Matt Weber's Blog, page 8

Work week 2023-03-27

Maker: Continue finishing first draft of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT

Manager: NA

Marketer: At minimum, share Shepherd book list.

Week of Sick has not recurred, but a lot of energy has gone into domestic stuff—navigating a kid situation, finalizing vacations, a solo weekend with the kids, medicating a friend’s parrot for anxiety. Unfortunately, I have no reason to expect this week will be calmer. But a couple weeks’ semi-steady writing have at least greased that that groove again.

Shepherd, referenced above, is a list of themed book recommendations by authors; see, e.g., Christopher Ruocchio’s The best science fiction books for fantasy readers. For readers, it’s a source of recommendations not owned by a book retailer; for authors, it’s a way to promote your books to readers with related interests. I don’t know whether the business model makes any sense at all, but seeing as I’m trying to find alternatives to social media for connecting with readers, it felt worth a shot. As I was saying, I’ll write a proper post about it later.

This week’s image is a medicated bird. (“Then who’s the little green guy?” I hear you ask. Ha ha.)

Currently reading: TURNING PRO, by Steven Pressfield.

Work week 2023-03-20

Maker: Continue wrapping up HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT

Manager: NA; I’m still recovering from the Week of Sick.

Marketer: I have a couple blog posts queued up in my head; should get those out there.

This week’s image was taken by my older daughter, an inveterate phone-burglar, in Nash Park in West Windsor.

Currently listening: THE PALLBEARERS CLUB, Paul Tremblay, read by Graham Halstead, Xe Sands, and Elizabeth Wiley. Yes, I’m reading Paul Tremblay because of THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD. Yes, I picked this one at random because that one is on hold for weeks. It’s exceptional, though.

Work week 2023-03-13

Maker: Fuck it

Manager: Also fuck it

Marketer: Fuck, and I can’t stress this enough, it

… I’ve been playing Whac-a-Mole with some stomach virus that scuttles around from family member to family member and periodically makes someone throw up. My current status is deeply tired and burpy but puke-free. Add in an intense work week last week, continuing resistance to finishing HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT, and Daylight Savings, and I’m writing this week off. Not with the intention of producing sweet fuck-all, but you know. Holding space for it.

This week’s image is from a Stephanie Hans guest issue of THE WICKED + THE DIVINE, which I mainlined all of this weekend. What a great comic. And what a great artist. (For the record, I love Jamie McKelvie too, but I’ve always been gobsmacked by what Hans does with color and this is no exception.)

Currently listening: The Seven Signs of Publishing Resistance: Creative Self-Publishing Podcast with Orna Ross and Howard Lovy. Orna offers an alternative framing for resistance to the one Steven Pressfield puts forth in THE WAR OF ART—less “kill resistance or it’ll kill you,” more “see what you can learn from it.” I may try extermination first, but I appreciate her alternative point of view.

Approach curators

Couple of inputs colliding in interesting ways.

How To Build A Blog Without Social Media:

So here’s my 2023 experiment. Building LTD up in a sustained way without doing the thing everyone’s been doing since the 2010s – leaning on social media as the one and only growth tool.

Let me point you now to ooh.directory, Phil Gyford’s growing directory of living blogs. And it updates live when any of them post a new piece. That’s one plank in a new stage for personal publishing.

Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Michael Webb. Fantasy Author Shows How to Launch and Market a Debut Novel.

A big part of my, when I got started, my launch plan was, how many people can I reach out to, give free copies away, give them an eBook copy ahead of time to read, so that hopefully when it does launch, it gets momentum because there’s a lot of people talking about it.

I reached out to probably 120 different bloggers, influencers, reviewers, people I found online or on social media, and basically just from a cold call pitched them, an email or a message on social media, pitched them, hey I wrote this book, you don’t know who I am, my name is nothing, but I wrote this book, this is what it’s about, I’m super pumped, and I think you would enjoy it based on seeing what you’ve been reading and writing about.

That took a lot of time and effort. It was a lot of hard work, but I felt that was necessary to get the ball rolling.
Out of those 120 that I approached, I had maybe 15 of them that took me up on it.

So, it’s difficult, but at the time it was worth it because a lot of the 15 people had great things to say and they are posting on their blogs, they’re leaving reviews on Goodreads and on Amazon, or on BookBub, and so that helps spark more interest.

The conventional wisdom is that social media doesn’t sell books (unless you kill it on TikTok). I’m bad at social media and semi-ideologically committed to not getting good at it, so for me it’s sort of true by stipulation.

So the question becomes, what else? These are a couple of answers. Ellis is talking about building a blog audience and Webb is talking about launching a fantasy series, but the common answer (at a level of abstraction) is “approach curators.” So that’s a thought.

Currently reading: THE WICKED + THE DIVINE Book 1, Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie. My 11-year-old daughter is very into mythology, so I thought it might be time to see if I could recommend WicDiv to her, since it’s one of my favorites.

The panel at the top of this post shows up on page 22, right on the heels of a four-way murder-suicide.

Probably have to wait on this one.

