David Mark Brown's Blog, page 3

Schism 8, Episode 0: Introduction

Posted in podcast

Welcome to the show! Schism 8 includes content from pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, weird western, adventure and thriller serials all written within the same fictional universe. While these stories have many names, Schism 8 is the name of the shared universe they have birthed from.

During these podcasts, I’ll narrate entire episodes, geek out over science fiction stuff and host reader Q and As.

So, thanks for tuning in. And as always, enjoy the show.

Razor Class Vessel #Hiberverse

Posted in Uncategorized

Find out more about the soon to activate digital fiction channel, the Hiberverse, @http://www.hiberverse.com

Fistful of Reefer Trailer

Posted in Lost DMB Files

One part serotonin, two parts adrenaline with a dash of grenadine served over ice, Fistful of Reefer is a double-fisted, dieselpunk weird-Western residing between No Country for Old Men and The Three Amigos.


Sergio Leone would have killed to film Fistful of Reefer. Harry Turtledove would admire the way history has been skewed. Others will love the notion of the Lost DMB Files. The estimable Mr. Brown has really latched onto something here.”

~ Mike Resnick

Writing as Lean Startup

Posted in Evolution of an Indie

I’m an author. I’m an entrepreneur. My company consists of me and my words. When, as a kid, I dreamed of writing, I didn’t envision creating a brand. I didn’t anticipate the need for a marketing strategy and a business plan. Even as I began to write my first novel and then shop it to agents, or even when I realized that indie publishing provided more options for me, it never fully dawned that I was starting a company.

I can’t look back at a single aha moment. Rather, it settled in layers. In bits and pieces, I discovered the world of startups. Admitting I run a startup company based on my writing eventually led me to Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

While I was asked to read the book due to my involvement in another startup company, I found the values and principles appropriate for indie authors. If you are an indie author and you can admit you’re an entrepreneur, I think the book will prove helpful for you as well. Several critical questions brought up in the book should be answered by any author trying to make money from their craft:

What is your guiding vision?

Another way to think of this is the big picture that won’t change even if your first efforts fail. For me, I deduced early on that my writing is about bringing vivid events and relationships to life. My first slogan was, “Enjoy the show.” I still like it. Since then I’ve added the idea that I write bad guys who do good things and good guys who do bad things. And the most common thread in all of my writing is that, “I explode things.” I believe in writing books that serve as an escape. Only when I convince the reader to let down his or her guard do I sneak tiny reflections of life into the story. In so doing, they glide seamlessly into the subconscious and impact life without even knowing it. I’m subversive like that.

What are your leap of faith assumptions?

We all make assumptions about our products (ie. stories). People will want to read them is the biggest and broadest. Beyond that, I have assumed that genre fiction readers like to read digitally. My readers like shorter, quicker and cheaper stories. They want to read about over the top moments that collide into each other in a continual and exhausting manner. They like to read in different genres as long as all the stories are fast paced and fun.

What is your customer archetype?

Without needlessly shrinking your audience, who is reading your stories? Who do you think will read them? How can you get to know those people to make sure you are right? (Maybe you know those people really well already?)

What is your value hypothesis (or value proposition)?

In other words, what do your readers really want? What do they value? Do they want to be entertained? Do they want to be challenged? Do they want to get away from the nagging responsibilities of life? Do they want to dream of being someone else? Now figure out how to deliver to your readers what they really want. For my part, my readers want a good time, an outrageous spectacle that is so tense at times that it’s laughable. I try to give them a good show page after page. If I do that, I believe they will keep coming back for more, because that’s what they value.

What is your growth hypothesis?

In other words, how do you plan on making money? Making more money? For most of us writers, we need some combination of sticky and viral engine growth. We need to generate core fans that keep coming back for everything we write. And we need those people to spread the word to everyone they know in order for us to add new core fans.

Strategies to accomplish this vary wildly. Social media, conferences, paid advertising and keywords, SEO and websites. Some people develop a strategy around one book. I have chosen to focus on a strategy of publishing as many products as possible. This has been part of the reason I’ve landed on episodic fiction–so that I can generate new products on a weekly basis.

What is your core assumption?

All of this will eventually lead you to your central strategic belief. What is going to make all the other pieces come together? For me, currently, my core assumption is that genre readers appreciate frequent serial content that saves them discovery and curation labor. It takes time to find new stuff to read. A new author with a new series is a risk. If the risk pans out, the reader wants to be rewarded with as much good reading content as possible before having to get off the couch and search for something else to read.

