when you are rich and famous, you too can claim you did it all by yourself. Until then, don’t forget to send birthday cards to your publisher/agent/editor (and if you know the date, to your bookseller as well).

The Theme’s The Thing

Last weekend, I was at the West Coast Writers Conference in Los Angeles, and I was fortunate enough to be placed on a couple of panels. One of the panels that I was on (and moderated) was on Writer’s Block. I was surprised to find that out of everyone in the room, only about 10% of the people—panelists and attendees—believed that writer’s block even exists. I thought I was the only one that felt that it was a non-existent phenomenon, although I have to admit there are times when I have trouble being productive in my writing. I attributed my lack of productivity to the fact that, with my current project, I’m trying to tell a story that isn’t 100% mine (I’m working with Harry Shannon again, and we negotiated the plot points together). It turns out I was wrong.

Later at the conference, I was pitched a novella by a friend of mine. I asked her to tell me about her story, and she talked about lasers and parallel universes and helicopter pilots. She was dreadfully nervous—which I couldn’t figure out, because I figured we were friends and I’m not all that intimidating. Finally, after her elevator pitch was done, I asked her to tell me what the story was about. She began to launch into lasers and parallel universes again, but I stopped her. I asked her, what’s the theme? She hesitated, and finally told me, Redemption. As we explored the theme of redemption, her nervousness evaporated, and she was happily telling me all about why her story was important to her. No hesitations, no stammering, no stress. She was in her element. And when we got to the end of the conversation, she had forgotten about the lasers and the parallel universes, and was totally focused on how to tell the story of her guilt-stricken main character and how he transforms himself through sacrificing himself for the greater good. She knew what she wanted to write, and she was ready to get it all down on paper.

Yesterday—the day after the conference—I was talking to my sister about my current writing project. She was asking me to tell her about it, and I was talking about zombies and survivalists and paranoia. But I couldn’t string the whole story together, because all I had were the plot points that Harry and I negotiated, and had no clue how to tie it all together. And then it dawned on me: I had no idea what the theme was. If it worked for my friend at the conference, why shouldn’t it work for me? So we tried boiling down what was really important to my main character, and what we discovered was that the story wasn’t about zombies and survivalists and paranoia. Instead, it was about Betrayal. Once I knew what the theme was, I was able to picture the entire story in my head—including the things that Harry and I had worked out—and I was no longer stuck. Knowing the theme transformed the process of writing from a chore to something I was excited to be working on. I knew what to do.

I should point out that my third grade teacher, Sheryl Crockey, introduced the concept of theme to me 35 years ago. I really didn’t understand what she was talking about until about last year. I understood plot (zombies and lasers, etc.), but I didn’t understand what it all meant—or how to use it. Now, I can’t write without it, or so it would seem. I’m not saying that you can’t write a good story/novella/novel/epic without knowing your theme, but I will say that when you know it, it can be so much easier to communicate with your audience. Right now, I’m really looking forward to seeing what my friend writes about her theme of redemption, because (if she can pull it off) it should be very powerful and emotionally charged. The same with my own writing. I know that my “writer’s block” won’t be a factor, now that I have a guiding principle to get me from the beginning to the end.

Is theme important to all writers? I honestly have no idea. I would imagine that the power of theme is available to anyone who writes, but since I am only me, I can only speak for myself. And I can tell you that from now on, I will be starting with theme before I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be).

What does all this mean to you, dear reader? Well, if you read my next effort, I hope that it will be as powerful experience for you as it promises to be for me. And if you are pitching me a story through my query form, you will discover that I have added a field for theme. I won’t say that I will reject a story because you can’t answer the theme question, but if you can, the chances of getting my attention is much improved.

I would be interested in hearing about your experience with theme, either the presence of it or the lack. I may want to do a panel at my next conference about theme, and it would be fascinating to hear what you think of the phenomenon before I do so.

Don’t Publish That Book!

In a recent article posted at Forbes.com, Suw Charman-Anderson says:

If there’s a common flaw in self-publishing, it’s that too many books are published too soon. Experienced voices across the publishing world continually advise self-publishers to get help with editing, and not just copyediting but story editing too. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to properly edit your own work. But the siren call of the Kindle store is often too seductive. The urge to finish your first draft, chuck it through a spellchecker and release it in to the wild is often far too strong for eager writers to resist.

She goes on to say that to self-publish a substandard work is to be married to it for all time. “Do you really want, in five or ten years time, to look back on your early work and cringe?”

