Chloe Garner's Blog, page 7

Scout

Want a free book?

That’s the best pitch I’ve got for a pretty-cool program I’ve signed up for with Amazon, where I’ll be listed starting tomorrow.  Wanted to talk it through in concept, the whys, the hows, before I started plastering links for it everywhere – support my book!

So.  Amazon Scout.  I’ve known about it for a while and, like everything else in the last year, any thought I had of getting into it was postponed until now.  I got HDM: Miami done, Portal Jumpers was up next.

I’ve wanted to do something more formal through Amazon for a while, now, because Amazon is the biggest single market on the planet and I’m willing to look at tactical ways to use that market, so long as the commitment is finite and reasonable.  I’ve been in Select for a while now (looking at dropping out with all of my Sam & Sam books as well as HDM in the next 6 months, so get your download now if you’re planning it) and I’ve appreciated the opportunities I’ve gotten there – now I’m going to go see what I get from being available in the other digital markets.

I really wanted to do the Serials program as my next experiment, because I’ve heard that there is a healthy body of readers who like reading a larger story in smaller installments, so I wrote Portal Jumpers in a format where I could break it into serial pieces.  Then Amazon shut it down – don’t know if it was for lack of interest from writers or audience – and that made me sad, but Portal Jumpers works just as well as a single unit, or I could just publish it as episodes on my own.  At that time Kindle Unlimited was rewarding serial writers.

Then came Scout.  Most readers don’t know, because most readers don’t care (good for you!) that Amazon publishes books.  Not just sells them, but actually publishes them.  And, unlike any publisher I know of, they don’t have an author’s path to publishing outside of simply standing out in sales.  You don’t approach Amazon publishing.  They approach you.  And the data says that, once they’ve picked their books, they do a darned good job keeping those authors selling.  (No kidding, right?  Amazon knows how to sell books.  Gee.)  I like being an indie author.  Genuinely.  I write what I want to write, when I want to write it, and if I don’t publish anything for a year, there isn’t a professional out there whose year I just screwed up.  I like that.  But, like I said, I’d love to try  some of the special opportunities from working with Amazon, and Amazon publishing was a room I couldn’t get into – no door.

But Scout, Scout is that door.  It’s not an Amazon imprint, the way the real imprints are, nor is it ‘crowdsourced’ publishing the way they advertise it.

Scout is a low-risk audition both for Amazon and the writer.  I put my book up on Scout and for 30 days, people (who know about Scout… small pool) read a sample selection of it (just like Look Inside) and vote on it.  Nominate it, as it were.  After 45 days, if Amazon doesn’t take me up on my de facto offer to let them publish the ebook edition of Portal Jumpers, nothing has changed for me.  I move forward with publishing it on my own.  If the manuscript catches their attention – for whatever reason – they can pick up my contract and publish the ebook.  Yay for me.  What draws their attention?  No one knows.  It isn’t votes alone, because popular books have failed to get the nod, while those that have not been so favored by the crowd have gotten published.  Someone told me that the committee does what the committee likes.  And that kind of suits me.  Good for them.  Certainly, though, I believe a book that gets a lot of action is going to have a higher likelihood of getting attention from inside the room where they make their Scout selections.  (So if you want a free book, I’d be delighted to have the nomination.)

From a reader perspective, you get to be involved in the process.  Which is kind of cool.  Nothing is binding Amazon’s hands to pick books by who can stage the most effective campaign, else click farms would rush in and ruin it.  (First world problems, what?)  But genuine readers who care about the outcome can go cast a vote and, if the book is selected to get published by Amazon, they’ll get a free copy of the end result.  I think that’s neat.

The process is easy.  You go on the Kindle Scout site and look for books you might be interested in, or you follow a link directly to a campaign page for an individual book (I’ll be posting mine tomorrow) and you nominate it.  Click a button.  Done.  You have to be logged into your Amazon account to do it, but there’s no more work in it than that.  In 30 days, the campaign ends and by 45 days, you’ll get a thank you note from me (or your other favored author) and a notice from Amazon for whether the book was selected.