This assumption has lead me to create a shared universe (www.hiberverse.com) with three other writers in order to provide weekly episodes for the next two years. Will it work? The next step is creating an initial hypothesis and testing it.

What is your initial hypothesis? And how can you test it?

My friends and I are each generating 3 to 6 initial episodes within the Hiberverse before we go public. Using WordPress along with some nifty plugins, we will be able to sell the finished ebook episodes with very little upfront expense. Using services and websites such as NoiseTrade, Inkshares, Kickstarter, Smashwords, Leafless, Facebook, Aerbook, Wattpad, Pinterest, Goodreads and Jellybooks, we will endeavor to build our email list to sustainable numbers (somewhere north of 500) in the next few months.

My hypothesis is that genre readers will repeatedly pay $1 an episode for serial content written by multiple authors in the same storyworld if we provide the content on a regular, weekly schedule.

After gathering 500 users via email list by giving away for free the first episode in each of our five serials, I will test my hypothesis first by seeing how many of those people are willing to pay $1 for episode 2 in each serial. Then the final key metric will be the percentage of readers who return to buy episode three in each serial. If 25% of readers who receive the first episode come back to buy the second episode and then 75% of those readers return to buy the third episode that will provide me with enough raw data to crunch the numbers. With that percentage of fall off vs. return spending, how many readers will I have to sign up on my email list to make a sustainable living? You get the point.

What is a lean startup?

According to Eric Ries, the whole point of being lean is to avoid waste. Only build or create the bare minimum viable product (MVP) you need to test your initial hypothesis. This is what Ries would describe as “Build, measure, learn.” If you do this incrementally, you never have to tear everything up and start from scratch. If an assumption proves false, you can either choose to tweak and test again or to “pivot” by altering your product, target audience, etc.

What is your MVP?

What things are critical to you getting your stuff out there and seeing if people want to pay you for it? Figure that out and focus on those things and those things only. If you don’t need twitter to test your initial hypothesis, then don’t waste your time. If you don’t need an agent, then don’t look for one. If you don’t need a website, don’t make or pay for one.

You don’t have to create a finished career along with a dozen backlist titles, impeccable credentials and a slew of references to take the first step toward success. Your first hypothesis might be as simple as, “There are five people in this world, not related to me, who will pay for my stories.” If that is the case, then write and publish a story and come up with a plan and a test to see if you can or can’t find those five people. After you do that, celebrate the fact that you are now running a lean startup.

Ebook Subscription Services are Doomed

Posted in Sustainable Storytelling

On that cheery note, I’ll just go shoot one of my characters. That always peps me up…

Now that we’ve got the ugliness out of the way, it’s time for my state of the digital publishing industry address. Last January, I spouted off about how indie authors would soon be running around like Chicken Little screaming “The Amazon is falling, the Amazon is falling!”

It took a little longer to happen than I thought, but sure enough the scales tipped with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. I have to be honest, I was by no means the only one who saw the day drawing near. Plenty of other observant indie authors had the prescience to realize that making Amazon a career strategy is not a solid long-term move.

Smart people have been saying for a while that authors need to own their audience (ie. we need direct access to our peeps). When readers find your stuff on Amazon, they are loyal to Amazon, not to you. That is a problem when it comes to selling them on your next story.

But that is all last year’s news now. I’ve been working for the past 16 months to build a software platform that will allow me to write for my true fans for the rest of my days (no perpetual-money-maker shaking required). For those of you who have been following along, you know about Epifiction. That platform is now moving into beta with it’s “For Schools” product. (Who knew that starting an ed tech company would take so long!?)

What’s coming down the pipe in 2015?

This doesn’t seem to be a popular sentiment at the moment, but I believe 2015 will bring with it the demise of the broad-based subscription model for ebooks. Scribd, Oyster, and now Amazon’s Unlimited–I’m looking directly at you guys.

It does seem like a weird time to forecast doom and gloom, seeing how major publishers have been giving in to these subscription programs left and right over the last few months. But I simply don’t understand how they can possibly work long term.

Converting the most avid electronic format readers to your platform is all about storytelling. What sort of narrative can Scribd and Unlimited tell? Oyster? All these platforms are telling the same narrative. It goes something like this:

There is only one golden reader amongst every hundred flabby losers. You are that golden reader! Come sign up for our “all you can read smorgasbord.” Sure, our service wouldn’t make any money if only golden readers signed up. But “wink, wink” we both know all those flabby losers think they are golden readers too. But just between us, we know who the real Golden Boy is. (Stay golden, Pony Boy!)

