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Writing Excuses 19.07: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Intention

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-07-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-intention

Key points: Editing for intention, focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. What effect do you want to have on the reader with the book? Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. You read your favorite author because of what they do well. So lean into what you do well, and what you enjoy. Don't kill your darlings. Why is this here? Do consider where and how you are planning to publish. Don't write to the market, but you can edit to the market. Having someone tell you what they think the book is about can help. Focus on the question the novel is asking. What is the tone of the book? The vibe? What is your lodestone, your guiding light?

[Season 19, Episode 07]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 19, Episode 07]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision with Ali Fisher, editing for intention.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Ali] And I'm Ali.

[Mary Robinette] We are delighted to have Ali Fisher back with us for this episode, where we are going to be talking about intention. This is, like, how you're approaching the editing when you're not thinking about the length, but thinking about really focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. There's a thing that Edgar Allan Poe said that I referenced in our last episode about writing and editing for unity of effect. That is, in his view, what is the emotion that you want to leave the reader with. That's a… Something that I share as well, and I think I've certainly heard both of you talk about that quite a bit. Like, thinking about what effect you want to have on the reader with the book. So, what are some of the questions that you ask your authors when you're trying to get them to focus their book?

[DongWon] Absolutely. When I'm approaching a manuscript, so much of what I'm doing in the initial pass is trying to make sure I understand very clearly what the author was intending to accomplish. Right? What was the unity of effect that they were going for? Since everyone else has a quote on this topic, I also have one…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Which is a Dolly Parton quote…

[Yes]

[DongWon] which is, "Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose." So much, I think, of writing a book is a process of figuring out what is this book, who is this book, why did you write it? I think sometimes you'll have an idea going into it, and sometimes that idea isn't clear until you've finished it. Or, what you originally thought it was about turns out not to be what the book is about. Right? So, I think the process of writing it is often, no matter how much planning you do, discovery of what your intentions were, and are, and what you want them to be going forward. Right? So, that's so much of the thing that's going to be informing your editing process and your revision process as you dive back into it.

[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. That Dolly Parton quote makes me so happy. It also ties into something that... I just took a class with Tobias [Buckell?]. He was talking about finding your spark, but one of the things that he said just set off all sorts of fireworks and sparks in my head, was that you read your favorite author because of what they do well, not because of what they don't do well.

[Ali] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So, like when you're reading Asimov, it's not because of his characterization.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that's not why you read Asimov.

[Ali, DongWon chorus] Nope.

[DongWon] Truly not.

[Ali] She likes jewelry. End of character.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. That's all you need. Really. It goes with the diamonds. But, for me, it was like thinking about… Like, really leaning into what you do well, and the things that you enjoy as a representative audience member yourself, as a writer.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That's, for me, I think just an exciting way to think about it. It's, like, what do I love about this and how can I make it more of what I love.

[Ali] It's such a good reframe. Author Jo Walton had a series of posts. I don't know if they were critiques or love letters, but they got all published in a book by tour that was called What Makes This Book so Great. That was what the series was called. I just thought that was such a wonderful way to approach, like, the reading experience. But also a very helpful way to approach the revision period which is when you're expected and most likely will be extremely hard on yourself. We're not talking about the fallout trial process in this episode, but stay tuned until next week or 2 weeks from now…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Next week.

[Ali] Stay tuned. But I will say one of the things that, when talking about revision and intention, I always do my best to try to remember to flag the things that, like, what's so awesome here, like, this made me cry, don't touch it. I want it, I want to get hurt. Let's talk about how to hurt me more. Or, like, what… This is so great. So, what else is like that? Or, like, what else can we do to sort of… Putting those flags down I think is just really helpful. Because it can be… It's a really hard time, it's a really hard time to be with the story and just remembering what all these good things is really helpful.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think 2nd only to show, don't tell, which is something I complained about last episode, one of the most common repeated refrains of writing advice that just drives me bonkers is kill your darlings.

[Mary Robinette] Ugh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? There's this idea that… There are times when you do have to cut something you love. Right? We talked about this a little bit less time, about cutting a character or cutting a scene or an element that isn't tying… That is slowing your pacing down or isn't supporting the main action of the story or the main intention of the story. But that's different from this idea, that's like, oh, if you love this thing, then it shouldn't be in the book. You wrote this book, the reason we are here is because we like the things that you're doing well. I mean, this is exactly… Going back to Tobias's quote, I don't remember the exact wording, but it's this idea of, like, we're reading this for a reason, and that reason is probably the thing that you're most excited about. Because your energy and enthusiasm and interests are going to come through. Right? Now, don't overindulge in that. Right? Don't, like, luxuriate in that at the expense of all the other elements that a book has to have. But, don't kill your darlings. Love them. Find ways to support them and give them an environment that they can be best observed, appreciated, and so they can flourish for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For me, it's that you have to be willing to kill them if they are pulling the book out of alignment. That's… Sometimes, if you've got a book that's got this really clean, spare, austere sense of language, and then you've got one sentence that has a lot of flourishes in it that you love, that sentence stands out, not because it's a bad sentence, not because you love it, but because it is in contrast to everything else that's happening in the book. It is not part of that unity of effect. There are times when you want to contrast, but you want to make sure that it's a contrast that is applied deliberately and for an effect itself.

[Ali] Right. Do you want that attention, because you're grabbing it. Is this the subject or the topic or the moment that needs that spotlight because it's got it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, when I'm thinking about this editing for intention, the thing that I'm coming back to is always like why is this scene here, why is this moment here? If I'm trying to fix something, sometimes I'm looking at it like I can't get this sentence to work. Then realize it's because it does… It just… It doesn't fit. There's some part of me that knows that it doesn't belong there. If I query, like, what is my intention with this and what function is it serving in this scene, then I can usually either swap it out for something different that serves better or recognize that it doesn't have one and cut it. But it is always coming to the why is my starting point.

[Ali] Yeah. We've talked about sort of philosophical and essentially political, but, like the effect that the book is having and that intention. Do we also want to talk a little bit about the intention of like how to publish it and, like, whether or not you're planning on going to a major publisher or publishing yourself or making it into a zine, like printing your own booklet? I think knowing the expectation, or like excitement of the reader in different spaces, or, like, what is more exciting to people right now, like, they're [garbled]. We were talking about the [Oops La] battle novel in…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Ali] In our last episode. I feel like there are certain areas that that could potentially hit stronger. I think maybe knowing where you're going with the story or where you're hoping to take the story out is a good thing to keep in mind, because there will be expectations based on whatever that publishing process looks like.

[Mary Robinette] That's a really great point. There is the reason that you write is not the same reason that you publish.

[DongWon] I always really strongly encourage writers not to think about the market when their drafting or coming up with a book. Right? Like, don't write to the market. But what you can do is edit to the market. A little bit. Right? You don't want to overdo it. But there's ways in which once you have a drafted thing, and now you're sitting there figuring out, like, okay, here's the book I wrote. I love it. How do I get this in front of as many readers as I can? That's the point at which you can now start to consider, okay, what categories does this fit in? Is this for adults? Is this for teens? Is this for a middle grade audience? Is it genre? Is it literary? These are so where you can start to edit and start tweaking things to push it in one direction or another. Sometimes, it can be hard to completely do a 180 in terms of your direction once you have the draft, but you can move it 10° this way, 10° that way, and I think start to hit a really specific audience and a specific reader that you're aiming for.

[Ali] I mean, even within like traditional publishing and within my work, I've had a situation where cover art comes in before the book is finished and, like, we realize, like, oh, there's… Like, there's an expectation here, like, an even cozier… Even, like, whatever expectation… Let's put in more food, more delicious like moments, like more textures. Then, the sequel, like, oh, what if it's snowing, and there's a little cozy fire. Like, there are things that can be really surprising that can have an effect. This is obviously very down the line. But you might be surprised at some of the things that affect the revision by the end of the process.

