South Bay Writers discussion
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A Reaper of Stone
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TalkBooks November 2015 Group Read: A Reaper of Stone by Mark Gelineau and Joe King
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I would like to know about the nuts and bolts of how you, Mark and Joe, share writing tasks. The resulting prose is smooth.
Does sharing the writing load let you turn out more books?
I notice that they are releasing a novella a month—that’s like doing NaNoWriMo—every month!
Mark and Joe, How long have you known each other? Have you been writing that long?
Have you written anything else, before the current series of novellas?
Is it easier to get a publisher, if you have a series?
I noticed that their first novella had 36 reviews, averaging 4.5 stars, on Amazon. How do you get your reviews?
How have the sales of the first novella been going?
Note to the SBW Goodreads discussion group. I have just posted a lot of questions, on behalf of others. There might be something else you want to know, so, please post a poser to Mark and Joe.
Lindy wrote: "I would like to know about the nuts and bolts of how you, Mark and Joe, share writing tasks. The resulting prose is smooth."Thank you so much for the kind words! We share and swap a lot of tasks, so there's a lot more nuts and bolts to our Frankenstein-style of writing that I can probably cover here.
But generally, Mark is the writer, the wordsmith, the artist. If you see a particular piece of prose that's like "Wowza!", that's Mark.
I'm the cold-hearted editor that cuts and cuts and cuts.
Then Mark does more writing, and I more cutting. And we go back forth til we feel it's done.
We never do the same job as each other. We each perform different functions at different levels to prevent the writing from feeling inconsistent. Instead, hopefully it feels more like a polished product as we add layers of more editing and more writing on top of the original drafts.
Lindy wrote: "Does sharing the writing load let you turn out more books?"Yes and no. I think it really helps with writer fatigue and writer's block because if we do start feeling worn down we can always tag out.
But there's also a lot of thinking and decision making that usually happens within our own head that now has to happen across emails or phone calls instead, which takes an awful lot of time.
I think our team-writing probably writes at, or a little slower, than your average solo writer, but we make up for it in consistency, which allows us to publish a new novella every month. I couldn't imagine having to face that kind of deadline alone every month.
Lindy wrote: "I notice that they are releasing a novella a month—that’s like doing NaNoWriMo—every month!"Yes! Thank you! It has been pretty insane.
Since we are publishing these on our own - it's actually closer to writing NaNoWriMo, managing 1-2 rounds of beta responses, 1-2 rounds with our dev editor, 1 round with our copy editor, getting the cover designed, digital and print formatting finished, creating all the marketing materials - blurbs, media kit, etc done, and managing all our amazing reviewers and promoters- every month.
And we have loved every minute of it. Well, almost :)
Lindy wrote: "Mark and Joe, How long have you known each other? Have you been writing that long?"We have been friends for over 25 years. We have been writing and telling stories in one form or another for about that long, yes. Mark's been published for a few years. This is the first series that we are publishing together on our own.
Lindy wrote: "Have you written anything else, before the current series of novellas?"In terms of published works, Mark has a very cool series of pulp stories with Pro Se following the Hanged Man.
We did one short novella together for them called "Southern Hospitality" in the collection Once Upon a Sixgun.
The Echoes of Aedaron is the first work we are publishing together, and on our own.
Lindy wrote: "I noticed that their first novella had 36 reviews, averaging 4.5 stars, on Amazon. How do you get your reviews?"We did a few things to help us out here, but mainly, we just asked people who bought our book "Hey, love it or hate it, we'd really love a review." In our experience, the hardest part is just asking people.
Here's a couple of things we did. Your mileage may vary.
1) We gave the book away for free at launch for a few days and let people know it was available (through websites, emails, going into local stores/groups).
2) We contacted the amazing weblogger community and asked if they'd be interested in doing objective reviews.
3) We also did goodreads giveaways and other similar giveaways to reach more people.
Ultimately I think people, especially here, are wonderful about wanting to leave honest reviews if given the chance. We just tried to remove as many barriers as we could to giving people that chance.
With that in mind, if anyone would like to do an objective review of our work, please contact me. I have ARCs available :)
Lindy wrote: "How have the sales of the first novella been going?"Sales are pretty slow but that was to be expected. We are new faces and our novellas are a very different product than the giant tomes that fantasy readers have become accustomed to.
That being said, we are hopeful that interest in our works will pick up as more people check them out.
They are the same classic stories that we, Mark and I included, grew up with and loved. They are just faster, cleaner, shorter reads designed for our new, busier lives.
We've got 4 different series set in the same world. So if you don't like one, that's okay, we've got something new for you every month.
I just purchased Reaper on Kindle this morning. So far so good. It's a busy weekend, but I should finish it this evening or tomorrow at the latest.
"A Reaper of Stone by @GELINEAUandKING http://bit.ly/1NQvpxc #Goodreads #discussion"
The Bitly-short-link points back to this discussion topic page.
Feel free to use this tweet and send it to your friends. The wording on the tweet is generic, so you don't have to change anything.
I did post an image of the book cover with my tweet, so you may want to retweet my post to include the image. And save yourself some work.
Happy reading,
Linda