Seriously. That’s the narrative. And I’m supposed to believe that’s the business model for future success? Let’s base our book sales on the hope that 90% of our paying customers only pretend they like to read.

That’s a Sad Narrative

That’s the first problem. Broad-based subscription services only work when most of the users pay and forget. This is what we call the Health Club Phenomena. (“But Jeesh, I really want to be a reader! Maybe if I pay for this Unlimited thing, I’ll start reading for real.”) This is a long-term plan for promoting illiteracy. I’m out.

The second flaw for these large broad-based subscription services is that they cannibalize 90% of indie authors for the sake of the more established publishers and elite authors. Amazon has built their dominance partly by boosting the lowly indie author. Now they are willing to demonstrate that the indie needs them a bizzilion times more than they need the indie author.

But when you lump a bizzilion indie authors together, they represent a significant chunk of the available ebook titles. Amazon does need those bizzilion indies. So does Scribd and Oyster if their subscription models are to work. Here is why those models won’t work.

I Need Money Too

The last month has unveiled a shiz storm of discontent from indies who have seen their profits crumble (partly due to Kindle Unlimited). Amazon may soon regret their jump into the subscription model, if they are unable to patch up their relationship with indie authors who are bleeding out while searching for UPS jobs.

Here is the course of events for 2015 as I see them:

thousands of indie authors stop publishing content into Kindle Unlimited when they realize it doesn’t make them money.
the most alert of these indies search out niche and genre models of establishing loyal readers.
many indies find other work while they retool their platforms and expand their tactics.
many indies stop writing.
available titles for subscription models shrink, even while they add titles from large publishers.
subscription models lose profitability as the average base cost of their titles increases due to losing indies and gaining industry.
Avid readers begin to shift away from services like Scribd, Oyster and Unlimited in preference for genre specific and niche-based subscription services that provide them genuine curation and undiscovered talent.
broad-based subscription services become the digital version of airport bookstores.

Not All Subscription Models are Equal

Having declared the imminent death of  the subscription model, let me be clear. I am a true believer in niche and genre-based subscription. I think that targeted subscription models may indeed be the future of digital publishing.

The romance genre has already successfully demonstrated the potential. Mystery has a few successful examples as well. I’ve engaged a few of my writer friends in the early stages of a science-fiction/fantasy platform that could end up thriving as a subscription model.

If a smaller platform is able to directly foster the reader/writer relationship, then subscription becomes a valid possibility. How many of you avid readers out there would pay $4 a month for insider access to your favorite science fiction world? Weekly stories, blog content, author skype conversations, and the occasional opportunity to name a character or contribute to a story line?

A small, dedicated group of authors could easily create such a steady flow of narrative content for an expansive world. Fifty stories a year for three years–immersive storytelling that dabbles with direct collaboration between reader and writer. That’s something worth subscribing to.

(As usual, I welcome your thoughts and comments! Tell me I’m an idiot if you think so. I can handle it.)

How to Market and Sell Episodic Fiction

Posted in Episodic Fiction

This post is the fifth in a series. For the first post (making a case for episodic fiction and emphasizing the importance of having a clear EndGame), click here.

Now it’s time to find readers. The first four posts in this series all dealt with writing episodic fiction. But honestly, I don’t have the luxury of writing for fun. I’m a commercial writer, and I need to make money off my “product.” This is, as they say in France, where the skidmarks meet the underwear.

Show me the money!

Monetization has been one of the main reasons I’ve returned to episodic writing. I started out writing episodes of weird western pulp fiction over four years ago (my Lost DMB Files) by following my gut and writing what came natural to me. But I didn’t have the knowledge or tenacity to stick with what my gut knew was gold.

Instead, I looked around after creating seven episodes and three novels. I lifted my head out of my writer’s cave and saw nothing but my shadow. No one was reading my weird western, alternate history, dieselpunk, new pulp, episodic fiction that I had given the label of Reeferpunk. (Okay, my marketing prowess was negative 682 on a scale of 1 to 10.)

Now we know it can be done.

