Indie Life / Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.

Extreme Pantsing

One of the more fun things about being an indie writer is the forever-ongoing “plotter/pantser” debate. I haven’t run across anyone who takes it seriously, we’re just pretending to debate (or argue) the issue because it’s a good way to share a laugh with our friends. One of my friends in the pubished-writer camp is a dedicated pantser: “The one time I tried to do a detailed outline, I ended up not wanting to write the damned book, because in my head, it was finished.”

Me, I go both ways. I like to have an idea of how a story is going to end, but I don’t exactly demand that of myself before I start writing. I’ve plotted two stories. One is in slow progress, the other I haven’t started.

Have you ever been there? An opening scene typed up, and it’s pretty cool. Now if you could only figure out what happens next…

That’s when you should consider a technique that I call “Extreme Pantsing.” Like any “extreme” activity, it’s not for the faint of heart. But like the first time I jumped a speed bump on rollerblades, just going for it might bring success, and not trying at all is a guaranteed faceplant.

Extreme Pantsing works like this: you take that cool opening scene, clean it up, and post it on your blog. Tell all your friends on Twitter that you’ve started a serial, encourage them to read it and leave feedback. When Tuesday rolls around, add the link to the Tuesday Serial collector and make sure to mark it “DEBUT” (only for the first episode). Include the episode number and genre (if you can) in the title line, like this: Long Story, Episode 1 by Joe Bloggs - Litfic - DEBUT. Now you have an incentive to keep writing the story—your readers are going to expect regular updates! If nothing else, you have a weekly deadline to turn in 1000 words or so.

(Disclosure: I’m one of the TuesdaySerial staff. It’s all-volunteer, no ads even, and we’re always looking for guest posters.)

I first tried Extreme Pantsing in 2007, when I’d not even heard the term “pantsing,” and I wasn’t on Twitter and hadn’t heard of TuesdaySerial. I posted Episode 1 of a story I called FAR Future; the title was a pun on my blog name, and the story depicted blog posts from an oil-depleted near future (a little too near, as it turned out, oops). I had no idea what I was doing, where the story was going, or how long it was going to be. There were weeks that I didn’t get an episode up. But I kept cranking away, and the story unfolded… and kept going… and going. It run over two years, with 104 episodes total.

Not content to take a break, I started posting White Pickups shortly after FAR Future wrapped up. Again, I had no idea of how it would finish, but I had a good head start (about ten episodes written) when I started posting it. I thought it might run 30 episodes. HA! It ran 90, another run of nearly two years, and turned into a 100,000 word novel that demanded an 80,000 word sequel (Pickups and Pestilence).

And that brings us to today… or maybe yesterday would be more accurate. I’ve been wanting to write some historical fiction about my fictional world, Termag, for some time now (does that make it fictional historical fiction?). The story was reluctant to be written, but I had an opening scene that looked good. So I forced the issue. If you have a mind, go check out The Lost Years, Season 1, Episode 1. (Breaking up a serial into “seasons” gives you the luxury of taking a break once you hit a good stopping point, just in case you decide to start plotting.)

Sounds scary, but it has worked for me before. Why question success? Start posting, and pants the hell out of it.


Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Adjusting the Balance

Image source: openclipart.org

It’s often difficult to keep some kind of balance in life, and that goes double for a writer. You have a job to maintain (until you hit it big, of course… I’m still working on that), the Muse is often prodding you with shiny new story ideas or driving you crazy by withholding same. There might be things you want to attend to on evenings and weekends besides writing. (Like blogging?)

Lots of little projects have been back-burner’ed over the years here, and not all of them because I was busy writing. But the new-to-me car sort of forced the issue, and in a good way. After putting the insulation back up, and making enough room to actually park a car in the garage (imagine!), I spent this last weekend attacking the mess on and around the workbench… which, of course, led to other sections of “my” half of the garage (The Boy has his band stuff in the other half). The wife, a while back, bought one of those shop-vac heads that snaps onto a 5-gallon bucket. I got it out of the box, found a donor bucket, and it became the new home for spider webs (and the spiders themselves, when I could catch 'em). I got a truckload of trash out of there, by which I mean it about filled the back end of a Tacoma pickup. A large tool box that was constantly in the way ended up on the bench, as did a drill press that we’re “storing” for someone and has been in the way for years. I collected enough antifreeze to… oh, I don’t know what. We won’t have to buy any for a long, long time. Various pieces of lumber went up in the rafters.

I’m not quite done arranging things, but I’m getting close. Close enough to actually get back to tackling a project that has been hanging fire for a long time: making a fan bracket for the little Suzuki. When I put the big gas tank on, I was able to flip the horn bracket, but there wasn’t room for the OEM fan. Many people just ride it without a fan, but you can mount a computer fan. I just needed to cut holes in a piece of sheet metal, and the new Dremel was well up to the task.

So with Evernote keeping track of stuff I’m remembering I wanted to do, and a place to actually do them, I’m back on track. And I still have plenty of writing time in the evenings. Except that I’m supposed to be editing a book for +Angela Kulig right now… so back to it!

Launch!

I tuned the Launch Cannon to fire at B&N and Amazon pretty much simultaneously. That actually worked out pretty well. As I’ve been researching in the last month or so, I’ve learned several ways I could further streamline the formatting process. Now, I have extremely clean EPUB and MOBI output, which takes less than an hour to clean up from Scrivener, and a fairly easy way to get the text to a typesetting program for printing (the next frontier).