[DongWon] Yeah. I've had situations where we wrote up the copy to pitch it to publishers, and in writing the copy, we both went, like, wait a minute. There's something that's not working. There's a huge piece of this that needs changed, because it just wasn't hitting, it wasn't… That intention wasn't coming through, both in terms of what the author was trying to get across, but also how we were trying to publish it and who we were trying to publish it for. So we really, like, took it back, broke it down, and like added a whole other… We added like 20,000 words, added a whole new character arc, and a new POV, based on trying to write the pitch for the book. Like, we were ready to go out with it, and then suddenly, like, 6 months later, we're like, okay, now we're ready to go out with it. Sometimes it really is that much of a process of figuring out how do we target it for who we're trying to get it to.

[Ali] I've absolutely been in the same situation, where I've been like…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] But, wait, I'm like working on addressing some copy and been like, I actually don't know what the stakes are, but I don't care. So what does that mean? You know, like… During the read, it didn't bother me, but now, like, is there space for that? Is it needed? That kind of thing.

[DongWon] Yep

[Mary Robinette] So, when we come back from our break, we're going to talk a little bit more about intentions and how to figure out what your intention is when you've finished a book, but actually don't know what it's about.

[Ali] So, DongWon assures me that they've already pitched you Scavengers Reign, an animated show, I assume you're all now watching. It is gorgeous, vivid, kind of psychedelic dark science fiction. A while back, I got to work with the cocreator of that show, Joe Bennett, on illustrating 2 books with us. One that he also cowrote with Dera White called I Will Not Die Alone about learning the end is nigh and basically just playing D&D with your friends. He also illustrated a book by comedian Joe Pera called A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing, But Using the Bathroom to Escape. Both are now available from Tor books, and you should check them out.

[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about different types of intention, but one of the things that I will hear early career writers say, and indeed have experienced myself, is I don't know what this book is about.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Nancy Kress, who is a phenomenal writer, said this thing to me that just… Like, I shivered in my very bones. That she writes a draft, and that that is what tells her what the book is about. Then she throws that draft away completely, and start writing again from scratch now that she knows what the book is about. I'm like, I cannot. Uh-uh. But I've also heard other people and myself say this, and then someone will say, like, one chance thing, and I'm like, "Oh! That's what my book is about." So, how do you help your writers understand what their book is about? Like, what are some of the questions that you ask? I'm hoping for pearls of wisdom that will help me.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Oh, great. How do we… No, I mean [garbled]

[Ali] One of the things that I do is I tell them what I think it's about. Then get to watch their face and find out if they're like, "Oh, no," or like, "Oh, yay," or "I hadn't seen that," or whatever. It's… I love to go in there with a very like, I'm often wrong, here's what I think attitude and just sort of see what that surfaces for somebody. But in terms of actually identifying it?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is… I think people ask a lot… I have an undergraduate degree in English literature, and I think people ask a lot, if, like that's useful in what I do, and in most ways, it isn't. Right? It's not like I learned grammar from that or how to compose prose from that. But one thing it did give me was critical reading skills. Right? And how to think critically about the stuff that I am reading. Thematically, what there is in it. It's not even so much the formal instruction that helped me do that, it's just reading a ton of books. Right? I think this is one of the reasons why I so strongly encourage, if you want to be a writer, if you want to work in publishing, you have to like books, first and foremost, and you have to read books, first and foremost, and try and stay current with what's happening out there. Because when you're consuming enough media, when you're consuming those things, you start to understand why you like something, what it is about it that… Even if you don't know how to articulate it. When we say that we want you to understand what your book is about, I don't need you to be able to sum it up in a sentence. I don't need you to be able to tell me. In part, you wrote the book because you don't have a simpler way of explaining whatever it is that you were trying to get to with writing the book. Right? That's okay. That's great, actually. That's my job to figure out how to frame it up in a pithy few sentences so they can go on the back of a book or go to an editor or whatever it is. So, I think, for me, it really is putting those critical skills into place as I'm reading to figure out, okay, what is this project? What are they trying to accomplish here? What are the thematics of it? What are the things that are really jumping out at me that seem to resonate with the person behind this book? Now, that's me as a third party coming in, and again, what Ali was saying, I think is so true of sometimes it's about presenting that idea and watching it bounce off the person you talk to, and hopefully you're close…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And sometimes it's like, oh, wow, I'm way off here. Then we can approach the edit with that sort of refocus on the intention.

[Mary Robinette] When you don't have access to an editor or an agent to do this for you, because I have absolutely had that happen… On the Spare Man, Claire looked at the book and said, "This is a story about a woman of privilege who wants to get her hands dirty." I was like, "Oh. Yeah." The… For me, the thing about that is that that is a declarative's statement. But when I go into the book, the thing that I have found most useful is to figure out what question I'm asking. This is a… I'm reframing something that Elizabeth Bear said, like, you know how you're having a casual dinner conversation and someone just says something brilliant? You're like, "Well, that is going to save everything I write from now on." She said that the difference between a story and a polemic is that a story asks questions and a polemic answers them. The thing for me about a novel, in particular, is that a novel can show so many different answers, so many different possible ways, and leave room for the reader to decide what their own answer to that question is. So, for me, one of the things that helps when I'm trying to focus a story is to think about what is the big question I'm asking. In… It's… It varies. Sometimes it's something like how do you handle it when your spouse is depressed. Sometimes it's a very straightforward one like that. Sometimes it's a big societal one, like how do you create community? Like, what does community mean to you? Like, what are the different ways that community expresses? Then, when I'm writing, I can evaluate against that question. It's like does this scene explore that question? If it doesn't, is there a way that I can add that? If there's not, what is this scene doing? Why is this scene in here? It's not that every scene has to be providing an exact answer to this. But it's… Even if it's just one moment in the scene where that is explored, it still helps me. It helped me with focusing and making decisions about what to include in that.

[DongWon] But if your book isn't feeling like it has a clear purpose, that it has a clear direction, then I think that's a great way to go about it, is asking these questions of is this particular scene supporting the central question that I'm asking? If the answer is no, then does this scene need to be here and does this scene need to shift in its purpose to better support whatever that central thing is. Right? So, I think being able to have some clarity about what that question is, and also what your personal connection to that question is… I see a lot of times someone will come into a book and they'll be asking a big question about society or about how a certain relationship would work, but I can't feel why that question is important to the person in particular. Sometimes digging until you get that personal connection, where you can feel the author in the story, is the thing that really makes a book pop for me. That's when I get very excited, when I can suddenly be like, oh, I see you. You're here. This matters to you because X, Y, or Z. Sometimes it's something as simple as a shared identity, and sometimes it's very nuanced and complex in a way that could not be explained without 30 hours of conversation about the author's like life. But whatever that is, you should feel a connection to the questions that are being asked by your book and find a way to really focus on that and make sure you're really highlighting that in all the major pieces of your story.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. One of the other things that I've found along these lines is, again, that personal connection is thinking about the tone that I want the book to have. Because I'm measuring against a bunch of different things. In an ideal world, I'm just writing it and I'm feeling it and it's there. But when I'm revising it, and I'm having to make decisions, like, my first series, Jane Austen with magic, it's like how does this feel like Jane Austen with magic right now? Spare Man, Thin Man in Space. Does this feel… Does it have that feel? No. Okay. Fine. There needs to be more cocktails, obviously. Like, who's… Where is the small dog right now? So, I think that that's another question that you can ask yourself, is, like, what is the tone that I want? What's my vibe? Is this supporting it or is it a deliberate juxtaposition?

[Ali] Yeah. That's so helpful because I do feel like purpose can start to feel sort of like academic. It can feel a little like intellectualized in a way that I think rightfully a lot of people would bristle against. But it can be really basic. It can be like I want to give people a laugh. Or, like, I want… I want to show how cool explosions are. Like [garbled] probably.

[DongWon] [garbled] by the fire. Right?

[Ali] Yes. There probably is more there, if you wrote a whole novel, like, there's more there. But, also, like that is a very legitimate and exciting and cool sort of jumpoff point that needs to be honored in a very similar way, I think. Especially…

[DongWon] Again, it's not something you need to necessarily be even able to articulate. You just need to have like a feeling of what the vibe is. If you lock into that vibe, that's all you need. You just need a tone, or like an image, a thought, a question, any of these things can be your guiding light. I just encourage you to try and figure out what that sort of lodestone is for you that is going to pull you through it, and keep you consistent when you're asking questions about should this stay, should this change, whatever it happens to be.