Four years ago, I couldn’t find anyone selling niche serial fiction to an avid fan base of a few thousand dedicated readers. Collective wisdom indicated that such a thing simply didn’t make sense. So I gave up. Now I know I had been on the right track. If I would have endured for another year, I would have heard about Sean Platt and David Wright’s Yesterday’s Gone serial.

Those two authors had the balls to make a go of what I had abandoned. Then Platt teamed up with Truant for more serial goodness. Over the past few years, I’ve tracked their rise to self-sustaining, work-a-day writers via mostly episodic fiction. In 2013, Platt and Truant published a book for writers called, “Write. Publish. Repeat.” I highly recommend it. I’ve used that book to fill gaps in my thinking and to find courage (like taking nips from the Good Book) when my knees began to knock.

Own Your Readers

The central truth that Platt, Truant and I came to realize separately is that a modern day ebook writer has to own his or her readers. Amazon has been a great platform for indie writers, but at the end of the day, I’m simply a dollar sign to them. When readers purchase my products through Amazon, Amazon owns them. I do not. Amazon has their email and info. I do not. The consumers are loyal to Amazon. Not to me. As a longterm strategy, that ain’t gonna fly.

To make matters worse for episodic fiction, Amazon pays authors 30% royalty on anything priced beneath $2.99. And while Amazon does have the ability to generate additional readers by increasing a book’s visibility, this only happens after the book has experienced a modicum of success. In other words, if I’m able to drum up my first few hundred fans and funnel them to Amazon, then Amazon will reward me with a few dozen new sales.

How nice.

At this point, the obvious question should be, “How do I generate my first few hundred fans?” Once a writer can accumulate fans on his/her own, Amazon becomes a helpful tactic rather than a longterm strategy. That’s the goal.

Building Your Own Platform

I’m a WordPress fan. If you’re not, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to help you. A self-hosted wordpress site can do almost anything. There’s a learning curve, but it’s a curve that most indie writers can learn. The themes and plugins evolve and improve continually. If you can’t find what you need, wait a few months and someone will build it.

This blog is built on the Genesis framework for WordPress. (It costs money.) But I’m currently building my next blockbuster project with the Total theme ($59) combined with plugins like Totally Booked and Easy Digital Downloads (all free).

To build a WordPress platform capable of landing readers, gathering emails, generating sales, and growing true fans these are the basic components necessary:

a web host, $60 – $90 a year (I use Dreamhost)
a domain name, $9 – $12 a year
a wordpress install, FREE
a premium theme, $40 – $60 once (only trust Elite Authors/programers)
wordpress plugins like: easy digital downloads, WordPress SEO by Yoast, JetPack, Totally Booked (All free)
email client such as MailChimp (along with a MailChimp WordPress plugin for integration)
a backlist of products to sell
Scrivener (word processor) by Literature and Latte (to format your ebooks)
Write. Publish. Repeat. by Platt and Truant (to kick your butt and fill in the gaps)

Marketing Tactic Toolbox for Episodic Fiction

Building the site isn’t enough to make readers come. But you can’t turn readers into true fans (that you own) without the site. Now that you’ve built it, let’s discuss some tactics for sending potential fans to your flashy website.

Drip Constant Content: The commercial strength of episodic fiction is its ability to be generated and published quickly. If you can generate 2,500 words a day, you can publish an episode every 10 to 14 days. No problem. Better yet, team up with one or more authors to generate a fresh episode weekly. Capture readers and don’t give them time to forget about you and your characters. Keep hitting them hard.

We’ve been conditioned to consume narrative on a weekly basis by television. Modern readers will only tolerate reading episodic, serial fiction if the episodes come reliably close together. We want anticipatory readers. We don’t want pissed off readers. Keep the content coming. Publish in large enough bites to tell a satisfying story. Publish in small enough bites to keep pace.

Low Hurdle Entry Points: Episodic content provides multiple sellable products quickly. Use the first episode to capture readers attention by making it FREE. Don’t give a potential fan any reason to not give you a try. Competition in the written narrative marketplace is steep and getting steeper. Make access to your stories easy.

Scatter Entry Content Broadly: You never know where fans might find you. Scatter your entry level FREE episode as broadly as you can (without waisting too much of your time). Check out platforms like Wattpad, NoiseTrade, GoodReads. Smashwords and Kobo allow you to set the price of products at $0.00. By using Smashwords, you can usually force Amazon/KDP to list your book for free.

Of course you should offer your entry level content for FREE on your website as well. Do what you can to send traffic toward your site and attempt to snag potential fans’ email addresses in exchange for free episodes.