Next up, the dreaded Smashwords thing. Actually, I’m going to hand them an EPUB and see if anyone complains about other formats before I do the .DOC file thing… so if you depend on Smashwords for anything non-EPUB, let me know right away!

Just in case you missed the cover reveal and blurb last week, I’ll go ahead and repeat it for you here:

Infiltrating a nest of rogue sorcerers can be hazardous… to your heart.

Mik and Sura are growing ever stronger as apprentice sorcerers, but neither knew what living in Mik's hometown would do to their relationship. Torn apart by misunderstanding, Mik volunteers for a hazardous mission in a distant land. Now Sura must learn to trust, and Mik must learn the true meaning of home.

And now, I get to take a brief break from writing, editing, and production for a while. I’m going to read some stuff now!

Writing Wibbles

As you have certainly realized by now, I changed the blog template. Some readers have told me the contrast (or lack thereof) made it hard to read, and I chafed at the hassle of trying to make the sidebar wider. The old template, called Abrasive, was a third-party template. I was able to tweak a few things—most notably moving the tags to the top, and putting comment links at both top and bottom—but at last, it was time to move on. The new Blogger-supported template is from awesome.com, and I customized it a little: the online tools let me make the sidebar wider (yay!) and change the background. I now have a little nicer-looking mobile template. I had to hack on the HTML to put a comment link at the top, but haven’t yet figured out how to put the share buttons up there without breaking everything.

OK, on to the writing stuff…

Water and Chaos is still with the editor. I hope to get it back this weekend, then finish it up next week. If all goes well, it will be in Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords before the July 4 holiday, and the other stores after a couple weeks. Sales at B&N are pretty slow, so far, but the Nook Press webapp is cool enough that people need to support it. If you find a typo a few minutes after publishing (yes, this has happened to me), you can edit the book on site—no edit/respin/upload cycle to go through!

Now if you’re on my mailing list, you’ve already seen the cover and blurb for Water and Chaos. If not, you’ll get to see it tomorrow. I’ll have it on this blog, the Green Envy Press blog, and Goodreads. So while you’re waiting… why not sign up for the mailing list? If you want to get in on the announcement fun, leave me a comment with an email address, or email me at lkollar at gmail dot com, and I’ll shoot you some attachments. Book bloggers interested in a quick-ish read (it’s about 44,000 words) can get an ARC by request.

My brain is already on vacation, although it doesn’t start until July 6. I’m going to try spending the entire vacation reading instead of writing. I have a lot of catching-up to do.

Addendum: Thanks to Jim C. Hines for linking to my Writing Wibbles of two weeks ago. It’s one of the most-clicked of these columns to date!

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! I have a short post this month, but I hope some of you find it valuable. Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.


As writers, you know the value of beta readers, right? They’re the people you trust to tell you what isn’t working in your WIP, and why it isn’t working. And often, they call upon you to do the same for them. My upcoming release, Water and Chaos, is the second story in the Accidental Sorcerers series, and the beta round gave me a lot of heartburn. It was necessary heartburn, but I haven’t had a story chewed on quite this thoroughly before.

But… haha… that’s not what this post is about. Beta readers are important, not only when you write your story, but when you write the synopsis. The way I do it is to propose several different blurbs and loglines, as I did two weeks ago, then put them all up for a vote. I try to tweet it and plug it on Google+ to get some traction, then post the results.

The whole point of beta readers is to get people to point out things you’re not aware of, simply because you’re too close to the story. I had a fair amount of feedback, not all of it on the blog—I got some votes on Twitter, and a couple on another blog I frequent. It was there that I was made aware of a word that is often offensive—and to people I really want on my side, no less. Some say (not sure if I agree) that your cover gets people to read your blurb, and your blurb is what closes the sale. If (if) it’s true, then you don’t want to burn down the market, huh?

So when you go looking for that all-important feedback, don’t forget to get some feedback and suggestions on your blurb.

How do you get your blurb to attract attention?


Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Writing Wibbles

This has been an interesting week. Maybe it was synchronicity, or maybe it was the universe sending a message. Anyway, let’s start with a summary of the logline and blurb voting from last week’s wibble.

		Men	Women	Total
Logline	A	1	1	2
	B	1.5	2	3.5
	C	4.5	3	7.5
Blurb	1	1	1	2
	2	1	3	4
	3	3	2.5	5.5

I arbitrarily assigned a half-vote where voters suggested that either of two were good, or picked “this one, but I liked that one as well.” That’s why the totals don’t equal out. (I included votes received on Twitter, and on a community blog of sorts that I frequent.) Here’s how I interpreted the results:

• Logline C is the clear winner.
• I was a little surprised that the men preferred C at least as much as the women. I thought it might be too romance-y for the guys.
• Blurb 1 is the one that +Angela Kulig rejected. The voting confirms her opinion, which I expected.
• Women liked Blurb 2 far better than the men.
• Voting on blurbs 2 and 3 was close enough that I’d be comfortable using either one (with modifications as described below).

I got some back-channel feedback about the word “exotic” in the blurbs. I wasn’t aware that it’s a red-flag word for some women. Ironic that the person described as such, comes from a matriarchal society! Now one could argue that exotic simply means “foreign,” and it’s a fool’s errand to avoid all offense, but why offend the very people I hope to have as supporters? (duh) I found and struck the one use of the word in the text. Fortunately, it was easy to remove.