[Ali] Find your vibe.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a great… Yeah. I think that's a great segue to take us to our homework for the week. Ali, I think you have that.

[Ali] I do. Thank you for asking. Or telling or saying. Okay. Yes, I do. Your homework this week. Write down what you like best about your book. Find a spot in your book where you can incorporate that element where it isn't now. Godspeed.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.19: What is Publishing For, Anyway?

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-19-what-is-publishing-for-anyway/

Key points: Why publish? For the money? For the audience? For fame and glory? Because writing is a habit, and publishing helps pay for it? Because publishing let's you put your energy into your own ideas? Publishers want to make money. Publishing is market-driven. To engage with publishers, focus on the question of who's the audience, and how big is that audience.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] What is Publishing for, Anyway?

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this is a big topic. I think this kind of comes out of one of the newsletters I wrote that I called The Publishing Question. It was me trying to encapsulate a little bit what I think the fundamental question of publishing is, which kind of led me to further questions of why do this. Right? You write books, you tell stories. What is the purpose of engaging in publishing as an industry, as an enterprise? Why go through all of this complication and frustration to get your book out in the world? I mean, the short and obvious answer is, well, then you get paid for it, and you can make a living doing it.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] There's a certain appeal to that. But one thing I want us to think about a little bit is understanding what the publishing industry does, how it does it, and why it does it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that this is a question that I asked students a lot, is, like, why do you want to publish? Which is different than why do you want to write. I think that you have to know that it's like if you want it for audience, if you're doing it for money. If you're doing it for fame and glory? Why do you want to publish? Because there's a lot of different paths to publishing. If you want to be somebody who regularly hits the New York Times bestseller, then you're not somebody who writes a book every 10 years. Usually. With a couple of notable exceptions.

[Chuckles coughing]

[Mary Robinette] So, like, why are… What career path do you want that publishing to look like. It's a lot of why in that.

[Howard] Many years ago, my friend David Kellett, talking about cartooning, said, "None of us get into cartooning to be rich. We get into it because we'd be drawing the comics anyway, and this is a nice way to be able to do it all the time." I love that spin on it, and it totally applies to being a full-time author. We attach ourselves to the publishing industry because it is a way to pay for our habit.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Well, as someone who has done a lot of freelance and write-for-hire… I've written in virtually every medium that you can name. I keep coming back to the publishing industry itself because I have so much more hands-on control of what stories I am telling. I've written for TV, I've written for games, I've written for movies, I've written for all this other stuff. Most of that is putting my energy into somebody else's ideas. Publishing is the one where I really get to sink my energy into my own ideas. Which is just really fun.

[DongWon] Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny, that's actually kind of… My first job out of college was working in television production for a news program, actually. What brought me to working in books was… It was a smaller team. It was three people, four people. So I could get closer to the art, I could get closer to the process and work with the creator very directly. I think that is one of the appealing things about the process. It's important to remember that publishing… I will talk about publishing in a way that will sound almost cynical. Right? Because publishing is a business. It's a capitalist enterprise. It's a corporation. It's important to remember that the only reason a publisher exists, under that logic, is to make money. Right? That profit is what drives them. There are a few exceptions. There are a few nonprofit presses out there that do incredible work. There's a few academic presses. They are subject to some money demands, but not in the same way that a big five publisher is. But, [garbled] big five publishing, Indy presses, most of those things, money is king, unfortunately. Because that's the world we live in. When art and capitalism collide, it can be an awkward fit. There can be a lot of churn in that. So I think that figuring out what publishing is trying to accomplish, and what it's building for, and what its tools are for, are important to building a sustainable career for yourself and figuring out what it is you want to get out of this. Right? So, in Howard's case, that is very much a I want to be able to keep doing this. Right? I want to be able to spend all of my time creating the art that I love. Publishing is a way to do that. Right? I think comics, in particular, led to a very direct audience self-publishing model through web comics in a particular era. When you're looking at traditional book publishers, that gets a little bit more attenuated because of the time involved.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Although I will say that if you are wanting to do this simply so that you have more time to write the things that you want to write, getting an extremely high paying job where you only have to work one day of the week, and then publishing to AO3 is actually going to give you more time to write.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In a lot of ways. Because much of what the career in publishing is, is all of the other stuff which we've been talking about, like newsletters and conference appearances and all of that. But I think everybody who goes into publishing, like, even the editors… The editors who seem all high-powered and fancy… They don't make a lot of money. People go into this because we love stories and we love connecting to people.

[DongWon] Yeah. Passion driven industries are tricky, because they are driven by the fact that I love books, I love stories, I love the books that I work on. I also need to pay rent and pay for groceries and do all of those things. As an agent, my income is very directly tied to book sales and to my authors success. Right? So, I need to be publishing and representing authors who are selling enough books that they could make a living, and I could make a living. Right? Those are just things that are the base requirements of what I do. If you are an editor, you can't just acquire what you love, you also have to acquire things that have commercial potential of success. Now. Figuring out what has commercial potential of success is its own sort of very complicated game to do, but it's a thing to keep in mind, that even on the other side of the line, from the industry side, even though we are driven by our love for this and our passion for this, we're also facing certain realities of the market. Right? Of sales that need to be answered to in one way or the other.

[Howard] When I was in the software industry, we called one aspect of that job inbound marketing. Which was the process of looking at what the market is consuming right now, and then going back to our team and saying, "Can we build that?" When authors do it, and we often counsel against this… "Oh, you're just chasing the market. By the time you write that, it won't be ready." But as I understand it, editors do this all the time. Where their market research people come to them and say, "You know what? We need to get books that look like this. Can you go get books that look like this?" As an author, I have no idea how I would get inside that loop so that I give them the book that they're exactly looking for.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But that's a thing to be aware of. It's a thing that happens.

[Mary Robinette] Time machine.

[DongWon] Exactly. Time machine. That's how you do it.

[Dan] You're not using a time machine, Howard?

[Howard] I've been using… No, I've been using it wrong. I've just been using it… I've been using it to make sure the eggs are fresh. That was silly.

[Dan] Well. There you go.

[Dongwon] If you use all your time machine time to go look at dinosaurs, you can't expect to get a bestseller.

[Dan] Okay. So, DongWon, I want to ask this. I want to turn this back to you. Because you asked this question of what is publishing for, and we kind of gave our answers. You're coming at this from a completely different perspective than us. You're not the one who is writing the stories, you're not the one who is putting your own vision out there. What is publishing for from your perspective? Why are you as passionate about it is we are?

[Dongwon] I… There's sort of two answers to that. I mean, one is it is my career. Right? It has been my entire adult life. So I'm trying to make a living and I would like to be rich and successful, etc., etc. I mean, the other side of it is, I do think telling stories is very important. I do think it is sort of how we change the world over time, is we make a better world by imagining better futures. Right? So if we can tell the right kind of stories, then, I think, we can really have an influence over, at a generational scale, the world. Now figuring out a way to make those two things dovetail is the real challenge. I heard a quote recently that was from a podcast, Brendan Lee Mulligan said something like, "Maybe that's what peace is, is when you realize that the thing you have to do in the thing that you love to do are the same thing." I think, for me, working in publishing is very much that. So I'm both greedy and want all the bucks and all the big bestsellers, but I'm also very mission driven in addition to passion driven. Right? All these things kind of dovetail for me into one thing that has a cohesive core. Yeah. So I think that is kind of the thing that really is the engine that keeps me doing this, keeps me pushing through a lot of the heartbreak that this business involves. I want to get a little bit more into some of the nitty-gritty's of what that means on a day-to-day basis, but before we do that, let's take a break.

[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is another newsletter. A newsletter that is from a very dear friend of mine and a colleague of mine, Kate McKean. She is also a literary agent at the same agency that I'm at, the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. Kate and I started our newsletters the same week, the first week of 2019. We had not talked to each other. We did not coordinate this. We just both started sending newsletters out about what we were doing, coincidentally. It was such a delight to… For both of us to take our own perspectives, our own different methods, and start building an audience. Kate's newsletter is truly wonderful. Unlike me, she publishes on a very regular schedule, twice a week. Has much more grounded and practical advice, and really thoughtful perspectives that comes from her many, many years in the business as well. I cannot recommend Kate's newsletter highly enough. You can find it at katemckean.substack.com. It is called Agents and Books. Or you can just follow her on Twitter. Again, that's Kate McKean's Agents and Books.