I chose Portal Jumpers because the resulting ebook is going to be exclusive to Amazon, and because it must be a previously unpublished book.  I didn’t want to have a single book from HDM or Sam & Sam get stuck in exclusivity territory by itself, which would effectively tie down the entire universes without the correlating benefits, and I also don’t think that the promo power of Amazon is going to be as powerful on a third or fifth book as it would be for a first book.  Portal Jumpers was the next one up on the production slate, so I pulled it forward and got it wrapped up snug and ready for publishing.  It may be longer than Amazon is interested in publishing (at 600+ pages, both it and its sequel tip the scales pretty hard), but it’s the story that I wanted to tell, and doing my final proofs, I was thrilled to be sending it out.  Either way, it should be ready for sale soon.

If Portal Jumpers isn’t a Scout selection, I’ll probably do it again with a more proper stand-alone of a more manageable length, Wizards, perhaps, or Sarah Todd.  Though I’m not convinced Sarah Todd stays a standalone.  I’m itchy to head back to Lawrence; there’s more story living there.

So that’s going to be my July.  Plus I’m NaNo-ing again this month.  Starting Jamie Bond, a story I’ve been chewing on for about ten years now.  I’ve grown up a lot since the first couple of stabs I made at it; now is the time.  Happy summer!

What I’m reading: Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett (going to finish it this time!)

What I’m watching: Psych.  And Kongos videos.

Pop

Okay, so full disclosure here, I was #teamBSB in the boyband wars, but they did some seriously atrocious videos.  N*SYNC, in Pop, created the consummate 90s pop video, complete with synchronized 5-man choreography, uber-bright colors, JT beatboxing, dancing hallways, and Wade Robson filling in in most of his own choreography because, as I remember it, Joey had a bloody great hole in his leg.  I’m off momentarily to ask the internet why.  The internet always remembers.

Do not be ashamed to enjoy.

What is a book worth?

So, this has come up a few times, in the circles I wander, and there are a lot of strong opinions out there. It’s my opinion that there is a methodical way of answering most questions like this one, if you analyze motivations and economics coolly.

How much is a book worth?

It’s something a friend asked me several years ago as we were wandering laps at a Target talking about writing and art. In the context of ‘art’ it feels nebulous and fearsome. What am I worth to the world? What is the value of the contribution I am making to society and culture. On a snarky day, I’d capitalize those, but those are real things with real value. The problem is that the value of society and culture doesn’t come in dollar units. It just doesn’t. It can come in more and less, but not in dollars.

Pushing the price of a book up or down doesn’t have anything to do with society and culture.

What it does do is change the type of reward that an author gets from his work.

As I see it, an author can have any mix of three motivations, when they undertake a publishing endeavor. They can seek to be read, they can seek to be compensated, and they can seek to be appreciated. Here, we can convert the cost of the book into something that will move the bar for each of these three goals. (Different authors, even different projects, will have a different mix of any of the three.)

In simple economics, (which are never true, but are never far from true, either) the more you reduce the price of an item, the more you will sell. If all an author wants is to be read, he should sell his novel for free, to gain the most readers possible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It doesn’t under value him, his work, his time, or his culture. It says that what he cares about is having the most readers possible read his work – that’s where he gains his value.

Good for him.

The other two are a little squirrelier.