What’s interesting is how this all ties into last week’s big ugly blowup at the SFWA, over unintentional(?) sexism in their quarterly bulletin. A woman in a chainmail bikini on the cover, along with authors Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg discussing the physical attributes of women editors, led to some protests. Resnick and Malzburg threw gasoline on the fire by claiming censorship, using language more appropriate for teabaggers than authors in a supposedly forward-looking genre.

Don’t take my word for it. E. Catherine Tobler’s public SFWA resignation did a fine job of covering the details, and described some of the blowback that she and others got. Lest you think this was just an isolated incident, Anna Guirre’s experience(s) suggest that sexism is endemic to not only the SFWA, but cons and especially the panels that claim to represent the genre and its writers. And she also received some nasty blowback.

The SFWA leadership was caught flat-footed, but (to their credit) got it together and acted. First off, outgoing SFWA President John Scalzi issued an apology, saying (in part), “when all is said and done, I personally am responsible for the Bulletin and what is published between its covers.” Shortly after, the SFWA formed a task force to see “how the publication needs to proceed… to be a valuable [member resource].” This is a good start. However, the task force is four men and three women, which doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. I don’t think it’s the intent—but given how women are marginalized at panels and the like, this could easily turn out to be a pinkwash.

And now… it’s rant time.

I find this head-desking incredible. I’m a middle-aged whitebread dude, and I have my issues, but I fracking try to do better. And yes, common tropes in Fantasy include putting a woman in a chainmail bikini. Or making her the damsel in need of rescue. Or part of an embarrassing sexual encounter with the hero. “Judas Priest, what the hell is this?!” as my Mom might say.

We know better, and should strive to do better. There have been examples of “better” since the 70s, now-classics by Anne McCaffrey, CJ Cherryh, and Ursula K. LeGuin. Yes, as writers, it can be work. When I first started writing, the characters were all guys all the time. I had to make a conscious effort to create female characters, then give them more than a few lines, then put them on an equal footing, then cast women as the main characters. But dammit, I did the work, because I knew it had to be done if I was going to be a decent writer. It wasn’t all that hard.

Fortunately, this is a problem that time is about to solve. Looking at my Writers list on Twitter, the vast majority of them are women. Bowker also tells us that women are 62% of the book buyers. As writers and authors, we have to appeal to women if we’re going to have any chance of success. That doesn’t mean everything has to be steamy romance—although erotica has (ahem) thrust its way to the top of the charts—but authors (especially new authors) have to understand what the market looks like these days. I’m not saying we should do nothing now, but in the long run, we’ll win. The old boys’ club is dying of old age.

I wanted to wrap this up with a survey of gender roles throughout Termag’s history, but this has run long enough. Maybe next week.

Writing Wibbles

Hooray, I’ve finished cranking in the Water and Chaos beta comments! Of course, that means I can no longer put off writing a synopsis (aka blurb). And this story has been amazingly blurb-resistant. I’ve tried four or five times to get something down, and finally managed to do something on Sunday. I sent it to +Angela Kulig, who shredded the living **** out of it.

You know what that means, right? It means I wrote two more.

Now it’s your turn. Below are the three attempts, plus a few candidate loglines. I’d like to include a brief emailed quote from +Craig Smith, but he hasn’t told me it’s okay to use yet. ;-) So… vote for logline a, b, or c, and blurb 1, 2, or 3, based on which one makes you most interested in reading the book, or “none of the above.” Feel free to suggest modifications, or what worked (or didn’t) in each attempt. And thanks much!

Meanwhile, this article on CreateSpace might be helpful for your own blurbification: How to Write an Effective Book Description.

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Loglines

a. What is home, when everything has changed?

b. One does not see. One does not trust. Two are torn apart.

c. Infiltrating a nest of rogue sorcerers can be hazardous… to your heart.

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1In the service of the Conclave, Mik returns to Lacota with his mentor and fellow apprentice. A hero’s welcome soon strains his relationship with a homesick Sura. After he and Sura are torn apart by a misunderstanding, Mik volunteers for a mission in a distant land. Far from home, his only friend an exotic girl, Mik must learn where his loyalties lie… and the true meaning of home.

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2A hero’s homecoming.
A tragic misunderstanding.
A dangerous mission.

In a distant land, sundered from Sura, his only friend an exotic girl, Mik Dragonrider must learn where his loyalties lie, and Sura must learn to trust.

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3Mik and Sura are growing ever stronger as apprentice sorcerers, but neither foresaw the strains that living in Mik’s hometown would put on their relationship. Torn apart by misunderstanding, Mik volunteers for a hazardous mission in a distant land. Now Sura must learn to trust, and Mik must learn the true meaning of home.

Writing Wibbles

The Pickups and Pestilence launch party is over, the prizes have been handed out… and White Pickups is still 99¢. I think I’ll wait for the holiday weekend to finish before resetting the price. If you’ve been sitting on the fence, you still have a few more days to get it at a discount!

I’ve finally begun the post-beta phase for Water and Chaos. The final third of the title describes the situation pretty well… maybe that’s a little exaggerated, but there’s a fair amount of work to be done. One of the beta readers went in deep, and found a lot of things that the editor would have caught… but the tighter everything is before edit time, the quicker that should get turned around!