Create Product Funnels: I owe my full understanding of this concept to Platt and Truant. I didn’t fully get product funnels until reading their Write. Publish. Repeat. Basically, your free content is the widest part of your product funnel. After that, the funnel narrows. Not everyone that reads the free content will like it, but you want to keep those readers who do like it. This means having a pitch or call to action at the end of the free content that tempts readers to buy the next episode.

To improve your call to action, include an upsell that offers the reader a package deal at a steep discount. This means you will need to have several episodes finished in order to complete your funnel.

Kickstart a Community: Utilizing a crowd funding platform up front is always a possibility. But a Kickstarter campaign should never be viewed as a means to gain new fans. You might pick up a dozen along the way. But the real value of a Kickstarter is to rally the troops you already have behind you. If you can organise a couple hundred readers who already love you and/or your stuff, those fans will help you reach others. And while your at it, they might give you a little money to pay for your WordPress build, cover art, editing, etc.

Getting to Your 1,000 True Fans

Put everything together, and you should be halfway to your first 1,000 true fans. Keep building and managing your email list as if it were your life (because it is). Create additional serials. Keep writing episode after episode after episode.

Maybe after you gather 500 quality email addresses on your email list, you can try selling a box set of episodes on Amazon. Push your fans over there in an effort to take advantage of Amazon’s discoverability. Climb the top 100 charts and pick up extra readers that you then funnel off of Amazon (via the call to action at the back of your box set) and onto your WordPress site where they become true fans of you, rather than loyal Amazon consumers. Now, Amazon is serving your interests instead of the other way around.

How nice.

How to Write Episodic Fiction: Live Process

Posted in Episodic Fiction

This post is the fourth in a series. For the first post (making a case for episodic fiction and emphasizing the importance of having a clear EndGame), click here.

If the idea of publishing something with a mistake in it terrifies you, episodic fiction might not be a good fit. Reality will most likely demand that episode one be published before you’ve even thought about episode five. Maybe you’ve got a handful of ideas for episodes. You should certainly know your endgame. But if you aren’t comfortable with being fluid during the process, episodic fiction will drive you nuts. If spontaneity gets you as excited as a Kleenex at a snot party, then keep reading.

Develop a Routine

Whether it’s weekly, monthly or fortnightly, develop a routine and stick to it. A huge advantage of episodic fiction is the ability to engage your readers regularly. That only works if you write and publish regularly. (Shocking!)

In order to do this, you might have to put additional upfront work into a few things:

character sketches
world building
research

The more you do these things upfront, the less time you’ll have to take during your routine to do them, and the less likely you are to change your mind on a critical world element midway through the serial. That being said, don’t be afraid to let your characters and/or world evolve.

Account for Reader Interaction

Live, episodic fiction maintains the possibility of direct reader interaction with the ongoing story. At the extreme, platforms like Epifiction invite and depend upon direct reader involvement to direct the story. Epifiction (delivered to schools as Smart Koala) incorporates reader feedback via online voting. This adds extra benefits and challenges for the writer.

If you are accounting for reader interaction, each episode should provide multiple genuine outcomes crafted with the sole intent of generating buzz and discussion among your fans. If you are not accounting for reader interaction, you might want to ask yourself why the bleep you aren’t. Advances in technology aren’t always positive, but in this case, technology has restored intimacy between reader and writer (storyteller and audience). And in my opinion, this is totally awesome and how it should be.

Multiple Genuine Outcomes (MGO)

MGO is critical for generating reader involvement and fan buzz. But what the frick does it mean? Let’s start easy. Multiple means more than one…preferably three. Why three? It’s more than two and less than four. You know, three–not to complex, but not too simple.

As for the “Genuine” part, this refers to the authenticity of the possible outcomes. Are all the options true to the story and/or the character who would commit them? If the possible outcomes at the end of an episode are: “Challenge the Duke to a laser battle,” “Sit down and die,” or “Use your secret Kill-Everyone-Wristband,” then I’m guessing you have one genuine outcome and two ridiculous ones. In reality, there is only one outcome, and that doesn’t count as reader interaction at all. Bottom line, no one will be discussing the next episode with baited breath. That means you’re missing out on the biggest strength of episodic fiction–reader investment/involvement.

Admittedly, reader involvement and fan buzz complicate the matter of endings. At this point, you may be thinking something like, “How can I be expected to create an episode (something with a beginning, middle and end) with any sort of resolution while still leaving room for MGO? This is starting to feel like a Mexican standoff!”