If an author has a single book, there will be a point, an exact one, where he will have the highest compensation, the number of copies an author sells times the price of the book minus the per-unit cost (Think e-books don’t have a per-unit cost? close enough, but Amazon actually does charge authors for the cost of delivering every e-book you buy, usually on the order of 6-10 cents per book. More caveats exist, but e-books aren’t free to the author in most cases when you buy off of Amazon. So now you know that.). In a simple economics model, there’s this really pretty arc where compensation comes off of zero at zero price, reaches a maximum, and then drops off without ever theoretically hitting zero again. Because, you know, if I priced my e-book at $1,500, at some point in the next million years, someone would buy it. In actual practice, there are generally agreed to be prices in between $0.25 and $3 where an author is actually going make less than they would at either $0.25 or $3. It was the $0.99 ghetto, and then it was the $1.99 ghetto, where readers who consumed the great quantity of e-books figured that the authors selling at those prices were snake-oil salesmen, trying to shift a sub-par product for a quick profit. Today, according to various models and aggregations of data, the peak compensation for an author is somewhere in the $2.99-$4.99 range.

Unless they have more than one book. At which point, peak compensation may come from a combination of free books and pay-for books. Because, if a writer is good at this game, people will read his free book and be unable to resist buying all the rest of them.

Good for him.

He’s trying to make a living and support himself and his family from the product of his mind. I think that’s pretty cool.

Then you have the writers who want to be appreciated. I’m gonna do my level best to give them a fair shake, but they’re the ones who drive me to capitalize ‘culture’. Who think that selling books cheaper in order to capture more sales devalues the importance of the work that we’re doing. Who send letters to the Department of Justice saying that novels aren’t toasters, and you can’t just outsource their production to China. No kidding, they said that. (Growl. Sorry. Fair shake. Take two.)

If the value that an author takes from his work is the knowledge that the people who are consuming it are genuinely appreciative of it, he makes a legitimate case that a higher price is better, even if fewer readers consume it, and even if it means he makes less money. In a less cut-and-dry example, an author may decide that the very small drop in income and the slightly larger in gross number of readers is justified in seeing his e-book priced at $6.99 and selling well, rather than at $4.99 and selling some better. It proves that he’s making something that really is worth it, not just something that people are willing to throw away some money on because, gee, it isn’t really that much money, is it?

And, okay, I get that. I think it’s another phantom of the myth of validation, but if that really is what you want out of your art, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong. It’s your art.

Walking around Target two years ago, I told my friend that if I could sell a billion copies of my novels for $0.25 apiece, I’d probably feel a little bad that I was charging too much. I want to justify the decisions I’ve made to prioritize writing over all of the other things I could be doing with my time: this is an investment and I want it to pay. But the price tag on my book? I sincerely, genuinely, earnestly do not have any emotion tied to it.

It’s a different way of looking at the theory of the thing, but any given thing in the world is worth exactly what a buyer and a seller can agree it’s worth. No more and no less. I’m grateful every time a reader looks at my work and agrees that it is worth buying.

What I’m reading: Joseph by Stephen Elliott

What I’m watching: Veggie Tales, a boxed set called All the Shows

OK Go #1

I will post lots and lots of OK Go.  I love them, and I hope to find them in concert someday.  They are in competition for my favorite group, and they have no competition as my favorite video group.  Here, they blow away the old performers’ adage: never work with children or dogs.

His Dark Mistress: a primer

His Dark Mistress has lived in my head for a long time. She started with a coat and then a hat, or maybe with Carmen Sandiego, I’m not sure. I loved the idea of Carmen Sandiego, but I always loathed how little of her story we ever got. We were always chasing her. Chasing and chasing and chasing, but we never got to meet her. It was like we were never good enough for her, and I grew up in awe of her. There’s a juvenile part of me who still wants to be the kind of person Carmen Sandiego would want to meet.

At any rate, the woman with the jacket has stalked me from the back of my head for years. I wrote her myth, the bit stashed a the end of the first book, (the one everyone either loves or hates; I get it) years before I wrote her first story. Let a friend read it, and he didn’t get it, so I put it away.

Thing about His Dark Mistress is that she stalks me, not the other way around. I put her books on my writing calendar and laugh. Like I get to pick when she’s going to show up or what’s going to happen to her. Her support staff, the other characters running around doing the work of the narrative, they are a bit more malleable, and they usually do what they’re told, but His Dark Mistress doesn’t even tell me when she’s planning on gracing the page again. She just shows up.