[DongWon] So, one thing I also want to talk about, in addition to sort of like my passions in the industry… The reason I love working in publishing as a business… You won't find a lot of people who say that they love publishing as a business model. But I genuinely do. I love it because it's kind of stupid.

[Ha ha]

[DongWon] What I mean by that is it's a business model that has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of years. What you do is you print a book and you hope that that cost less money to do than the revenue you make from selling it to people. Right? We make physical objects. We ship them around the world. Then we collect revenue from people who want those. Most profit in publishing still comes from selling physical books in stores. Publishing is as much a manufacturing and distribution business as it is a content business. Right? That's why publishing has been so resistant to startups, to disruptors, to all these different things. Because it's kind of too stupid to mess with on some level. That gives me so much joy and so much hope for a future for publishing. Which I know sounds backwards. What I am saying is that the future for publishing is kind of backward looking. I think it's truly a wonderful thing that I find a lot of interest and joy in figuring out how to survive in that.

[Howard] I think during season one of Writing Excuses, and it took me a few minutes to look this up during our break, Mike Stackpole described publishing… The whole point of publishing was to make money by shipping cheap bundles of paper all over the world and tricking people into buying it by getting people's stories printed in it and only paying those people tiny little amounts of royalties to ensure that you're being paid as much as possible for shipping this paper around. It was such an incredibly cynical point of view. Then I read David Hajdu's The Ten Cent Plague talking about the birth of comics and learned…

[DongWon] Low-grade books.

[Howard] That the comics page existed because it was a way to sell surplus paper. They had surplus paper and a way to print color on it and they wanted to make money. So they got kids to draw… I say kids. The guys who created Superman were like 20 years old. So, at that very cynical vein, publishing exists and has existed for 100 years or more in order to sell paper by putting your story on it.

[DongWon] After three years of the paper shortage, boy, do I wish we had that surplus stock now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I have this series of thoughts that is colliding in my head. The first of those is we have been talking about novels.

[DongWon] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] There is also the whole short story publishing industry. That has moved almost exclusively online. There's very few… Like, most of the short fiction is electronic these days. Except for the things that come out as novellas, as beautiful artifacts. The whole idea of the cheap bundle of paper… I think that is a fundamental shift that we've seen, is that now people really want the artifact, that you are seeing the cheap versions… That these are being replaced by other things. I'm curious about what your thoughts are about how that's shifting.

[DongWon] Stackpole was talking about a different era of publishing.

[Howard] Yup.

[DongWon] That was the mass-market era of publishing. That era died, unfortunately, in like the early… In the 2000s, the oughts. That was sort of my start in publishing, was watching the mass-market, which is the thing I grew up on and deeply loved and will miss every day, get phased out of existence. Basically. By the way, I'm making lots of big broad generalizing statements…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I fully recognize that. Please don't ask me on Twitter about all…

[Howard] These are the broadbrush. We're getting paint everywhere.

[DongWon] These are broad brushed. I did state my publishing is stupid thing somewhat provocatively. Obviously, I'm aware of these things. Caveat there. But basically, so I think we moved away from the cheap bundles of paper to expensive bundles of paper.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[DongWon] I think the goal… I mean, we've seen the individual cost of books go up two fold, threefold, fourfold over the course of my career in publishing. Right? Most of our money's now coming from hardcovers. We aren't shipping 100,000 mass-market's of a debut novel anymore. We're shipping 10,000, 15,000 hardcovers. Right? Profit is still going up. Publishers are making more money. Publishers are quite healthy, financially. In general, when they're not losing lots of money trying to buy other publishers. In general, though, the business has been doing quite well, and that business is doing well primarily on the back of print. That has really been focused on high quality, beautifully editions. We've seen all these special editions that Barnes & Noble is doing, Waterstone's is doing. All the book crates. People are investing very deeply in books as objects. Which is very delightful to me in many ways because I love a beautiful book. But there is also the part of me that has seen the readership contract because of that. As the price points go up, you have fewer readers. There are some concerns I have about that as well. So it's a balancing act. When I say the business hasn't changed, I mean, fundamentally, we're still printing books and making money from selling physical goods. But how we sell it, who we sell it to, what genres we emphasize, those do evolve and shift over time. We are kind of going to an older model, pre-pulp fiction, pre-penny dreadful, sort of into this more like elevated bigger book kind of mode. I think we can see that in the kind of books that are succeeding. Even what's winning awards, what's on bestseller lists. There's been a subtle shift. Not that commercial fiction isn't still incredibly viable. It obviously is. But I think undeniably, especially in SF F space, there's been a little bit of a shift in what traditional publishers are looking for and finding a success in.

[Erin] This leads me to a question, which is perhaps a very silly one, but, if I am a writer, how much should I care about that part of the business? Like, how much should I be watching these shifts and trying to catch them, as we were talking about earlier? How much should I, like, is it good to know publishing is a business for my own peace of mind, so that when, like, they reject my book…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I can be like, "Well, it's just a business decision." How much should I care about it and try to work with that business?

[Howard] Did I go into anything for peace of mind? No.

[Laughter]

[Howard] No, I went for the roller coaster.

[DongWon] Absolutely. I think it's a fantastic question. Right? Sometimes I talk about this stuff and I'm like, "Is this helping anybody?" I think that is kind of the core of that question, is what do I want writers to do with that information. A little bit of it is peace of mind. A little bit of it is understanding that when your publisher is making a decision, it might look insane to you. There are reasons why it's happening. Right? There are logic behind it. It may be bad logic. You may not like that logic. It may be bad for you in particular. But, one thing I want to emphasize is that publishers are rational creatures. Given certain definitions of insanity which is capitalism. Right? But they are making their choices based on a certain kind of logic. I often don't like the logic. Right? I think that helps, as a baseline of understanding. I think the more practical thing is understanding that publishing is really trying to answer one single question, which is how many copies of this book can we sell? And who can we sell it to? Right? The way they answer the question of how many can we sell is by saying this is the audience. Right? This is why comp titles are so important, because this is the language in which publishers use to talk about how big the audience is. But, anytime they're acquiring a book, putting marketing dollars behind a book, printing a book, publicity decisions, all these things derive from the fundamental question of we think this book will sell N copies. Right? A success is when it sells a multiple of N. A failure is when it sells less than N. Right? That's… The whole business can be boiled down to that. Right? So, for you, as you're approaching the industry, the thing that I think you need to start thinking about as a writer is who's my audience, really, and how big is that audience. I don't think that's something you should think of when you're deciding what novel to write or when you're writing your first draft. But once that novel exists and you're getting ready to pitch it to publishers, I think taking a step back and really thinking about who is my audience, how big is that audience. Right? Is it five people who like this one very tiny subgenre? Or is it applicable to the biggest audience in whatever genre you're in? I think those are questions you want to think about and make sure you have good answers for them, and a way to frame your book as you're, like, pitching it to publishers, to agents, so that it looks like it's going to hit the biggest audience as possible.

[Erin] Follow-up to that, like, what do you do if you feel like publishing doesn't value the audience that you think you'll reach the way that you do?

[DongWon] Oo, you're asking the big questions.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That's where it gets really tough. Right? I publish a kind of fiction that I believe that audience exists, and is an underserved, underutilized audience in publishing's mind. By that I mean, mostly, like marginalized audiences. So convincing publishers that that audience exists and we know how to get to them is the real challenge. Right? Sometimes, if it… Publishers want to follow existing success because that's where the safe money is. Even though that means that there is potential for more audience if we go in a different direction. Right? So it's a balancing act. Right? It's how do you find a way to make your thing look enough like another thing while still getting to the new thing. I don't think that was a very clear way to do that, but…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's… You almost need to like disguise what your book is, like hiding a pill in cheese for a dog, in some ways.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is a thing that we had to do with… So, puppet theater, we run into this all the time, that everyone… You say puppet theater and people think it's for kids. When you're doing serious adult drama with puppets, and you say I'm doing adult puppetry, everyone's minds go someplace that is not where you actually are. So what we learn to do was to pair it with someone. It is… I'm doing a retelling of Hamlet incorporating puppets, Disney, and stage theater. You say I'm incorporating things, and then… It's the strange and the familiar.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] You package it with something that they are familiar with, so that they're like, "Oh, I like this. Oo, and you've got this other spicy thing."