Not long ago, I was at a speaking event with Literary Agent Diane Dumars. While she had a lot to say, some of it negative, about the publishing industry today, one of her major points was that if you have a manuscript that you really believe in, that you think could be a real success, don’t self-publish until you have exhausted every possible avenue for being picked up by a publisher. Having your manuscript published “traditionally” is much better than self-publishing, because if a publisher feels that your story is worth investing the time and energy (and money) in to make it a publishable book, it probably deserves it. By the same token, if a publisher says no (and as I’ve told everyone that will stop long enough to listen, a publisher’s job is to say no), then the probability is that the manuscript wasn’t ready for publication in the first place.

Self-publishing too early also has other consequences. I recently had a short story accepted to a well-respected anthology. Like any other author, having my work vetted by a publisher and editor meant a lot to me. Additionally, my story was the first story in the anthology to be accepted. I was very proud. And then, just as they were about to start the editing process, they did a little Google search and discovered that I had self-pubbed the story about two and a half years before. The version I had self-published was horrible, amateurish, and just plain bad writing. The version that I had submitted to the anthology was a rewrite of the same story which was greatly improved from that earlier attempt. Even though the story I submitted to them was very publishable, they did not accept reprints, and they rejected my story. I blew my opportunity to have a story I was very proud of be published in a wonderful anthology, just because several years before I couldn’t wait for a publisher to pick up my (then mediocre) manuscript.

Now, this article may sound strange coming from someone who pays his bills helping authors self-publish, but I stand by my position that many books that are self-published just aren’t ready, and often neither are their authors. Any publisher, whether self or traditional, is a business owner, and must treat their endeavors as a business. But many writers simply want to throw their books out there and make money, without any of the intervening steps. If you are determined to go the self-publishing route, I strongly suggest that you pick up a copy of Self-Publishing Attack by James Scott Bell. It is an in-depth discussion of the business of being a self-publishing author, and I highly recommend it.

Publishing, whether self-publishing or publishing other people’s works, is a tough business and should be taken seriously. It takes dedication, experience, and above all, money. When I put up that short story, I had none of those things, and you can see the results of starting off too early. If you’re a professional writer, then it makes sense to go to someone who is a professional publisher to get the job done right. And if you get told no, take that answer as a reprieve from a sentence of having substandard work forever associated with your name. The publisher just did you a favor. Take the opportunity to improve your work. You’ll be glad you did.

I Love Penny Miller

A rare interview with Sheriff Penny Miller of THE HUNGRY and THE HUNGRY 2: THE WRATH OF GOD, conducted by Brian Knight, author of The Misadventures of Butch Quick series, also from Genius Publishing.

Get The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, or direct from Genius Book Publishing in print or e-book formats

I was lucky enough to get a little face time with the beautiful, and somewhat frightening, Sheriff Penny Miller. In Flat Rock, Nevada, Penny is the law, and woe to any miscreants, scofflaws, or zombie hordes causing trouble in her town. I visited with Sheriff Miller during a short break in the ongoing action described in The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God, available everywhere July 6, 2012. This is what she had to say…

Brian Knight:  Sheriff, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Penny Miller:  I see you’ve got a ring on your finger. I hope that means we can dispense with the flirting and that there won’t be any clumsy attempts to get inside my big girl pants.

BK:  Yes, ma’am.

PM:  Great. I have more than enough redneck, mouth-breathing, Deliverance-humming, banjo-picking, numb-nuts males drooling over me at the moment, and an entire undead apocalypse to stop. I don’t need any more trouble. I don’t want to mistake you for a zombie and have to put a bullet in your brain pan.

BK:  Absolutely no flirting. Actually, if I did make a pass at you, you’d be doing me a favor. When my wife found out I’d be begging for a head-shot, and she’s sure to read this interview. She’s a fan of hard-core, ass-kicking heroines like you.

PM:  Good for her. Smart girls stick together.

BK:  Uh … yeah. Well…

PM:  Are you going to stand there making school boy faces or come the hell out and ask me something? I got guns to clean, zombies to plug and a team of outright dumb-asses to lead.

BK:  They say you’ve had a bit of a mess on your hands here in Flat Rock. I heard something about walking corpses with a taste for long pig.

PM:  You heard right. The smelly critters have overrun the great state of Nevada. Truth be told,Las Vegas is now a fortress run by some of the same Army twits who started this ungodly mess.  They want us to go back into the Top Secret base with a mercenary escort and bring ‘em back some kind of data. Personally, I think the idea is a good way to get killed, but I got out voted. By the men, of course.

BK:  I read The Hungry and was just blown away that you fought off the initial undead assault while stuck in your old wedding dress. That must have been a huge inconvenience, logistically speaking. Where the hell did you put your gun?