Massaging Episode Transitions

Episode transitions are tricky, but not impossible. After all, we’ve experienced them via television hundreds if not thousands of times. Some episode transitions piss us off. Some just pass with a sigh. Some heighten our anticipation of the next episode. Those are the kind we’re after. Here are a few ways to pull off the anticipatory transition:

resolve one problem/event while introducing a new one
classic two-episode cliffhanger
resolve the first problem in a chain of progressively thorny problems
Resolve the perceived problem while revealing the real problem
Resolve the problem at hand while reintroducing an earlier or ongoing problem
End the episode moments before the actual resolution (see next section)

Timing Reader Involvement and Fan Buzz

I hesitate to include the final option in the above bullet point list because using it would result in creating episodes that aren’t technically episodes (due to the ending of each episode being stapled to the beginning of the next episode).

While I can’t think of an example of this in television, I can see a place for it in written story telling, specifically in regards to subscription services. If a reader is highly likely to read every single episode, as is the case with Smart Koala and Epifiction, then it is possible to short-circuit the ending of episodes for the purpose of providing MGO for readers.

Making this decision should pivot on when you want to create MGO. If it is critical that the readers participate in directing how an episode ends, go for the short circuit. If it doesn’t matter, or you would rather gain reader participation in directing how the next episode unfolds, then avoid the short circuit approach. Instead provide resolution and then ask for involvement/input on directing the next episode.

Empower. Don’t Insult.

Reader Interaction is a revolutionary force in written word storytelling today. Don’t unleash it’s mighty force if you aren’t ready to live and die by its rules. Rule number one: Readers will know when you are blowing literary smoke up their literary woohoos. If you ask for input/involvement from readers and then discard it (or don’t respect it), your readers will figure it out and be pissed.

No one like to feel like a dupe. Only give readers input if you expect to follow their lead, no matter what they choose. Rule number two: readers will inevitable choose differently from what you expect. It’s next to impossible to emotionally detach yourself from your story (why would you even want to). As a result, when providing MGO, there will almost always be one you favor. That’s fine. But get used to the readers crapping all over your pet outcomes. Then embrace the sultry possibilities behind door number two (or sometimes three).

Now that we’ve discussed the structure, the content and the process of writing episodic fiction, all that’s left is to ruminate on how to bring it to the consumer.

As usual, please speak up in the comments. What are some other ways you’ve ended episodes or seen episodes transitioned well?

How to Write Episodic Fiction: Character Death & Rebirth

Posted in Episodic Fiction

This post is the third in a series. For the first post (making a case for episodic fiction and emphasizing the importance of having a clear EndGame), click here.

While episodic fiction is inherently plot or event driven, no one will care about the events without interesting characters. An episode is when such and such happens to what’s his butt. Over time, if a serial is to maintain the reader’s interest, the character dynamics must continually evolve.

Joss Whedon is the Master

Before vampire slaying was cool, Whedon gave us Buffy. He later gave us Angel. For those Browncoats out there, he briefly gave us Captain Reynolds and crew. I think one of Whedon’s greatest talents is balancing character dynamics over the span of numerous episodes. A large part of his success in this area is due to his tendency to kill off beloved characters. You might be thinking, “WTF! How does that make a serial anything but painful!” The answer: It keeps you fully invested in every single scene, because you never know when it might be that character’s last.

Writer on Character Violence

Like in all things there is a balance when it comes to writer on character violence. Too much can leave readers so frazzled that they simply can’t carry on. In television, the successful spectrum of writer on character violence can range from the extreme of Twenty Four to the other extreme of Castle.

When Twenty Four first aired, I remember the utter shock of how casually the show would toss away main characters. The character is there one minute, and then “boom,” a bullet to the head the next. Only Jack was safe (and by safe, I mean he could be tortured and robbed of all humanity, but never killed).

I prefer a balance somewhere along the lines of Battlestar Galactica. That show created a large enough cast of important characters to regularly kill/disappear one. Plus, the show devised a complex means of resurrecting characters that allowed for even more permutations for character interaction. And that’s ultimately the name of the game. If you are going to dip from the same well fifty plus times…

You Gotta Shake it Up

When it comes to character interaction, you don’t have to kill a character to radically alter relational dynamics. Falling Skies is an excellent example of this. The show begins with a father protecting his two sons and fighting as part of a resistance community. His third son has been “harnessed” by the aliens. Midway through the first season, the harnessed son is rescued. The son’s living bio-mechanical harness is removed from his spine. The middle son is no longer controlled by the aliens, but he is now known within the broader resistance community as a “razorback.”