[Howard] The other thing to look at, and this is as difficult as finding the right piece of cheese to put that pill in so that the dog will eat it. But, I like this one more. Find allies who share your vision, and who are in a position to connect you with more people who share that vision. Because ultimately, if there's a demographic that's not being served by publishing, you're unlikely to solve the problem without someone in publishing deliberately pivoting and aiming at that demographic.

[DongWon] Exactly. So building a cohort is a great way to do that.

[Howard] Building a cohort.

[DongWon] Finding a group of writers who do kind of the same thing that you do. That's a way to convince publishers. Publishers are very easy. This is why it's important to understand the publisher business and they have this logic. Is, once you understand the fundamental logic of what they're looking for, then you can start… I don't know, manipulating them. Right? Like…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But this is where the short story market comes in. Because it's an opportunity for… That we were seeing that happen a lot with short fiction, that the stories that were winning in short fiction were shifting the demographic. Then people were like, "Oh. Let's give that person a platform with their book." There is a… It is not the fast movement we'd like to see, but that's one of the places where we will see people starting to experiment.

[DongWon] Exactly. So I think finding those experimental markets, and then using that to build into the more traditional markets… It's why change is so slow in publishing. It takes a long time to publish a book, it takes a long time to move publishers off of a certain logic. Change does happen, but it is incremental and it is painfully slow sometimes.

[Dan] This is reminding me so much of the conversation around energy and renewable resources. People realized decades ago you can't convince an energy company to switch everything from coal towards solar purely out of the goodness of their hearts. Because, like we've been saying about publishing, they're a business. They're in this to make money. So the goal then became we're going to make it so cheap that it just makes more business sense to use solar. We've already seen that in Europe. They passed that point this year or last year, where it is literally cheaper to produce solar power than through any other means right now in Europe. So that kind of goal of greener energy, renewable energy, has been accomplished through business means. It just takes a long time and you have to approach it with that right mindset.

[DongWon] Exactly. So, with that in mind, I have a little bit of homework for all of you. I want you to start thinking about… Take a look at your work in progress and think about who your audience is. Think about what comp titles there are. Think about how you want to… If you had to sit down with an agent, with an editor, with a publisher to try and convince them that there's a market for your book, how would you start doing that? So make a list of your 3 to 5 titles that your book is like, and here's the audience for that book. Then, you'll be set up at least to start thinking about how to turn your book into a commercial success.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we help you figure out if working in publishing is right for you, and, Erin explains why you should take a bath after you receive a rejection letter. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.34: Writing Deliberate Discomfort

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/23/15-34-writing-deliberate-discomfort/

Key Points: How do you write when parts of what you are writing make you uncomfortable? Cursing, sex, violence, racism, misogyny? Where is the discomfort coming from, and is it desirable? Do it on purpose. Signpost what you are doing. Let other characters balance. Don't kick the puppies! Consequences! Be aware that for marketing, this may be hard to place. You may be uncomfortable, but you may also be hurting specific readers. Listen to your beta readers. Make sure you have thought through the discomfort, and you are doing it for a reason.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 34.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Deliberate Discomfort.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm definitely not that smart. My name's Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Lari] I'm Lari.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] We are very excited to have Erin Roberts back with us. I won't make you introduce yourself this time. But she's amazing.

[Dan] We want to talk about deliberate discomfort. This was a really fascinating question that came in from a listener, and I'm going to read it to you. It says, "What do you do when your writing includes elements that make you uncomfortable, but you're writing the story you want to write?" Someone asked this a while ago in the comments section in relation to a character cursing, but I'd like to ask this question in a broader sense. What if my mom reads this? This is uncomfortable to write. Thank you for submitting that question. I think this applies to so many things. Whether it is you are not a person who uses curse words, but your characters do. Maybe you are uncomfortable writing the sex scenes, or the violence. Maybe you're writing about racism or misogyny or something like that that makes you very uncomfortable. How do you deal with this as authors, as editors? Deliberate discomfort. For yourself, or for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] I think all of us are uncomfortable about jumping on this one.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I've done this a couple of times. What I find is that there are… There are different degrees of discomfort, and you have to understand where that discomfort comes from, and also think about whether or not it's desirable. So there's the what will people think aspect of it. So, like, I have a story Cerbo en Vitro Ujo, which I've told my parents, "Do not read this." Like, I just… I don't want to have that conversation. That's a different kind of discomfort then when I am writing sexism in a novel, because that is stuff that I have experienced directly and I am putting things in that made me uncomfortable when they happened to me, and I know that they're going to make my readers uncomfortable in the same ways, hopefully, that I was uncomfortable, and that for some people, it's going to be even more painful than that. So… And with those, I am like, that discomfort, I know that I'm doing it on purpose because I want to invoke that sense of "Oh, this is really… Oh, God." But other times, it is about making sure that I am reflecting the shape of the world. So, for me, it's really about interrogating why am I putting that discomfort in there.

[Dan] Yeah. I had to have this conversation with my editor with my historical novel, Ghost Station. There are two major plot points that kind of turn on sexism. The fact that the women in the main character's life, he doesn't necessarily respect them as much as he should or consider them as equals. Which sounds horrible, and it is horrible. What that meant was that for the first two thirds of the novel, there's a lot of kind of gendered language that I worked for 15 years to edit out of my own writing. Making sure to include more inclusive environments and cast of characters and so on. For this book, I was deliberately pulling back from that, so that we would be building this character towards the moment… Two different ones, like I said, where he realizes, "Oh. I screwed up because I have this massive blind spot in my life." I had my beta readers, I had my editor, I had the copy editors, all of them for those first two thirds of the book were like, "You did this wrong. This is a wildly sexist book." I had to say, "Yes. But it's on purpose. I know that it's painful to read. But that's what we're going for at the end, and it does pay off."

[Erin] One thing that I love to do and stories in general is write horrible people that are… I like to call them sympathetic monsters. One of the things that you have to do, or at least that I have to do, when I'm writing a like really not the greatest person, is to remember that there is a difference between the story the character is telling and the story that I am telling about them. Even in a first-person perspective. There, you can signpost out there that what they're like… I'm stuck in my horrible evil world, but you can still indicate by how other people see them and react to them, by what else you put in the descriptions of what they're doing, to show people that it's not necessarily… That you are not your character, and that they're something that you're trying to do, and that the discomfort is there for a reason.

[Dan] Relying on other characters is a good way of doing that. Because then you can still have that character, whether it's the viewpoint or a side character, expressing an opinion that you as an author disagree with, but then you still get to have the balance in there through the other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I think that one of the…

[Erin] I was going to say, you could also use objectives… So I do a lot of unreliable narrators as well. I think there's a similar craft there. If you take something objectively wrong, and the character is agreeing with it, it helps to show people that they're… Something is off in the way that they see the world and that there's… And that you realize the difference. They talk about it sometimes as like the kicking… Kicking puppies is always a good example people use in film. Like, if you have a character kick a puppy, and be like, "That's the greatest moment of my life," then you're showing… Everyone objectively agrees that kicking puppies is wrong. So you're showing that there's… That the discomfort of living in that character is something you know about, and that you know the reader is experiencing and you're saying that's on purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think also giving consequences to some of the horrible action that… Even if it's your protagonist doing it, like, not letting them get away with it is something that you can do to kind of mitigate that and indicate that it… This is not acceptable behavior, there are consequences. Lari, I'm curious. How do you handle this as an editor?