PM:  You are assuming I had a chance to put the gun down, cowboy. The zombies didn’t give us much time to pee, much less choose a new outfit. I was damned glad to finally get the hell out of that thing, though. Almost as glad as the first time I got out of it and then got rid of my ex-husband, Terrill Lee. Well, sort of got rid of him. He still kind of hangs around. The dress is toast.

BK:  Yes, so readers should understand that the wedding dress thing on the first book cover was a bit misleading. You are in fact actually a divorcee. So, inquiring males and more than a few women want to know–are you currently seeing anyone? In a serious relationship? Playing the field?

PM:  Dang, once the zombies came, my options kind of narrowed down to three–well, call it two and a half–so the short answer to that question is no. Oh, I get hit on a lot, but in all the wrong places and at all the wrong times. And it seems like whenever I do decide to reach out and touch somebody, something always manages to go wrong–with the live ones, anyway. Wait. Come to think of it, my sex life ain’t any of your damned business, you chain-smoking, pencil breaking, horror and crime fiction loving skinny little circus geek.

BK:  [deciding to rapidly change the subject] So … uh … you and a few unlikely companions did manage to survive the initial assault by the ravenous zombie horde, but in the new novel things still haven’t returned to normal. When The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God begins, do you know if the government has developed a contingency plan of some kind to combat the zombies?

PM:  Are you serious? In my humble opinion, they are still using their thumbs as fart corks. As usual, we all find out the hard way what the Army is up to. Sometimes life’s a bitch and so am I.

BK:  I’m curious about your companions. Apart from your ex-husband, I understand that one of your team is an accused murderer, and another is one of the Army scientists that helped develop the zombie virus. As an officer of the law, how do you justify your choice to continue to partner up with outlaws and psychopaths?

PM:  Listen, squirrel-nuts, it’s simple. When your choice is to team up with the living or become a stumbling lump of gory corpse chow, I’ll chose the living every time. Hell, I might even save your sorry back side if the fertilizer hit the central air, and that’s saying something.

BK:  Thanks… I think.

PM:  Don’t mention it. I’m a professional.

BK:  So, what are your ideas for the immediate future? Do you have a plan of attack concerning the continuing zombie threat, or are you just handing things as they come up?

PM:  I tend to improvise, cowboy. A girl has to stay light on her feet when facing a horde of flesh-chomping bad asses, especially when she don’t get much help from her own side. [Indicates three men standing nearby. Two look jealous.]

BK:  What advice can you give the rest of us nervous citizens concerning the continuing zombie menace from Nevada? Any tactics you’ve found especially useful?

PM:  Aim for the brain, cousin. [Aside] Damn it, Scratch! Quit jerking that assault rifle around like it was your dick, the weapon is loaded!

BK:  I can see that you have some pressing problems that require your attention, so I’ll let you go with a final question. As an elected official, the demographics of your constituency are changing rapidly. The zombie population is growing at an incredible rate. In Flat Rock alone, the majority of the citizens have already adopted the “undead” lifestyle. In the next election, how do you think your hard line in dealing with the zombie community will affect your chances of reelection, and what is your stance on the concept of zombie rights?

PM:  Excuse me? Listen, booze breath, I don’t plan on leaving enough of the dead upright for that little election year meme to mean jack to me down the line. Zombie rights? Kiss my country butt cheeks! We got more than enough voting zombies in this nation now as it is. I’ll be damned if I’ll let the government go and grow us any more.

BK:  Thank you very much, Sheriff Miller. I wish you continued success in all your endeavors. If I were crazy enough to hang around Flat Rock any longer, you would certainly get my vote in future elections.

PM:  Heads up, cowboy. You hear that moaning?

BK: Yes, now that you mention it.

PM: Smell that? See that big old crowd down the block, all kind of headed this way?

BK: Uh oh.

PM: Right. That ain’t kids on summer break. They’re all dead. And if you got the brain pan of a sand flea you might want to hightail it the hell out of here ten minutes ago.

BK:  I’m gone.

PM:  Good thinking. And you have yourself a nice day, sir.

About the Interview Participants

Sheriff Penny Miller’s exploits can be found in The Hungry and The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God, available in e-book and print formats just about everywhere. (Update: All requests sent to the Department of Defense for comment on Sheriff Miller’s activities have been refused. Sources close to the DoD, speaking on guarantees of anonymity, report that, officially, Sheriff Miller and her team don’t exist.)