Formatting eBooks has suddenly become a hot topic in the last week or so—it’s shown up both in a Goodreads forum I frequent, and in my Twitter feed. Strange, how all this is coming together all at once… I’m working on a “Best Practices” document for work, right after diving in and producing optimized files for Pickups and Pestilence. I thought I’d share the beginnings of some general principles for setting up eBooks here. Be warned: I do get somewhat dogmatic about this stuff. Most of you who read this blog are younger than I am, and you guys are supposed to be the generation that “gets” computers. ;-) Just sprinkle IMO, IMHO, or IMNSHO as needed.

So… what I call the First Principle of formatting eBooks, is widely known in programming circles as the Principle of Least Surprise, or the Principle of Least Astonishment. When producing eBooks, this simply means Respect the defaults. All of them. People expect to be able to set their font, type size, spacing, and so on, in their eBook readers. You need a very good reason to override that expectation—children’s books and comic books are two good examples. Fortunately, this makes your job easier, too—your CSS (styles) is shorter and easier to maintain.

This leads to the second principle: KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly!). A work of fiction isn’t a complex technical document, and I’ve formatted many of those in my day job. You have paragraphs of body text, section breaks, chapter titles. Plus a few special things you’ll do in the title page, and various highlighting in the body text. Each of these gets a “class” name. You should have a dozen or less, all told, including the classes used only on the title page. The other part of KISS is to eliminate anything that isn’t absolutely required to format your book.

More to come later. Lots of eyeball-melting details.

Writing Wibbles

The last couple weeks, I’ve been doing just about everything but writing. Taxes, yard work, driving long distances, working… you name it. That changed a little in the last few days; I got a little new material down in Into the Icebound. But I’m starting to panic a little; I’m nowhere near done with adding beta feedback for Pickups and Pestilence. The only saving grace there is that my editor wanted to beta it, and opined there shouldn’t be much more to clean up. Whew. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about this week…

Set the Wayback Machine for 1989. At the time, I worked for a company, now long-defunct, called DCA. The management decided to give themselves a free vacation, and sent themselves to Hilton Head for a “strategic planning conference.” Uh-huh. They were out of the office for two or three weeks… and things ran more smoothly during that time than at anytime they were around. Imagine what would have happened if they’d just sent all the administrative assistants off for a couple weeks, let alone all the other employees: the place would have ground to a halt by Day Two.

Now, just a couple days ago, a link to The Passive Voice turned up in my Google+ feed. There’s a lot of gems in this post, like “At this stage in the disruption of the traditional publishing business, publishers need authors more than authors need publishers. Smart authors already realize this…”

Yes, indeed. Just like any company bigger than a mom-and-pop needs its employees far far more than it needs managers. After all, without authors, what would publishers have to publish? But the crowning glory comes at the end of the post, with a suggested “submissions” policy:

Publishers wishing to submit proposals for publishing any of author’s books should send them to queries@author.example.com. Proposals should be no more than 250 words and include the amount of the proposed advance, royalty rates for hard copy and ebook editions, the number of years of publishing rights requested and the amount of the guaranteed promotion budget for each book. Proposals that ask for rights for a period of longer than ten years or include ebook royalties of less than 50% of net revenue will not be considered. Regretfully, Author does not have time to respond to proposals that do not meet these requirements.

You can quibble about the details, but this is pretty good. Me, I’d give them more than 250 words to describe what they’re going to do for me. Other commenters said they’d reject proposals that weren’t strictly for print rights (ala Hugh Howey). Seriously, though, publishers are already cherry-picking the blockbuster indies—when they, like they did for Howey, make an attractive enough offer. But there’s a very finite number of indies who have that blockbuster pre-packaged for publishers to poach, and some of them aren’t interested in going traditional at any price. So the bravest and most forward-thinking publishers may soon start looking down-market, hoping to discover authors who haven’t “broken out” yet. They’ll find a hungrier crowd down there, authors that might be willing to jump at a mediocre or worse contract, and many works that require a minimum of preparation (i.e. already edited).

I suspect that will be a future version of the original Hydra/Alibi-type of publishing contract, tempting indies who are willing to trade control of their destiny for an up-front advance or that ephemeral “validation.” Perhaps, like Random House modifying those “e-publishing house” contracts after all the negative publicity they got, there will be a period of adjustment as both traditional and indie authors (and agents) have the opportunity to vet them. Agents will still be relevant, for vetting contracts and keeping everyone honest, but the whole “querying” process might get tossed out the window—if publishers are already expressing interest in an MSS, after all, that would eliminate the need to decide whether they could sell it to that publisher.

These are interesting times. And, as others have said, no better time to be an author.

Sideloading EPUBs into iBooks

Sideloading: the process of transferring data between two local devices, in particular between a computer and a mobile device [such as an eReader].
— Wikipedia

While a backlit LCD isn’t the best kind of screen for reading eBooks, Apple does make the experience as pleasant as possible with its iBooks app. On an iPhone, it hyphenates long words, to avoid making the margins too horrible. While Stanza is growing ever more outdated, there’s still a need to load EPUBs into a reader, just to make sure they’re right if nothing else. And sometimes, you might buy an eBook from Smashwords that you still want to read on your iOS device.

Fortunately, the process is straightforward.

1. Find your eBook.
When you download an eBook, whether on MacOS or that Microsoft thing, it usually ends up in your Downloads folder. Leave the folder window open on your desktop.