By doing this, Falling Skies is not only able to birth a new character into the dynamics, but the series also births a new category for characters in the community. Now there are aliens, resistance fighters, and people who are strangely a combination of both. This dramatically effects character interaction. Some characters are suspicious, some hateful, some compassionate.

This is All Part of Character Death and Rebirth

The most interesting character in Falling Skies is a mercenary type known as Pope. In nearly every episode that he appears, his character evolves. He ranges anywhere from psychopath, to anti-hero, to renaissance man. He disappears from the show in stretches due to his anti-social behavior. He gains popularity by killing aliens and then loses it by trying to kill the main protagonist.

It is characters like Pope that continually turn the prism of a serial to catch different aspects of the light. No one agrees on how to deal with him, and even individual opinions change from episode to episode. Pope is episodic gold.

Episodes are by their nature formulaic simply due to the fact that they borrow from the same fictional world over and over and over. When done right, the formula becomes comforting for the reader. The fact that the reader already knows the world and cares for the characters can be a huge strength of writing episodically. But the flip side of that coin is the risk of becoming stale and predictable. The easiest means of staying fresh is through character death and rebirth.

Nobody Has to Die

At its most subtle, character death and rebirth can involve shifting the focus from one character to another. If each of your main characters can support an entire episode, all the better. Remove a character from an episode or a mini-series of episodes. Put a character through a life altering event. Bring in a new character. Shift a character’s allegiances. All of these options should remain in your arsonal.

By focusing on:

The EndGame
Mini-series arcs
Episode arcs
Character death and rebirth
Along with all the basics of good story writing

Episodic fiction can become a brilliant means of regularly engaging a community of true fans. Due to the manageable length of episodes, a single writer can easily produce and publish them on a monthly basis in order to keep his/her readers constantly engaged. But this continual, live nature brings up a whole new bucket of worms: the beginning has to be published before the ending has been written. More on that next time!

As usual, feel free to sound off in the comments. If you are a Browncoat, say hi!

How to Write Episodic Fiction: Episode Arc

Posted in Episodic Fiction

This post is the second in a series. For the first post (making a case for episodic fiction and emphasizing the importance of having a clear EndGame), click here.

Wikipedia defines an episode thusly: An episode is a coherent narrative unit within a larger dramatic work such as a film or television series. An episode is to a sequence as a chapter is to a book.

In its Most Basic Form, an Episode is an Event

So, a serial (or sequence) is a bunch of related episodes published consecutively, while an episode is a “coherent narrative unit” describing an event. Episodes have to be:

Related to each other: A book of short stories or an anthology doesn’t count. On the other hand, episodes don’t have to be chronological or sequential. They don’t have to be about the same characters.
A coherent narrative unit: This is the biggie. Episodes tell stories. Episodes have an arc with a beginning, middle and end.

Us writers are typically taught to write stories using things like scenes and bridges, ups and down, etc. Anymore, most ebook chapters are typically one to two scenes cleverly ended moments before the actual end or resolution of the scene (so the reader has to start the next chapter to figure out how the scene ends). Because of this, a single chapter is almost never an episode.

Chapters are NOT Episodes

My early experimentation (almost four years ago) with episodes started as a means of developing the backstory of my main characters before writing a novel. Because of this, I typically chose a traumatic event from the character’s past, inserted a story arc and wrote a short story. They involved a moral of some sort (to describe the impact on the main character). They contained short term resolution while opening up longer term questions about the character’s future.

I wanted readers to get to know my main characters as masters of their own worlds, and then be curious enough to read a longer story about those worlds colliding.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was creating episodic fiction with each episode around 30 to 50 pages long. After creating seven shorter episodes and three longer novels, I realized I enjoyed creating the shorter episodes more.

Episodes are Lightning in a Bottle

Dense, compact, efficient little pops, episodes are like punches from Bruce Lee in comparison to books being like wild haymakers from a drunken Lee Marvin. Episodes have no time for wasted words. Unlike short stories, episodes aren’t irrelevant one-offs reserved for snooty and wanna-be-snooty readers alike. (Oh yes I did!)