And shoots someone in the face.

I’m not in love with her.

I’m in love with most of my core characters; the relationships tend to be complex and diverse, but ultimately I’m in love with most of them and dodder along behind them as they work their way through the plots I have in mind. Some of them get outlines; these days, more don’t. I don’t love His Dark Mistress. I love lots and lots of the characters she draws along in her wake, but I’m afraid of her. Her stories are some of my more popular stories among the readers I have routine conversations with. They want to know when her next book is going to be done, and when they can read it. They tell me what she should be up to. They’re good sports, as I finish yet another book of Sam & Sam, or do my NaNo project on a fluffy fantasy one-off. But there’s this hum, as they wait on His Dark Mistress.

And I haven’t got a clue when she’s going to get here.

When she does, all I generally know is what city we’re working in, what character is taking the front-of-stage role, and very roughly where we’re going to end up.

Terrifying. I have no clue – none – how we’re going to get there.

So we charge ahead. And I’ll get a nice roll of characters going, the relationships, the conflicts, the idea of the thing, and she shows up and blows the whole thing up again.

You think I’m kidding. I’m not.

It’s more than that.

She lives in the back of my head to mock me for the weakness in my own life. My indecision. My people-pleasingness. Procrastination. Fear.

And then I blink and I’m seeing things through her eyes and everything gets… simpler.

Certainly not easier, but she sees the world in very simple terms.

She’d be my hero, if I could trust her to do things I’d be proud of her doing. In the end things tend to turn out, but she’s never picked a team.

Some day, one of her friends is going to look at another of her friends and say, “she may be a shark, but she’s our shark,” and I’ll wonder if it’s true, or if he’s lying to himself because he’s afraid of her, too.

The first one is in Boston, and it’s a mob thing. The second one, which came out this month, is in Miami, and it’s gangs-and-drugs. The third one is complete, but a long way from hitting shelves anywhere, and it’s more corporate. I think the next one is going to be Chicago. She keeps mentioning Chicago, and I think the Lady of the Lake is there, but I could always be wrong.

I plan twice as much time for a His Dark Mistress novel as any other one. They’re hard, and they take faith that when I get to the end, there’s going to be a story there. There almost wasn’t, with Houston. I missed half the story and had to go back and put it in. (And here I thought book four was going to be Carolina. Not.)

Any rate, Miami was a lot of fun. There’s a lot going on, and I got to introduce Timo, who plays a very different role in His Dark Mistress’ plans than Beth did. This is JJ’s favorite novel of the ones I’ve completed (14 of them in the running for that), and I’m very pleased with how it came out. If you’ve read the first two and enjoyed them, and might be interested in an ARC of Houston, hit the Contact Me button up there and let me know. I can’t promise when it will be out, but I can promise I won’t forget you wanted it.  Just want to know when the next one comes out?  Sign up for my mailing list – I only mail for releases if that’s what you want, and you can pick which names you want to hear about.

What I’m reading: Let’s Get Digital, David Gaughran

What I’m watching: NCIS. (Yes, there’s lots and lots of it.)

English!

With some additional digging, I’ve found some additional videos in English of Henning May and his musically talented compatriots.  Some day, I’m going to string together the ideas into a short story.  It’s just right there.  Loving it.  This is on my writing playlist, at present.

 

Give Me Fantasy

I write lots of different stuff, and I read lots of different stuff. I tend to find a writer I really enjoy, and then just devour everything they’ve written until they disappoint me a couple of times in a row and I find someone new to binge-read. That said, I read very little ‘approved’ literature. The last time I put in an effort to read unassigned important fiction was a reading list coming out of the eighth grade that was intended to prepare me for the rigors of high school.

I loved Catcher in the Rye.

I bailed on Catch 22 for nonspecific reasons.