2. Open iTunes.
If you’re like me, you already have iTunes open in the “mini player” view. You need to open the expanded view. If you’re using the latest version, display the sidebar and look for “Books.” Select it to see the books in your library.

3. Drag and drop.
Arrange your Downloads window, and the iTunes window, so you can see them both. Drag your book file into a blank area of the iBooks window. It may take a few seconds for the new book to show up in your library, be patient.

4. Sync and go.
Plug your device in and let it sync. It will automatically copy your new eBooks over.

You can actually do the first three steps in less time than it takes to read this blog post… although the sync process will take a while longer.

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

Welcome to the Indie Life edition of Writing Wibbles. Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.

Once again, this is a continuation of my previous Writing Wibbles post. Last week, I ranted about someone who did a (deliberately?) bad job of releasing his novel and using that as an excuse to write off the whole indie experience. Of course, I wasn’t the only blogger—especially not the highest-profile blogger—to feed the troll. Chuck Wendig also responded.

Then Salon, perhaps to balance the scales, ran an article by Hugh Howey that said self-publishing is always the better option. I might have commented strictly on that article, had it not been Indie Life week, but Wendig did already, and got rebuttals ranging from polite to “typical Internet rude.” Not the kind of guy to slink into a corner, Wendig came back with a very good point: there is no One True Way.

I have to agree.

There are, contrary to what the simple-minded insist, very few absolutes in life. There are some absolutes, to be sure, but the route to sharing your stories isn't one of them. Self-publishing was what worked best for me, which is not to say it will be best for everyone. I have a couple friends querying their books now, and I cheer them on. In my own case, I found myself with an epic-sized, post-apocalyptic, paranormal non-romance that defies attempts to pigeonhole it into a particular genre. I followed that up with two fantasy novellas, Accidental Sorcerers and The Crossover. Novellas are probably the closest thing, right now, to an absolute “indie is the best way” choice. They’re too long for magazines, and too short for book publishers; but they’re just right for people using eReaders, tablets, or phones. So my course is pretty well set… for now.

Once I digest my way through the first half of the year, I hope to turn my writing efforts to a YA contemporary fantasy trilogy that has been patiently waiting its turn. Once I finish the first book, I may try querying it (but with strict limits on query cycles or time). A handful of sales, after all, is worth far more than an endless stack of “it’s good, but not for us” rejections.

Feel free to share what brought you into the Indie Life in the comments. Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

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My latest release is Oddities: an Anthology. This is an eclectic collection of flash fiction and short stories. Some are fantasy, some science fiction, and some could go either way (but had to be pigeonholed in one section or another). Book blogger Eric Townsend described it as “one entertaining story after another.” Enjoy a quick story on that bus ride or with your morning coffee—for 99¢, you’ll still be able to afford both the fare and the coffee!

Writing Wibbles

Feeding the Troll (or, the Winters of Our Discontent)

In today’s column, I’m going to break a long-standing rule of mine and feed a troll. Just this once.

The troll’s name is John Winters, and his bait is called I’m a self-publishing failure (capitalized, or not, exactly as shown). In a nutshell, a journalist who writes for Salon self-publishes a novel, doesn’t do too well with it, and thus gets to write off the entire phenomenon as “the literary world’s version of masturbation.” The condescending tone comes through loud and clear, even when he pretends to be self-deprecating.

Now I’ll be the first to admit: even with five books available, one of which has been fairly successful, I’m still trying to figure out a lot of this—especially the promotion stuff. Still, the methodology that Winters describes in his column just plain reeks of UR DOIN IT RONG. As a journalist and (according to his bio) someone who teaches writing classes at a local college, I’m guessing he knows better. In fact, I’m guessing he deliberately sandbagged the whole process, playing at being the newbiest of newbies, so he could write about the outcome he’d planned all along.

First off, he tells us “Turning my [book] to a title on Amazon took relatively no time at all.” No comment about formatting or editing it, nothing about getting cover art, no agonizing over the synopsis (although, to be fair, he could have done the latter when he was querying). Are we to believe that a journalist/columnist/writing instructor is ignorant of the importance of production values? I’d bet a box of donuts that Winters has editors and artists in his personal address book. It’s not beyond the pale that he could have had both done for sweetheart prices. And (he doesn’t mention this part in the article) he sets a retail price of $9.99. Um… yeah. No wonder he’s not getting any sales. Spending 10 minutes cruising the best-seller list would have shown a lot of titles at $2.99 or less. (Although it’s free as I write this, and doing well enough in the rankings. Maybe his Salon article touched off some interest.)

Next off, Winters goes on to talk about the variety of advertising he did. According to his article, he spent $100 on Google ads, and (reading between the lines) $50 on Facebook to promote a giveaway. Nothing spent at Goodreads, Indie Author News, or any other bookish site, where he might have had at least some return. (I’ll be doing a little advertising later this year, but even now I know that Google and Facebook aren’t the places to advertise books.)

What strains belief most of all (and this article is dated April 1): someone who has the kind of exposure you get writing for Salon, doesn’t think to use it. Well, maybe he did—if Winters has sold 20 copies of a $10 eBook, that’s not bad. But he doesn’t know any book reviewers who would let him jump in line? A positive review on a major site can really kick your sales, after all. Coupled with a reasonable price, there’s no reason that a good book written by an author with connections can’t do quite well.