[Lari] Also… I wanted to point out from a market perspective, just how what Dan did with 1/3 of the novel being a misogynist character is not something that everyone can do at any point. I do think that there should be… There is discomfort for yourself, like we were saying, there is discomfort for… In terms of who's reading this. Then, I do think that when you're trying to break through, there are a few things that I would consider inadvisable. That is one of the things, if you just spend a lot of time in it. As incredible as the second and third part would be, if that's your breakthrough, that might be really hard to place.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that I recently saw someone say about Calculating Stars. I was like, "Oh, yeah. That's a really good point." It was on Twitter. It was a Black reader saying that she wondered when Elma's friends would get tired of her continually making the same basic nice White lady mistakes. And that she found it exhausting to read because she had to deal with it so much in her own life. I think that that's an important thing to understand, that when you put in something that's deliberately discomforting… Uncomfortable, that it is often going to be significantly worse for… Like the misogyny that Dan was putting in. That's uncomfortable for him. For me, reading that, that's going to be worse for me reading it because it is an environment that I live in all the time. So you do have to think about the cost that you're putting in there is that you are… You're not just making yourself uncomfortable, you're also potentially hurting specific readers. That… It's like is that… You probably need less of the deliberate discomfort than you think you do.

[Dan] I definitely want to dig really deep into this. Everyone's raising their hand, they have something they want to say.

[Dan] Let's pause first for our book of the week, which is actually a short story, and then we'll get back into it. Erin, you've got the story of the week.

[Erin] So the story of the week is The Lamentation of Their Women by Kai Ashante Wilson. It can be found, I believe, on Tor.com originally, and then it was republished at PodCastle as an audio. What I love about this story is it wants to make you uncomfortable because it has a point to make. So it is a story that has curse words in it, it has violence in it, it has a really stark look at policing in America in it. It is something that… Where discomfort is used as a tool to try to be part of the story that it is telling.

[Dan] Excellent. That is The Lamentation of Their Women by…

[Erin] Kai Ashante Wilson.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you.

[Dan] So, yeah, let's dig into this. Being deliberately uncomfortable in your work is going to affect your readers. It is going to cause discomfort in them, and, like Mary Robinette was saying, it's going to be a lot more painful for some readers than for others. So why do we put it in? What is the purpose of this? What value does it have? I know Lari and Erin both have comments they wanted to make. Lari, let's start with you. What were you going to say?

[Lari] I was going to talk about the importance of beta readers. I think it's really important when you're writing uncomfortable scenes to have people who are in that group make some comments. They might be something that you want to incorporate or not. But sometimes it's a little hard to know where you are in that line. If… How far you've gone, how hurtful it might be. So I do think it's really important to have people make comments.

[Erin] What I would say, to build on all that, is that you need to do the discomfort work first. If it's something that you're not comfortable enough with to write well, and to really do the work and make yourself feel horrible and all that stuff, don't do it. Because… If you're not doing that work, you're putting it on your readers. It is unfair to ask readers to do work that you are not comfortable doing yourself. So make sure you're in a place where you can use that discomfort as a tool, because there's a specific thing you're trying to get out of it. I would also say don't do it as a thought exercise, like, "Can I write horrible people just for funsies?" When I do it, it's usually because I'm trying to make a point about the way that culture… Oppressive culture can warp the people within them. So for me it's important to show how a monstrous culture turns a person into a monster. But there's a point that I'm trying to make. I'm not just doing it like to see if I can.

[Dan] That might be valuable as a writing exercise. But if it's something that you are going to put in front of readers, then, yeah, I think you're right. It is important to have a purpose, and have a purpose in mind. Why am I including, for example, racial oppression in my fantasy world? It doesn't have to be there. I'm making this world up. So if it is there, why is it there?

[Mary Robinette] Within that, also, the… Like, again, that… It was just a single tweet. I don't want to make it sound like I'm spending my entire life… But it did make me sit back and go, "Oh, yeah." I knew that I was writing this book for an audience… For me. But this is a really good reminder that that also meant that specifically I was… As much as I want those books to be inclusive, that I was writing this book for a White audience. The realizations about race that are in there, that I… Like, I see a lot of people who are like, "Ah. I realize that I was doing the things that Elma was doing." I'm like, "Yeah. Yeah. That's… I mean, that is the realization that I want you to have." But Elma's realizations are all in there because I had friends who did the emotional labor to teach me. But that means that I have to recognize that any Black readers are also having to do emotional labor to like my character. That wasn't something… That was not a deliberate choice. Like, that part of it was not a deliberate choice. That's… That is the piece that I'm like… That was a thing that I missed when I wrote it. And that I'm trying to think about when I'm writing other things. Which doesn't mean that I'm going to leave out the discomfort, but I'm also… It does mean that I'm going to think about… I'm going to think more carefully about how much is necessary to have that character arc and growth. It's usually less than you think it is.

[Dan] All right. Well, let's have some homework. Lari, you have homework for us.

[Lari] I'm calling this an exercise in confession. It is a short story in first person about a character whose point of view you completely disagree with.

[Dan] Excellent. A short story or a paragraph, write something with a character you disagree with. Excellent. This has been… I've been looking forward to this episode because I was hoping for a great discussion, and we got one. So, thank you, to all of you. This was awesome. Wonderful listeners, thank you. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/01/15-09-choose-your-own-adventurous-publishing-path/

Key Points: Self-pub? Traditional pub? Hybrid? How do you decide what's the best outlet for your work? Right now, trad and indie are two parallel but separate markets. Which one is best for your book? Who else is doing similar work, are there successful titles like it in the market? Don't try to go indie just because your work isn't very good! Look where your audience is. But there is no easy mode of publishing. Don't get taken in by "Here's the simple path to success." Fundamental strategies or principles are the same, but you have to keep up with the changes, too. You can make self pub and trad work together. Your goal should not be "making a stunning debut." Your goal should be cranking out good books. Be a 10-year overnight success! Similarly, awards are a consequence, not a goal. Turn your words into money.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Nine.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path.

[Pause]

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And Dongwon didn't know he was supposed to turn to page 3.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I was too busy marveling at the beauty of that very smooth episode title.

[Howard] Isn't it great?

[Piper] I was panicked because I'm in… Like, a different spot.

[Dan] These are the kind of titles that we get when there's no adults in the room.

[Dongwon] Choices have been made.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] Who are the people who…

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. Okay. Despite the very unprofessional nature of this episode intro, this is a very great and important topic to discuss. One of… Like… As we've been covering throughout the entire year, there's a lot of career questions that we know you listeners have. This is one of the big ones that we hear at conventions and all the time, is, should I go self-pub? Should I go traditional pub? Should I do some kind of hybrid of that in the middle? So we wanted to make sure that we had both Dongwon as an agent and Piper as a very successful hybrid author on this cast to talk about this. So, I'm going to ask be really dangerous question first that's going to get us all in trouble. When you're looking at a particular work, how can you decide what the best outlet for that is, self pub, indie, trad? How do you know?

[Piper] I have a thought, but I think Dongwon has a thought, too.

[Dongwon] Let's see if our thoughts are in alignment. So, I think, is my thinking about this has evolved and as I've sort of taken a close look at both markets and sort of the state of where traditional publishing is, I have become more and more convinced that they're two parallel but separate markets happening in book publishing right now. I think the indie readership and the indie authorship and publishing is often a discrete set of people from the people buying traditional books in bookstores. So I think the question is whenever you have a specific book is, is this particular type of book working in the indie bookstore or… Well, indie bookstores or independent publishing, right? So I think you need to be looking carefully at who else is doing this and are there other successful titles like your book in this market, right? So if you're writing a 200,000 word literary beautifully written epic fantasy story, I think that's going to be a really tough sell in the indie market, right? On the other hand, if you're writing a 60,000 word compulsive urban fantasy that's part of a 10 book series, you're going to have a really hard time finding a traditional publisher, right? So I think a lot of this is being driven by certain market trends, certain audience expectations and demands.