Episodes strung together provide the heaviest genre binge readers with the kind of content they need in packages they can snort on the way to work. Episodes have everything novels have, without the water. When done right, episodes have the ability to become the fodder–the hard stuff–of true fiction addicts. And aren’t these the people most writers want to write for?

Focus on the Arc(s)

When done wrong, episodes become either incomplete (ie. chapters), or they suffer from amnesia/redundancy–starting over too much or too little. The trick to writing punchy episodes that contain the right amount of plot complexity is to remember all of your arcs.

EndGame: the overarching big picture goal
Mini-series: for added thrills, bridge a small number (2-6) of episodes together with an intermediary goal.
Single Episode: every single episode must resolve a problem of its own (with the exception of the cliffhanger two-part episode).

A single episode arc should start with the introduction of a new problem/event (or possibly pick up from where the end of the previous episode introduced the new problem). The middle of the episode describes the efforts to come to grips with the problem/event. The middle should include ratcheting tension and stakes. The end describes an either successful or unsuccessful attempt to resolve the problem/event. Commonly, the end will provide resolution of one problem/event just to introduce the next.

Do all this while also referencing the mini-series arc, the endgame arc, and altering your character dynamics with either a death or a ressurection and you’re golden. But, we’ll have to wait for the next posts to get into the details on these! Next up, we’ll focus on episode transitions and incorporating mini-series arcs.

Sound off in the comments if you disagree or have anything to add. I’m by no means the Jedi Master of this stuff (although I have reached advanced Padawan levels).

How to Write Episodic Fiction: The EndGame

Posted in Episodic Fiction

In case you’ve been so busy shielding your mountain compound against high altitude nuclear EMPs for the last couple of years that you’ve missed it, let me reiterate–the rules for writing and publishing have been burned and rewritten so many times, they no longer exist.

It’s Every Writer for Herself

In the wake of the publishing apocalypse, dozens of templates on how indie authors should pursue success have emerged. Most of them probably work, when taken in context. Let’s face it, every writer’s context is different, and (as any blogger knows) when you stretch a template too far things will get ugly.

Episodic Fiction Isn’t for Everyone

But I absolutely believe episodic fiction will exponentially increase in popularity as the digital revolution continues. The internet is the ideal environment for episodes and episodic story-telling.

Readers desire repeating content
Readers want to invest once and benefit over and over
Readers don’t want to wait (long) for the rest of the story
Readers don’t want to pay big bucks for digital content
Page length is meaningless on a screen
Story is still supreme

These reasons and more are why episodic story structure will explode in popularity in coming years. This doesn’t mean that writers should take their backlist and publish them a chapter at a time.

Chapters are NOT Episodes

Episodes have a distinct structure. Episodes put unique demands on writers. Marketing and sales for episodes will evolve as they grow in popularity. These are the topics I’ll spend the next days and weeks discussing in these posts. Let’s start with…

The EndGame

Television provides the largest sample base for episodic story-telling–some examples good, some bad. Not all serial story-telling has an endgame, but the good ones most definitely do.

Has anyone else noticed that The Walking Dead (comic or television) starts to get grating/irritating after a while? The reason, in my opinion, is due to the lack of clear endgame for the series. What sort of life is Rick and his group striving for? Survival can only fuel a serial for so long before the passengers become too exhausted to care.

Sticking with the same genre, the show Falling Skies does a much better job of providing a clear endgame. (In Falling Skies, the apocalypse involves aliens instead of zombies.) The survivors have the overarching goal of forcing the aliens off Earth and taking back their world. Every episode involves a new event with new problems, but the endgame repeats regularly in the hearts and minds of the main characters–they long for a day when the aliens are gone, and they’ll fight until they accomplish that or die trying.

The epic Lord of the Rings remains satisfying for hundreds of pages (and what breaks down into several episodes) because throughout everything the story remains true to the endgame of destroying the ring.

Battlestar Galactica is all about finding a home for the human race.

Even the crime drama, Castle, eventually lands on the endgame of Castle and Beckett being together and living happily ever after. (It started with the endgame of Castle shadowing Beckett for a book he was writing before picking up the obvious relationship endgame and then continuing on for one season too many…)

Most authors wouldn’t try writing a book without an endgame. A serial should have one too. It just might take longer to get to. (In the next post, I’ll dive into the smaller arc of the individual episode.)

Please, leave any and all comments. Have an example of a serial you love that doesn’t have a clear endgame? Share it!