Brian Knight’s new novel, Sex, Death & Honey — From the Misadventures of Butch Quick will be releasing from Genius Publishing on August 17, 2012. (Update: We are pleased to report that Mr. Knight returned safely from zombie-occupied Nevada, so it is not necessary to continue to send condolence letters to his family via the publisher. Thank you.)

Adults Should Read Whatever the Hell They Want

“The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading The Hunger Games.”

Joel Stein, a columnist for Time magazine, started a recent article in the New York Times Opinion Page with the above line. I stopped reading there and spent a few minutes trying to wrap my brain around that statement, trying to find a way to relate to Stein’s point of view. When I couldn’t, I read on, thinking that perhaps he was engaging in a bit of satire, expressing a personal prejudice against a certain kind of fiction in a manner meant to elicit chuckles. The next 269 words in his article, Adults Should Read Adult Books, disabused me of that notion. He was dead serious.

Stein goes on to equate reading primers like Hornton Hatches the Egg with works like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, while admitting to not having read them. I’ve dipped into Twilight, just to see what all the excitement was about and found it wasn’t my cup of tea. Same With The Hunger Games. I enjoyed Harry Potter quite a lot, and feel no shame. Stephen King, recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and about a thousand other awards, an accomplished wordsmith in his own right one might say, said of the Harry Potter novels “Jo Rowling set out a sumptuous seven-course meal, carefully prepared, beautifully cooked, and lovingly served out.” I couldn’t have said it any better, so I won’t try.

Mr. Stein is undoubtedly an accomplished writer and all around smart guy. Very well educated as well, I would venture to say. Probably well respected to boot, Time Magazine and The New York Times don’t publish morons. His snide and simplistic characterizations in Adults Should Read Adult Books make him sound like a pretentious and narrow minded jackass.

Adults should read whatever the hell they want. As long as they read. Read Charles Grant, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Jeff Lindsay, Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck. Read modern fiction, genre fiction, classics, or even Hornton Hatches the Egg, if that’s what floats your boat.

Stein says that the only time he’s okay with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads, and that’s just fine, just as long as he doesn’t expect the reading public to base their choices on his good opinion. It’s not going to happen.

Enjoy your Dochevsky, Mr. Stein. I’ve got some Ed Gorman to catch up on.

Brian Knight

Read Joel Stein’s article,  Adults Should Read Adult Books , at The New York Times Opinion page

Embiggen Your Vocabulary

I’ve been getting a lot of grief in the last week or so about my choice of vocabulary and use of language. It seems that there are those who feel that if an author (or, I suppose, a blogger) uses a word that a reader isn’t familiar with, they are breaking the rhythm of the story (or post, etc.) and taking the reader out of the fictional world. Should an author, who is ostensibly crafting a world out of words, be obligated to modify their choice of language in order to avoid using rare, unique, or invented words with the goal of being inclusive?

Let me give you a couple of examples of this phenomenon in my own life/writing:

My first novel—which has seen three or four first drafts and was really just a training ground for my writing—was a fantasy set in an alternate universe. Therefore, there were creatures, objects, foods, and situations for which I felt there should be a word that doesn’t exist in English. The technical term for a word that describes a common object but uses a made-up name is a “Shmeerp.” I am not making that up. According to Orson Scott Card in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, James Blish made it up to describe “a needlessly coined word” (p. 54). If your characters are eating bread, call it bread. Otherwise, you are using a shmeerp to describe bread. Now, I don’t think that my word choice rises to the level of a shmeerp, but one of the things that I “invented” for my story was a vegetable called a blue pepper. It’s a pepper, like a green, yellow, or red pepper, but in this case, it was blue. It was a small thing, really. The hero stood in his kitchen, slicing blue peppers for a salad. Well, several of my beta readers stopped immediately on reading “blue pepper” and complained. They could handle the corrugs and who-ghosts and other crazy stuff, but blue peppers were unnecessary and distracting, and they wanted me to just say, “peppers.” The book was never completed and blue peppers never saw the light of day, but even if I had finished, I doubt you would be reading about blue peppers. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, worth the fight over something that is, in my opinion, so insignificant and trivial.


In The Hungry 2: The Wrath of God, in chapter 1, one of the characters, Scratch, was described as wearing a “wifebeater with a rock-and-roll logo.” It never occurred to me that this would be a problem. Harry knew what a wifebeater was, and I did, and so did many of the people who were reading it. But two beta readers, both very intelligent and well read, called me on that word, “wifebeater.” One said it was confusing and asked for a definition, and the other insisted that it would have to go entirely. I tried to compromise: I used “wifebeater t-shirt,” “sleeveless wifebeater,” and I think one or two other iterations. None of them were acceptable. Wifebeater had to go. For those of you who will read The Hungry 2 when it comes out on Friday, watch in the first chapter when Scratch is described. He is wearing a “clean t-shirt with a rock band logo,” and not, as I had intended, a wifebeater. I think the story loses something because of it, but I’ve always said, if it is worth arguing over, it is worth cutting.