Winters speaks of two groups of indie writers: the half who make less than $500, and the blockbusters. But what about the (almost) half of us in-between, the hundreds of authors making a decent living, or the thousands with a nice supplementary income? Not a peep. Why not talk about those people if you’re not writing with a pre-determined conclusion in mind?


OK, I’m done feeding the troll. In other news, I received an email from Amazon about a “Kindle Quality Notice” for Accidental Sorcerers. The email calls out a typo and something they call “forced alignment,” which I assume refers to the block-quoted sections. So whoever you are, thanks for the typo catch, and for caring enough to report it. I’ve emailed back to ask for clarification on the “forced alignment” issue, and I’ll update as soon as I know what to fix there.

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If you haven’t grabbed my new anthology, Oddities, you’re missing out. Reviews have been pretty positive so far. If you want something to read on your commute, or during a coffee break, you’ll be treated to what Eric Townsend called “one entertaining story after another.”

And you’ll spend a lot more than 99 cents on that cup of coffee! If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow it, too.

Truckalypse Covers!

In lieu of Writing Wibbles this week, I’m happy to show off some new covers by Angela Kulig. As part of the upcoming launch of Pickups and Pestilence, we’re cleaning up a few typos in White Pickups and giving it a new cover! They’ll look like they ought to, two books whose covers reflect their close relationship.

OK, OK, here they are!

  

And here’s the start of a blurb for Pickups and Pestilence. Don’t forget to click the button to add it to your to-read list:

“Humanity decides its own fate and the means by which it comes.”

War, locusts, vermin. The world continues adjusting to the Truckalypse, and to the sudden disappearance of billions of people, seeking a new balance. People in Laurel Hills and elsewhere survive and try to rebuild what they can.

When a dream reveals the nature of the trucks, it is young Cody Sifko who must become humanity’s champion. His friends—and the enigmatic Delphinia—will stand with him, but he must face his inner demons alone.

Pickups and Pestilence takes you on a ride from suburban Atlanta, to the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell. Buckle up and hang on!

I am really looking forward to this release, which is currently scheduled for April 25. If it doesn’t hit by then, though, it’s because I’m busy making this the best it can be.

Cover Reveal: Oddities

Coming this month, a collection of odd little tales, both flash fiction and short stories. I've sorted the stories into Fantasy and Science Fiction collections… of course, I had to make a judgment call on a few of them.

Only 99¢, how can you go wrong?

If you want to give it a little early love…

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

Welcome to the Indie Life edition of Writing Wibbles. Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.

In last week’s Writing Wibbles, I described my mobile writing station that consists of a smartphone, Bluetooth keyboard, and +Evernote. I was delighted when +Katherine Hajer used that post as a springboard to talk about ferreting out the root causes that keep you from writing.

Katherine made a good point about my post: I didn’t present it as a “this is how you get more writing time” post, but rather “this is how I get more writing time.” There’s a zillion “writing tips” blogs and websites out there. Sometimes, advice on one site conflicts with another’s—but they all agree I’m doin’ it w0rNg because I edit as I go and often revise previous passages while I write new ones.

This month, I want to say hello to writers just getting started, unsure of how to find an audience and how to develop as a writer.

This is what worked for me.

When I decided I wanted to start writing intentional fiction¹ again, after a long hiatus after college, I already had a blog. It seemed like a good place to post a few short stories I had sitting in my desk, and I did. Not much came of it, but infinitely more people read them on my blog than they could have in my desk.

Later on, I joined Twitter, and one day I stumbled across something called #FridayFlash. The premise is simple: write a piece of flash fiction (1000 words or less), post it on your blog, and tweet links with the #FridayFlash hashtag (and don't forget to add it to the collector). I met many of my bestest Twitter buddies through #FridayFlash.

Writing flash fiction helped me develop as a writer by focusing on the moment, and what’s important in that moment. Flash doesn’t absolutely require elements found in longer stories, like plot or character development, but it’s cool if you can fit them in. I know artistically-talented people who can sketch a few lines and make you see so much more; a skilled flash writer can do the same in a handful of words.

There’s an unwritten rule of #FridayFlash: if someone comes by and leaves a comment, it’s a courtesy to do the same for them. You don’t need to be on Twitter to get involved; just hit the collector and check out things that look interesting to you.


One thing I realized when writing short pieces: 2000 words might be a short story, but it’s a hell of a long blog post. And there were longer stories wanting to get out. Like FAR Future.

While I was writing flash, I was also writing much longer pieces, and began serializing them on my blog. Soon after I finished FAR Future, a flash piece called White Pickups blew up into something huge and I was off to the races again. Then, I discovered TuesdaySerial. It works much like FridayFlash: put up your latest episode, tweet links with the #TuesdaySerial hashtag, add a link to the collector. After White Pickups came Accidental Sorcerers and others. Somewhere along the line, I was invited to join the TuesdaySerial staff.

If you’re brave (or just crazy like me), you can start serializing a story before it’s done. It does give you an incentive to keep writing, and sometimes your readers give you ideas for subplots or can help you get unstuck. Serials don’t get the readership that flash does, simply because serials require more dedication on readers’ parts as well as the writer. But serial readers can turn out to be more dedicated fans in the end.

Feel free to share what has worked for you in the comments. Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

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¹ My dayjob is technical writing. Some of that turned into fiction, but not by intent.

Bottom-feeding

Do traditional publishers think that bottom-feeding is the way to beat Amazon?