[Howard] I'd like to take just a moment to address the third possibility, which is that the thing that you are writing, depending on who you are and what it is that you are writing, might not fit in either place because it's not very good.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I hate to phrase it in that way, but if you've been turned down for representation by agent after agent, if you've gotten rejection from editor after editor, and what they been saying is, "This isn't ready yet, thank you for playing." That's very different from what my agent told me in 2006, which was, "I have tried to sell this…" We were talking about Schlock Mercenary. "I have tried to sell this, and everybody I've talked to has either said I'm already reading Schlock Mercenary, I love it. We don't have any place for it at our publishing house. Or, I don't know what that is, but I can tell you right now, we don't have room for it at our publishing house." In every case, the answer was, "Howard, you need to be self-publishing." Now, I'm self published differently than the Kindle Unlimited or whatever market, but the decision point is the same. I was told by the gatekeepers, if you will, that my thing fit in a different space. If I'd been told, "Oh, we would love to pick that up, something like that up, we've been looking for just such a thing, but this one is really crappy…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Going to the indie space with it might not be a great career move. So… That's… I bring that up because I don't want people to go to Indy because… I don't want them to go to Indy without good critiques, without understanding…

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad that you brought that up, because even 10 years ago, that was the whole stigma of the entire indie market, which is, these are the people who couldn't hack it in the real publishing, and so they went indie. Which is not… It wasn't true then, and it's very, very not true now. It is absolutely a respected and viable publishing path, but it wasn't before. Now, Piper, you keep trying to talk, and we keep stepping on you. What do you want to jump in here with?

[Piper] You're not stepping on me. I'm dodging, I'm waiting, I'm dodging. But, the moment is here. So, I do agree that there needs to be a certain quality, that you have to have faith in, in your book, and be sensitive to… Open to critique so that you know this is the right quality. There are, I agree, certain market trends that will help you to realize that perhaps your book could find your readership better via self pub or indie. So, for example, science-fiction romance right now, at this time in 2019, is very niche. It has a very specific readership, and that readership often looks for things online in certain ways. So it's so niche, it's not necessarily picked up by trad pub. But there are readers out there hungry for it. So it can still be very, very successful if you take the leap of faith to go indie with this series. You can have a really small, tight, but super loyal readership out of that. That can be very, very profitable. I would say paranormal romance is something that people have been waiting for it to come back for years and years and years, but I've got news. There's readers. They're out there. They love paranormal romance, they would eat it up. The audience is out there for indie work and self pub work.

[Dan] Yeah. I agree with that. I… My first self published book is now eight or nine years old. I've been hybrid for a while. It was for that exact reason. Here's a book that is clearly good and there clearly is an audience for it, but that audience is small enough that a big publisher is not necessarily interested. So we put it out in that space, and it found its audience and that's great.

[Piper] Yeah, and you can make money that way. It's not that trad pub is the way to go to make bank. Right? Indie pubs can definitely make, if your goals are focused on the financial return. Any pub can be very profitable done strategically. There are advantages to trad. But indie can also have strategies that allow it to be profitable.

[Dongwon] You keep such a higher percentage of every sale you make, if you go indie, that it takes so many fewer copies sold to really be very profitable. If you know what you're doing, and if you're successful, you can make significantly more money by going indie than you will traditional.

[Howard] Six weeks ago, we had several authors on the show. It was one of the ones that we recorded live at the Writing Excuses Retreat. That episode is probably resonating with you right now, dear listener, as you are recalling some of the numbers that they spouted.

[Dongwon] The thing I really want to caution you, though, is for every one person who is making those kind of numbers, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are selling under 10 copies a week, right? Those who have under 20 copies sold total of their book, right? All I'm pointing out… That's true on the traditional side, too. There's plenty of books that are published traditionally that vanish without a trace, that you've never heard of, right? I'm only pointing out that there's no easy mode of publishing, right? Sometimes where I get very nervous about the conversation around self-publishing and indie is there's a certain industry of people who are invested in making it look easy and invested in saying that here's a simple path to success, right? Here's the 10 tricks you can do. From my experience, that just doesn't exist.

[Howard] They're invested in it, because they have built a business around selling shovels to the prospectors.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They are the ones who are selling editor services, selling cover services, selling whatever. Part of their pitch is telling you…

[Dan] Well, it's not entirely these people, though. I do think that there is kind of a…

[Howard] Oh, there's absolutely…

[Dan] A group of old-school people that've kind of been burned by the market and their primary investment is biting the hand that used to feed them and doesn't anymore.

[Piper] Well, I would like to say that I have some recs because sometimes it's really frustrating to listen to these episodes and just have somebody tell you to go out and find somebody who knows what they're doing. So, dear listeners, I have some people who know what they're doing.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So, Zoe York is getting a shout out. I don't know her personally. I have not ever spoken to her, but I do stalk her… I mean, follow her on social media. Zoe York has a book coming out. She also has two really great podcast episodes on the Sistercast about building your marketing brand. Now, it's applicable if you're a trad author, but particularly if you're going to go indie, if you're going to go with self pub, those two episodes really, really break down what it's like to think strategically about your approach to the market, and how you're not only going to market your first book, but your series if you're going to have a series, and then how do you keep that going over time so that you can build that trickle income up to something that really feels good. Skye Warren also did a marketing class for expert marketing advice through the RWA forum to celebrate the opening of their RWA marketing forum in January 2019. So those are two people who really know what they're doing and have made that information and knowledge available to you publicly.

[Dan] Perfect. As it happens, Zoe York is our book of the week.

[Piper] It is.

[Dan] Romance Your Brand. What can you tell us about that?

[Piper] So, Romance Your Brand came out in December 2019. It's, actually, the full title is Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series. So, friends, don't think that this is limited to romance. It is applicable across, I would say, all spec-fic genres. It is really, really focused on helping you build a marketable brand with an eye towards all the things that you need to be able to keep in mind, the moving parts of promotion and marketing and ads and also planning out your series.

[Howard] Because some of these things just work so much better in print than they do in audio, what we're going to do is were going to get a list of Piper's recommendations for people you can trust. I want to throw Writer Beware in there. And we're going to get them into the liner notes, so that you've got links. I bring up Writer Beware because I figured out how to articulate my concern. My concern is that the un-agented author, the author who has… Who hasn't found their footing, hasn't found their connections within the industry, and is looking for somebody to help out, is a prime target for predatory publishing schemes. We don't want any of you to end up there. We want all of you to never end up there. The way to avoid that is to listen to the reputable voices and do some homework. We will have pre-done some of that homework for you.

[Dongwon] For me, I'm very focused on educating writers about how the business works, and I think it's really important. It's one of the reasons I do this podcast, not just to hang out with your beautiful faces. But what I want to do is make sure that people understand what they're getting into. So I hope I'm not coming off as negative about the indie market, I'm not at all. I think it's a really wonderful opportunity. It just breaks my heart when I see people going out there being sold a false bill of goods and not understanding how things work. In my experience, kind of going into what Piper was talking about a little bit, is publishing is kind of publishing no matter how you're doing it. The fundamental strategies, whether you're doing literary fiction, contemporary realistic, women's fiction, or indie romance, or whatever it is, the fundamental principles are all still the same. Selling books is just selling books. There are different tactics that can apply in very limited ways, right? I think indie has a certain set of tactics that are working. Those change seemingly every six months or so. So a lot of it is keeping up on, like, what's working right now, what strategies are we using, how's the algorithm working, and those kinds of things. But we're doing the same thing on the traditional side. On a slightly slower cycle, but what's going on with the booksellers, what's going on with the libraries, what's going on with the school markets? So, a lot of it is similar factors, but the underlying principles are all the same, no matter where you are.

[Piper] As a hybrid author, I just want to say that you can harness those marketing strategies so that your indie and your trad can work together and actually build each other up.

[Dan] That… Let's talk about that. Because we talk about being a hybrid author all the time, and yet there still are people who are wondering, "Can I self pub and still have an agent? Is it possible to self pub one book and then get picked up by a trad publisher for your second one?" What can you tell us about that?

[Piper] Well, I can tell you that it is totally possible. There are some concerns sometimes with it. You want to look at the genres of what works you're going to self pub and what works you're going to try to put out there for submission for trad. In some ways, it may be easier for you mentally to think about I'm going to self pub in this genre first while I submit for trad in another genre. That doesn't necessarily have to be the way you go, but sometimes it's easier. Because the risk is if you put a book out indie and it doesn't perform well, and then you try to take that same book or a book in that series to trad, there's a track record that the publishing houses going to look at to determine whether they think there's a market for that book. That can impact you. Right, sometimes if your book went gangbusters and awesome, then, yes, the trad pub is going to want to eat that up and take it and publish out further with their extended distribution capabilities for you. But in other cases, when the book does not do as well or does not find its audience, the trad pub may unfortunately decide that that's not a good investment, and therefore it can hurt your chances. You want to think critically about that.