Tonight, my wife was on her way to bed, and asked me to bring her a glass of water for her bedside table (presumably so she can drink from it, but I have always suspected that it is just there for the convenience of our cats). I filled the water glass and put it on her table, and walked away. As she was getting into bed, Leya asked, “did you bring me my water glass?” And I responded, “yes, I brang it to you already.” Brang? Brang?? She then spent the next three minutes explaining to me that brang isn’t a real word, and that I should have used brought instead. I had no idea. I’ve been using brang for years. It still surprises me to see the spell-checker on my browser where I am composing this blog post flag brang as an unknown word. I hold that brang is the right word, spell-checker and wife notwithstanding.


About two weeks ago, I was discussing the details of a new cover that I had commissioned for a book that will be coming up in our catalog soon. I didn’t like that one of the figures depicted on the cover looked older than I pictured her in my head (the character is about 22 or so, and the figure looked in her late 20s at least). Therefore, I asked the artist to “youngify” the figure. Okay, even I know that youngify isn’t a real word, but it was the word I needed then, and I said it anyway. It turns out that the artist knew exactly what I was asking, and was simply amused that I would be bold enough to coin such a word. I think I’m going to keep it, along with my favorite “invented” word (which I later discovered is actually a real word), philosophize.


In an earlier post, I referred to my logo as a Vitruvian logo. This seemed like a rational choice. After all, it is an image of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo DiVinci, which is named after Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who wrote papers about geometry and human proportions which were the inspiration for Leonardo’s drawing. Calling the logo Vitruvian made a great deal of sense, and I felt it was descriptive, but two of my family members called me on it. They didn’t know what it meant, and suggested I cut it. Now, Vitruvian is a real word, a proper noun. It isn’t a shmeerp, urban slang, improper conjugation, or bad grammar. It’s a real bloody word. But still, I was advised to get rid of it because it would “turn off” some of my readers when they had to run to the dictionary.

Understandably, I find these situations frustrating. I’m a writer, a teacher, a publisher, and probably a couple of other things that would qualify me to be a clear communicator. I am aware that I have a tendency to speak in jargon—especially when I’m talking about the mechanics of publishing, or, you know, economics, or, well, lots of stuff—but I put a lot of effort to using words precisely (as well as accurately), so it bothers me when people tell me I may as well be speaking Klingon (which I can, at least a little). I am not looking for perfection in my writing—too much work, if you ask me—but clarity is something that I should be able to achieve with much greater frequency than my critics point out.

I am therefore calling on all my readers to Embiggen Your Vocabulary (Follow this link to a definition of Embiggen, a really wonderful word). Yes, I recognize that not everyone knows every word in English. And I’m not saying that I have the same vocabulary as Shakespeare. In fact, yesterday my sister, Jenny, introduced me to the word prolix. It is a very good word, and I am surprised that I never knew it before. But just because you don’t know a word doesn’t make it inappropriate, useless, or unnecessary.

When I was teaching high school computers and math about 5 years ago, one of my students stormed out into the hall from her English class as I was passing by. I asked her what was wrong. She shoved a piece of paper at me—a word list—and claimed that the English teacher was making them learn useless words. I asked her which word she found so utterly useless. She pointed to the paper and indicated the word, aloof. That word, in her opinion, was silly, sounded funny, and didn’t add anything to a conversation or thesis. I looked at the word, carefully handed the paper back to her, and said, “no, that’s a perfectly useful word. It comes up all the time for me. I suggest you learn it. You might need it some day.” A very teacherly (wow, spell-checker didn’t flag teacherly) thing to say, to be sure, but I offer you vocabulary-phobes the same advice. Instead of getting derailed by an unfamiliar word, either go from context, or look it up. But don’t blame the author for using a precise word—even if the author made up the word out of thin air.

By the way, I started writing this blog post with the idea of creating a survey and soliciting your opinions about the best way to cope with an unfamiliar word. I wanted to see what the trends were, and if my critics were correct in suggesting that 9 out of 10 of my readers are unhappy about my use of cromulent words. So, if you don’t see a survey with this posting, please feel free to comment, email, tweet, post on facebook, or write your own blog. I’d love to hear from you. And I’m sure my friends and family who precipitated this discussion would be interested in the results as well.

Qapla’