This has been a disturbing week for anyone watching the publishing industry. Random House launched four new imprints, with “you really named them that?” names like Hydra and Alibi, offering terms worse than a standard vanity publisher. As always, “the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” The 50/50 split seems pretty good, until you realize that your share is zero until all expenses are accounted for. The thing is, it’s Random House that determines how much they’re charging themselves (and authors) for the editing, cover design, layout, and so forth, as well as any ongoing expenses they can gin up. Musicians have pointed out similarities to record label contracts, coupled with the record companies’ use of creative accounting to avoid paying royalties to artists at all.

Given the nature of the contracts, the SFWA has de-listed Hydra (the SF imprint) as a qualifying market¹ for SFWA membership. SFWA president John Scalzi thumped Random House thoroughly on his personal blog. “It’s genuinely shameful that a publisher is willing to offer this contract — and for that matter, to defend it,” he writes. But defend it they do, in an email to SFWA’s Writer Beware.

One major publisher pulling this kind of stunt, ever, would be bad enough. But it’s not just Random House. They weren’t even the first. Last year, Simon and Schuster hooked up with Author Solutions/ASI, the scammiest of the publishing scammers, to create the “Archway” imprint. (Hmmm… “arch.” As in, bend over? I’m seeing a trend in these names.) Perhaps to steal a little of Random House’s thunder this week, S&S emailed major writing bloggers, offering an affiliate program. (No, I wasn’t contacted. No, I wouldn’t have signed up anyway.)

If it was just this, I could say the universe is validating my decision to not bother with traditional publishers. But then someone forwarded me an email they got from Amazon on Wednesday:

Look at what’s topping that list. Look at the fourth book down. I believe it was no coincidence that Accidental Sorcerers got yet another wind (fourth wind? fifth? eighth? I’ve lost count) after that mail went out, and jumped back into the Top 100 lists for Kindle Fantasy, Fantasy, and Teens. How many traditional publishers are going to do that kind of marketing for a new unknown author?

Say what you will about Amazon. Even 30% is a better cut than I’d get from a traditional publisher, and they actually do some marketing. Now I need to email Apple, B&N, and Kobo, and tell them, “Hey, Amazon’s including my book in ads, and we’re getting pretty good sales over here. How about you guys try to outdo them?”

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¹The SFWA also says indies like me don’t qualify either, to which I give a shrug and a “pfffft.” Why join a club that would have me as a member, anyway?

Writing Wibbles

Between the day job and the family, sometimes I have to snatch writing time when and where I can find it. I’ve done plenty of handwriting onto notepads and journals, but then I have to type it all up again. Sometimes, it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes, it just feels like a hassle.

Technology is a wonderful thing (as long as the batteries hold up, of course). If there was a way to have something about as portable as a writing journal, but doesn’t force you to write it twice, why not use it?

Behold, it really does exist!

The required ingredients are a smartphone, a Bluetooth keyboard, and +Evernote. I have to take off my glasses to read, so they make a fine phone stand. As you can see, the A key on the keyboard has gone to the Great Computer Room in the Sky, but it only took a little adjusting on my part. All of the components here can be substituted—use a tablet instead of a phone, use whatever Bluetooth keyboard will pair with it, use Dropbox or Google Docs instead of Evernote. The whole point is to have something you can type into, then copy/paste from Evernote into your normal writing tool.

This rig does get some attention when I’m at lunch. People come by to see what I’m typing into, or just what it is I’m doing. They want to know how it works, and sometimes what I’m writing.

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

I actually have something useful this week…

When Lightning Strikes (or gets really close)

I haven’t been struck by lightning, but came pretty close once. I was riding home from work, on the motorcycle, and ran into a thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning came down behind the supermarket, where I was sitting in traffic, and I felt a spark jump from my hand to the handlebars. Needless to say, I bolted for a bank overhang and waited it out.

As an indie writer, getting into the best-seller list on Amazon might be like being struck by lightning. But lightning could just get really close, too, and your book might end up in the upper 1,000 overall rankings and chart on one or more genre Top 100 lists. It happened to me, it might happen to you. Then you might ask yourself:

Now what?

First, celebrate! Do a happy dance around your desk, pour yourself a generous helping of your favorite beverage, take the family out for a nice dinner. Take screen shots of your book page. And don’t forget to thank your higher power, whatever you recognize as such, for cutting you a break!

Next, stay focused. Constantly checking your book's rank or sales numbers isn’t going to push it any higher, and takes away from time you could be writing the next book. In fact, this is the time you really need to get that next book ready. You've got an incentive, and impending royalty checks have a way of making family take your writing more seriously.

Finally, analyze. If you have other books on offer, and they never caught on like this one, why not? What did you do right, this time? Is there anything you can do with your current books to give them a boost? Can you do the same things for your next book, or even improve on them, to do even better next time?

Think of it as the “stop, drop, roll” of modest success in your writing endeavors. Oh, and here’s a little soundtrack for the happy dance:

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Being Indie doesn’t have to mean going it alone. Check out some of the other Indie Life blogs this week:

Writing (WINNER!) Wibbles

Let’s get the cool stuff out of the way first—the One World, Two Ages raffle results! I’ve emailed the winners, and am looking forward to giving out stuff:

1st prize: Jim Zarling

$20 Amazon gift card
Accidental Sorcerers eBook
White Pickups eBook
Water and Chaos eBook (ARC)
Heroes and Vallenez, eBook by Angela Kulig (ARC)

2nd prize: Nicole Lee

Accidental Sorcerers eBook
White Pickups eBook
Water and Chaos eBook (ARC)
Heroes and Vallenez, eBook by Angela Kulig (ARC)

3rd prize: Tony Noland

Accidental Sorcerers eBook

Congrats—and happy reading—to all the winners!