Jane Eyre was my favorite-book-of-all-time for about a decade.

I aborted my read of Last of the Mohicans on the twenty-second page of description of the man’s coat buttons. Seriously.

I enjoyed Animal Farm, though I know I wouldn’t now because of the overbearing politics. At 14, I didn’t see the agenda and just read the story. There’s something important there about stories and innocence, but that’s not the paydirt I’m looking for.

It was an educational summer, and I don’t regret a bit of it.

I haven’t done it since, though, and there’s a reason for that.

I prefer Jack Ryan.

Even as an avid reader, one who habitually checked two books out of the library each morning in middle school and returned them before I got on the bus at the end of the day, reading in the hallways and in the classes where my teachers didn’t confiscate my reading material, I didn’t read any of the ‘classics’ in an afternoon, forgetting to eat, or under the covers in bed with a flashlight long after bedtime. They were work.

Work isn’t a bad thing. But it should accomplish something, not just be work for its own sake, and I’m not convinced that higher, harder literature always (or even usually) accomplishes something that’s that special, compared to other formats.

My favorite author of all time, bar none, is Terry Pratchett. I am not alone in this. People would show up in costume to his book signings and stand in lines that went around the building – twice. I can make a compelling case why Alexander Dumas or fill-in-the-blank Bronte should be my favorite author, given that they are suitably long-dead to be considered great writers, but they simply don’t hold a candle to Pratchett and his world that goes floating through space, a disc riding on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of the great world turtle Atuin.

Anything is possible on Discworld.

Slow light.

Music-with-rocks-in-it concerts.

Primate librarians.

An entire sequence of books with DEATH as the central character.

They’re funny.

And irreverent.

And thoughtful and profound and sometimes outright disturbing in their observations on humanity.

People really are like that.

Strip away all of the details of the real world, and you can ask any question any way you want, and just go looking for an answer. A fantasy world has only got the baggage you give it, and the important questions that are so tangled here get streamlined, sometimes in deeply poignant or painful ways. People paint fantasy as escapism, and there are lots of strong, valid arguments against that characterization being bad, but fantasy has the space to create its own cultures, its own races, its own political and social structures. Its canvas is simply bigger than any other genre I know.

Without the burden of literary distinction, fantasy has taken on some of the hardest questions out there, honestly and without pretension. This is where I turn over and over again to find worlds that are worth exploring, dilemmas worth fleshing out, and characters worth following.

Yeah, I love Jack Ryan. And Spencer. And Harlan Coben’s Win. The world is certainly big enough for fantastic stories, all by itself. I love science fiction. I even read some ‘normal’ fiction, here and there. But I binge on fantasy, shelf after shelf of it, in all of its diversity and its spectrum of seriousness.

We live in an era of superhero movies and young adult dystopian trilogies. It’s clear beyond argument that these are popular stories. But it’s more than just escapism. Fantasy stories are important in the questions they’re able to ask, and they aren’t just for kids and geeks. They’re microcosmic experiments that arguably tell us more about human nature than any ripped-from-the-headlines fiction out there.

What I’m reading: Bitesize by Liz Hedgecock

What I’m watching: Young Riders

HDM: Miami

So, we pushed Miami to KDP this week.  It’s been a long time coming, as my backlog of work continues to grow behind the publishing side of things that I want to and need to get done, but it’s out, and I’m thrilled.

This is the continuation of the world of His Dark Mistress.  Those of you looking for more of Beth or Sabrina will be disappointed (for the time being), but Neil is back, and Brad features more prominently as well.

Since His Dark Mistress novels are intended to be one-off stories, you should feel free to start here, if that’s what suits you.  His Dark Mistress is a shadow, something of a cross between Carmen Sandiego and Selene from Underworld.  No one has ever seen her, but everyone knows what she looks like.  A force of nature, she pushes the world toward a stable equilibrium between good and evil, using whatever means necessary to do it.  This time, it’s a kid named Timo, who is a bit player in the underworld of Miami but is about to be a lot more.