Work week 2023-03-06

Maker: Work on the conclusion of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT, hopefully for an EOQ1 completion

Manager: Kick off for a week for once

Marketer: Simmer some ideas about promotion later in the year, maybe read something (see “Currently listening”)

After not writing new fiction for six weeks, the resistance is very real. But I put out a couple of hundred words today; it’ll get easier. I wrote most of last month’s newsletter on a reMarkable 2 and it was a pretty good experience; I’m dreading the autocorrect on all my ridiculous Fantasy Nomenclature, but it’s still going to be so much better than transcription, I can’t even tell you.

This week’s image is my office, where I’ve just rehomed a quartet of paintings my oldest daughter made at YPI last summer. The big posters are data visualizations from Cuantica.

Currently listening: The Creative Penn #677 – How to Build a 7-Figure Book Business with Shopify With Pierre Jeanty

A working definition of expediency

I’ve said in a few places recently that fantasy featuring royals isn’t doing it for me lately. Robin McKinley’s DEERSKIN is an exception. I’m not too far through it yet, and I will admit it took me a few chapters to really get its hooks in — a few pages before this, there’s a bit of run-up to a tragedy where the fairy-tale tone of the story shades just noticeably toward horror, just creepy enough to communicate that real shit might happen and probably will. And then you have bits like this, three sentences conveying the interests of three different court constituencies in language that’s both economical and charming.

Currently reading: DEERSKIN, Robin McKinley.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

97, 543

is the current word count of HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT, with all longhand work transcribed. This doesn’t count the prologue novelette, which is currently around 14,000 words, and could possibly go longer. I definitely need at least 5-10K to wrap it up, but I now have all of March to do it, which is nice. (Although I’ll have to finish the newsletter before I get into it.)

Pretty boring post, but getting this transcription done before 3/1 feels like a big deal.

Currently listening: THE FAST RED ROAD: A PLAINSONG, by Stephen Graham Jones.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Work week 2023-02-26

Maker: Write newsletter; resume HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT.

Manager: Finish transcribing HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT (8p remaining).

Marketer: Rough out a promo stack, probably?

Today’s image is…

OK, look, I’ve developed this, you know. Habit. Of — so, Chinese, right? China is not the greatest place to be LGBTQ+, and it’s been hard not to notice that all the Duolingo content for Chinese is, going by the words at least, extremely heteronormative? So you’ll see “he goes running with his girlfriend every Saturday,” but not “he goes running with his boyfriend.” Which isn’t to say that this is unique to Chinese content on Duolingo, I only really do Chinese, I’m just saying I notice it and it annoys me; and so I have this, like I was saying, habit. Of screenshotting quietly and/or inadvertently LGBTQ+-positive content on Duolingo.

Currently reading: BATMAN/CATWOMAN, by Tom King, Clay Mann, and Liam Sharp.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

This blog post is about a Money Stuff knock-off, sort of.

I used to work at Bloomberg, so I of course read Matt Levine‘s “Money Stuff” newsletter, and yesterday I ran across this:

https://moneypuff.substack.com/p/welcome-to-money-puff

The tagline is “Like if Matt Levine was a stoner,” but there is some interesting financial analysis! Like I was never going to independently arrive at the conclusion that “multi-state operators” are propped up by the high barriers to entry imposed by regulation, but they are getting their lunch eaten in mature cannabis markets by smaller growers. I’m not saying I believe this (how would I know?), I’m just saying it’s real commentary and not just some ChatGPT-style mashup circulated as performance art.

(My views, as always, do not represent those of any employer, past, present, or future.)

(Please, Money Puff, don’t turn out to have been written by ChatGPT.)

Currently listening: Writing Excuses 18.05, “Interview with Dan Wells.”

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Automating income… ?

Clarkesworld got hit early because they are always* open and pay well.

Neil noticed early because he is so on top of his submission pile.

There are probably other publishers seeing this who haven't gone public.

It's not about being a writer, it's about automating income.

— Craig Shackleton (he/him) (@ShackletonCI) February 20, 2023

For context: Clarkesworld Magazine, one of the best-regarded short fiction outlets for science fiction and fantasy, closed submissions Monday due to a flood of bot-generated spam.

I’m not as confident about the last line as OP, but it sure seems plausible. If it’s correct, though… maybe it’s self-correcting?

Email spam works because you can email 100,000 people for basically free and actually monetize a tiny fraction of them. That’s not going to work for short fiction — there’s not enough journals, not enough money, and editors are smart people with strong tastes. The kind of premium mediocre prose that bots are sucking from the thick part of the distribution isn’t going to cut the mustard nearly often enough.

Definitely not saying the destructive potential people are observing isn’t there; it is. But would-be fiction spammers may soon find it isn’t worth the effort, however small the effort:

I can just see the AI becoming sentient and saying "you wasted HOW much money to build me and I got EIGHT CENTS A WORD?"

— Will Frank (@scifantasy) February 21, 2023

If the destruction of short fiction markets is actually the objective rather than a blindingly self-evident flaw in the income-automation plan, though, that may be harder to stop.

Currently reading: RORSCHACH, by Tom King. This might be the best thing he’s written; I should see if I can write something about it.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.