I must have been crazy to commit to releasing two books, even if they were “only” novellas, two weeks apart. But things are going well enough since then. Both books had minor issues in Smashwords that prevented them from getting into Premium right away… but Accidental Sorcerers has already made it to iBooks. Funny, how Smashwords implies it’ll take Apple longer than any of the other stores to list your Smashwords book, but it’s actually the fastest in my experience.

So how are the books doing?

I put The Crossover on Smashwords Sunday night to get it a little head start, and to have a link already pre-digested for Amazon when I obeyed their suggested to “tell us about a lower price.” Since Smashwords doesn’t seem to have a problem with revealing numbers, I’ll say that 82 people (as I type this) have downloaded their free copy in the last three days. That’s a little better than one per hour. I’m hoping it’ll really take off once Amazon price-matches.

As for Accidental Sorcerers, it plodded along until the blog tour got going. Since then, it has been climbing Mount Rankings pretty steadily, sometimes taking a step back before taking two steps forward. It seems like the purchases have been increasing along with the ranking, which keeps it moving pretty steadily. After two weeks and a day, it has come this far:

I really need to stop checking the numbers every waking hour, but it’s so much FUN when they’re moving in the right direction! Besides, some funny things turned up. At first, Smashwords was doing fairly well keeping up. Every third Amazon sale, I’d get a Smashwords sale. Then Amazon kept going, and Smashwords didn’t. And, on average, I see a book returned for every 31 sales. That’s more entertaining than annoying—I figure someone hit the wrong button, or might have sent it to the wrong Kindle (forgetting that you can pull a purchase to any of your Kindles from the cloud or archive).

It’s also doing much better than White Pickups, which leads me to wonder why. The Truckalypse gets great reviews, but not many sales. I can think of four factors, ranked by my guess at probability:

1. I’m right about a 99¢ eBook being an impulse purchase.
2. I got some good (i.e. popular) blogs lined up for the blog tour. The interview with Patrick Satters was retweeted a LOT, for example, even if he said it didn’t get the usual volume of pageviews.
3. The cover art doesn’t do the story justice. (This is Angela’s #1 guess.)
4. More people read YA Fantasy than adult paranormal.

It’s most likely a combination of factors, perhaps all four, with different weights. We’re working on a White Pickups cover art reboot, as part of the run-up to launching Pickups and Pestilence in April. If sales immediately take off, I’ll move #3 up to #1.

And I owe everyone who has bought my books so far (and in the future) a huge THANK YOU!

Writing Wibbles

The Launch Cannon went BOOM, and Accidental Sorcerers has landed at Amazon and Smashwords! The other eBook stores should have it as soon as it works its way through Smashwords Premium. Don’t forget to hit the blog tour, and check out the cool people who are hosting me next week.

Meanwhile, I’m cleaning the Launch Cannon and getting it ready for The Crossover. This is an interesting experiment, launching two stories in a month. Since The Crossover will be free on Smashwords right away, and will be on Amazon once the price-match kicks in, I’m hoping to see a lot of download action with that… enough to pull along the other titles with it, maybe.

The thing is, it’s too easy to find free eBooks, and I’m not talking about pirate sites. The Kindle Store has dozens of free titles, in just about any genre you can name, and the list changes daily. So, before you realize it, you’ve downloaded a pile of books that sound interesting. If they were paperbacks, you could fill a full-size bookshelf with the bounty. To have some chance of reading everything, you swear off the free lists, at least until you can whittle down the pile—but then your social-network friends post links to more free books that they think sound cool. And even adding only two new ones a week, that to-read shelf isn’t getting any smaller.

So you start ignoring the links. Then authors on Goodreads and other places send you “invites” to download a free copy of one of their titles. For some of them, you can avoid the temptation. Some. And then…

I opened Gmail last week, to find that one Winston Emerson sent me the following missile, I mean missive:

Hello everyone. This past Wednesday, I took a major blow to the head by a ten-foot cedar post. Today, I'm giving away free digital copies of The Object: Book One to everyone in my email list and anyone else I can find.

One thing has nothing to do with the other.

Attached were MOBI, EPUB, RTF, and PDF versions of his book.

So I guess there’s no avoiding free eBooks, because they’ll follow you home if nothing else.

This isn’t a method of distribution I’d recommend to anyone, especially if you don’t have an established relationship with the recipients. Since he serialized his novel (and plans to start his next one in May), I took the opportunity to point him at TuesdaySerial instead of admonishing him about spamming. I just hope this doesn’t set a precedent; I think the last thing we all need is having our inboxes clogged with free eBooks.

I spent some of my holiday/sick downtime trying to put a dent in my own huge to-read pile. Odd thing, several of the titles I thought I’d like were both poorly written and poorly formatted. On the other hand, one I didn’t think I’d get into, The Black Opera, has the kind of production values I aspire to with my own titles. And it’s engaging.

I need to grit my teeth and write a few reviews, but the book prep has been demanding most of my writing time right now.