The King of Miami is a fast-paced story that takes place in the aftermath of the events in Boston, with new drama in New York and Miami.  It’s going to be a rough ride for everyone, and His Dark Mistress is going to have her hands full, getting everyone through it alive.

Among early readers, including JJ, this has been a favorite, and a number of them have been hounding me for Houston (which is close to hitting early readers, I promise!), which will see the return of Beth.  His Dark Mistress only shows up on her own time, though.  Her books are still the hardest of anything I write, because I can’t trust her for anything.  I don’t even know what happens after Houston, because she hasn’t told me yet.

Stay tuned, ya’ll.  And enjoy Miami.  I certainly did.

Click here to buy on Amazon!

The Myth of Validation

I self-publish.

What that means is that I write what I want to write, based on a lot of factors, like how I feel, what I’m interested in, what my upcoming schedule looks like, what I’ve already finished, what my beta readers are pestering me for, and what I think will sell. After that, I work on it until I decide it’s done, and then I arrange for it to be assembled, laid out, covered, blurbed, categorized, and button-pushed. I don’t ever push the button myself; that’s not in my skillset.

And then I see what happens.

It’s entirely possible with anything I write that no one will like it. And that bothers me plenty.

Because I want to be liked just as much as the next guy. More than a lot of them.

And this is why the professional writing industry has more work coming to them than they could ever seriously consider. Writers want to be liked.

More than that, though. They want to be liked by the right people. It’s the it-clique in high school. The money doesn’t matter. They want special, important people to wave a magic wand and dub them special and important, themselves.

I’m not saying that publishing a book through a mega-corporation is always wrong. For the right contract and the right advance, I’d do it. Certainly. I have a low tolerance for risk (ha! and I want to write for a living…) and I look at every dollar in my bank account as a fraction of a year’s expenses. An advance that bought the rest of my life and left me free to write other things and publish them as I saw fit; yeah, I’d do that. Between here and there, there are a million incrementally different situations that could happen, and I’d consider some of them. This isn’t a hit piece on traditionally published writers. Live your life, man.

What I hate, though, is the hostage-taking behavior of the industry. When they talk about the decision between submitting to a house and doing the work yourself to send directly to distributors, they always bring up this specter of ‘validation’, and it makes me a bit sick.

Because it’s a disease, and I’ve got it.

It looks like this: most self-publishers are ultimately looking to get picked up by a big publisher.

Or this: you should submit to a publishing house first, and only if you get rejected everywhere should you start looking at self-publishing.

Or this: self-publishing is a fine option for self-starters who are obsessive about details and love marketing and are willing to thumb their noses at the so-called gatekeepers and just publish their own work.

Even the term, self-publishing, has this sense of ego to it. Of impatience. That you weren’t willing to wait your turn, that you weren’t willing to push yourself to be good enough, that you don’t care if you’re good enough to be published. You just wandered off and did it yourself. Pushed your book out on the world. Foisted it. Contributed to the tsunami of crap. (Okay, ‘tsunami of crap’ makes me giggle. Dunno why that one doesn’t get me, but the rest of this does.)

And I fight with this. Sometimes out loud when I’m driving by myself.

It’s a myth. A debilitating one that has been intentionally, if not consciously, groomed by the professionals who like to talk to writers on behalf of the industry. (Or worse, who pretend to talk to writers as advocates of the writers. Growl.)

The novel-length publishing industry doesn’t release much of this information, but professional-level magazines (particularly in the science fiction and fantasy genres) does. So let me talk it through.

A ‘normal’ magazine (ha!) may publish four times a year, eight stories per edition. Some will publish significantly more, and some will publish significantly fewer stories, but it’s in the ballpark. Even assuming none of those stories are coming through established relationships with authors (unlikely), that means they have about 30 slots to fill any given year. Many of these periodicals will have as many as 1600 submissions every quarter – more than four-thousand submissions to look at to find their 30 stories to publish.

In a simple, ideal world, the 30 stories with the absolute highest merit would make the cut.

Even assuming a complete, perfect lack of malice and bias, that’s not how it works.

I asked a magazine publisher once, when he’s sitting in front of a stack of 800 submissions, how I get into the last 50. His answer was straightforward, honest, and very useful.

Format the piece correctly. He said that formatting issues kill the first half of submissions. (We’re down to 400.)

Submit the correct genre. Random stuff that doesn’t remotely match the magazine genre makes up the next half gone. (We’re down to 200.)

He reads the first few paragraphs of the rest. He said you can tell which writers are going to be engaging and be a good fit at that point. That’s another half. (100 left)

He reads all of these. Eliminating ones that aren’t a good fit for the next year or so (he printed something like that recently, that trope has been overused recently, this isn’t a good thematic match for his audience) and the ones where the stories just don’t work for him, he gets down to those last 50.

After that, he said, you have 50 stories that are great. They work, they fit, he likes them.

And he has to pick 8. Every one of them, he said, hurt to cut.

I figure a great author with no existing relationships can only control what happens up until the last 100, give or take. (Not assuming that the industry is relationship-based. Some corners are, some aren’t. But having a track record of writing printable stories and knowing what any given editor is looking for deserves to give you a full read and consideration. It’s not about favors, it’s about trust.) After that, you’re looking at a combination of luck and taste.

Let me say it again: it doesn’t matter how good you are. Some people are going to like your stuff better than others, and sometimes the timing is just wrong.

I’ve seen writers ask how many times to submit a piece before scrapping it and the numbers they get as advice are shocking.

Two. After that you do a major revision and try two or three more times. If you get rejected after that, you need to take a step back and consider whether or not the story is really ready. The voodoo that writers believe about what gets short stories and novels (assuming the ratios hold out; I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t) published is akin to sincere belief that the earth is flat.

Worse than this, there’s no telling whether your story was one of the first half cut because you used the wrong font, or if you were in the last ten competing for four slots. There is no affirmation, no validation, from this trusted authority until you actually make it into that last slot, which has very little to do with skill or talent in those last few cuts.

But writers are supposed to believe that validation of talent comes from being selected by one of these editors.

It’s entirely possible for a writer who has a compelling story and voice to be skipped over dozens of times by people who, even without malice or corruption, simply don’t have the space or taste to engage that story.

It’s equally possible for a writer who has very questionable talents to be selected. Taste is a funny thing.

And yet, the psychology persists, that writers should salivate at the idea of being published. And that it doesn’t count until someone else does it.

It doesn’t count.

That’s the hostage-taking behavior.

I’m going to invalidate you until you meet my expectations. Expectations that I developed without consulting you, and that may or may not match your goals.

It’s very simple for commercially successful independent authors to say that validation comes from sales. Readers like your stuff. Therefore you’re good.

I certainly won’t argue with that.

But it implies the inverse: if you don’t sell lots and lots, you aren’t good.

So where do you get your validation if you don’t sell and you don’t submit?

There’s a sickness in that.

I need someone else to tell me I’m good.

Art is funny. Taste is funny.

I don’t have an answer to that. I come to the helpless conclusion that there’s no such thing as good art, something I reject out of hand. Because if there’s no such thing as good art, there must be no such thing as bad art, and that’s just false.

But external validation of art as mandatory is a myth.

If you’re insecure, nothing that ever happens is going to validate you, and if you’re overconfident, nothing is going to take away your self-validation.

Impress your mom. She matters. Impress yourself. You matter more.

After that, look at your goals and be careful who you give validation power to. Be sure that their validation matters, in terms of your own goals.

But don’t let someone hold you hostage by telling you that their validation must matter to you. It’s a sick power game, and they can only win if you play.

What I’m reading: The Martian by Andy Weir

What I’m watching: The Monument Men