[Dongwon] You almost never can take a book that you've self published and resell that to some publisher. The cases where that happens is people are coming to you because you are selling so many copies, right? So if you are Andy Weir and you're just selling a billion copies every 30 seconds, then, yeah, publishers are going to come knocking, yelling, "Hey. We want in on this." Right?

[Dan] We want some of your money.

[Dongwon] If that's happening, then that is when that works. If you self publish something, you're not getting the numbers, you're not getting a lot of excitement, then my advice is to move on to something else that's in a different category, a new series, and that's what you want to be pitching to some publishers. The hybrid authors I work with, we really view the self-publishing side and the traditional side as two parallel careers. There's crossover in terms of the marketing and brand. In my experience, there's almost no crossover in terms of audience. The people who buy one are not buying the other one. Right? So you can't expect that if you sold 100,000 copies indie, that suddenly you're going to sell 100,000 hardcovers, right? So I think learning to think of them as two separate channels that you're developing in parallel. It's really more about market and career diversification, then it is about transferring audience from one to the other.

[Piper] I'm going to slightly disagree with you on the fact that I do, as a Venn diagram, think there's a small amount of overlap, because I don't want to disregard the readers that are buying both. But that's because there are readers that have become loyal to the author and decide that the author, regardless of how it was published, is a one-click buy. But they are a smaller selection.

[Howard] We also need to take into account that 10 years ago, this conversation would have been completely different, and that these markets change. For me, the decision points about choosing your own adventurous publishing path hinge on some of the same things, which are, on these two different paths, which market is my book going to sell better into? That's going to change over the years. The big one for me is do I want to make the sale once and let somebody else sell it a million times, or do I want to beat down 10,000 doors myself? I chose the beat 10,000 doors down myself path because I'm an idiot.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Or you really like knocking on doors, Howard.

[Piper] Yeah, maybe.

[Howard] I really… I would much rather have somebody else doing that work for me. But what we found is that my primary product, as of this episode airing, is something that plays to a market where I can't let one person sell it for me.

[Dan] It's worth pointing out, you said that these markets change over time. They're still changing. We're in the middle of a massive technological flux in this industry. I genuinely don't know what either the trad or indie market is going to look like a year from now. We don't know. So it is worth your time not just to figure out what to do with your own books, but to keep your thumb on the pulse and keep track of what is going on. Who is big, and where they're big, and why they're big. Because it's going to keep shifting throughout your career. I have one more question before we end. We're going to go a little bit long, because somebody asked a question that I think needs more of a disabusement than an answer. He says, "Does self-publishing count as a debut, and hence ruin your chance of emerging with a big bang?" In a lot of ways, I think that if you're publishing plan is I want to emerge with a big bang, I want "a stunning debut" written on the cover of my book, your publishing plan at that point is to win the lottery. What you need to be focused on more so than these questions "of am I going to hit big? Am I going to have a massive debut?" You just need to be cranking out good books.

[Howard] For every big debut we can think of, we can quickly put our fingers on, there are 100 ten-year overnight successes. Where people have been grinding away at this, and they've had books hit the market, and they've perhaps rebooted their career a couple of times… That would be a great topic for later this year.

[Dan] Hey!

[Piper] Hey-o!

[Howard] And yet, we don't really notice them until this thing happens. Well, that's not a debut author. That is a ten-year overnight success.

[Dan] One of the examples I love to use is Hilary Mantel. She started small, she got big, and then with Wolf Hall, she got huge. She got massive. She had a BBC miniseries. All of these things. That was the first time most of her readers had ever heard of her. So, in a sense, that was emerging with the Big Bang. She just had to write 20 other books 1st.

[Piper] Right. Patricia Briggs is my favorite, favorite author in the urban fantasy space. But I read her before she hit big with the Mercy Thompson series. She had the Sianim series, she had Hurog series, she had a really, really fun adorable book, The Hob's Bargain that I was in love with and have read 50 bajillion times and had to buy three new copies of that book. So she was out there already for quite a few years before she ever wrote urban fantasy. People are like, "Oh. She hit big." But she was already out there, friends. She was already out there, she had written quite a few books already before the Mercy Thompson series came out, and that hit.

[Dongwon] To sort of go back, though, and answer the actual question, if you all don't mind?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, fine.

[Dongwon] What we do do is we say it is a traditional debut, or a traditionally published debut. You put parentheses around traditionally published and you make the font really little, so it looks like it's just a debut. That's the actual answer.

[Dan] I'm glad that you hit that. Okay, so there is one aspect of this that I do want to touch on a little bit, which is awards. Again, I don't think that your goal should be to win awards. Your goal should be to write good books in a long-term career. But, for example, the Astounding Award for Best New Author, which is connected to the Hugo, that one, I… You can only win that in the first two years of publishing. But they look… They do, for that one, look at specific markets. So they don't count self pub for that. To my knowledge. That could change any day. Because as we said these things are still in flux. So. There is that. But I don't want anyone listening to this episode to say, "Oh, I've got a fantastic book. I'm going to wait three years to publish it because I want to make sure I have a shot at the Astounding Award." That's not your goal.

[Howard] "I don't want to spoil my Astounding eligibility." No, what you don't want to spoil is you're not getting paid for writing these words.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Howard] Let's go turn these words into money.

[Piper] Awards, actually, don't often boost your sales. Like, there's a spike. Don't get me wrong, there is a spike. But they don't skyrocket your career in the big picture and the long tail.

[Dongwon] The thing I always say is that awards are a sign that other things are going well. Awards are a consequence, not a goal.

[Piper] Agreed.

[Dan] Excellent way of putting it. We are going to end our episode right here, and we are all kind of on egg shells because Howard told us he has a secret homework planned and he wouldn't tell us what it was.

[Howard] Okay. The secret homework plan is I want you to write the Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path thing. What you're going to do, you're going to build yourself a flowchart with little decision points about your manuscript. Is this going to sell into a wider market? Is this a niche market? Do I want to hand sell a bunch of copies? Do I want to sell it to one person? Do I have test readers in mind? How do I feel about this manuscript? You're going to write this thing, and in writing this thing, start fleshing out the flowchart. Start fleshing out the flowchart, and write a fun fiction about your Adventurous Publishing Path. Fill every one of those pages. I promise you, when you are done with this, you will be the first person ever to have written this.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because it's ridiculous. But also, I promise you, you'll be way more excited about choosing these things, because you will have begun imagining yourself making the difficult decisions.

[Dongwon] Please work hard to keep it from becoming GrimDark.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, I want to read the GrimDark one.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's going to be great.

[Piper] Make it light! And fun.

[Howard] He didn't win the Astounding Award. Something got hit by a meteor. All right. Dan, take us home. Please.

[Laughter]

[Dan] From where?

[Howard] The ruins of civilization.

[Dan] Okay. Unlike Howard, you have no excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/02/15-05-setting-goals-for-your-career/

Key Points: Set short-term and long-term goals. Think about who are you writing for. Do what you want to do. Write what you want to read. Watch out for the mortality rate in publishing, it can be demoralizing. Everyone's career is different. Set goals for yourself. Think about what you want to do this year, what you want to do with a series, what kind of space you want to be in, what genres you want to write in. Be aware of the wavelength in your genre, how big are the peaks, how long is the tail. Look for goals that you can control, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. Word count versus time spent? Another career goal might be to have a plan for when this career ends and you move to the next. Careers take many shapes. Focus on the goals when you are writing a book, what is the next step in front of you. One word at a time. Sometimes your career plan is to write something wildly different. Write what you love vs. mass appeal? Think about author brand, think about writing that is always you. What is your through line, to keep readers following? The voyage, what kind of story do I want to tell, is being true to yourself. How am I going to tell it is marketing. Look for the common thread in your writing, the similarity that you want to hold onto.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting Goals for Your Career.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm realizing that I should have set more goals.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, this is a really interesting question we've gotten here that I don't think we've ever covered on the podcast before. Which makes me excited whenever we get a question that spirals us in some new direction. What kind of goals…

[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What kind of goalsetting do you do in your career?

[Dan] This is something we have talked about a little bit with Dongwon. But I am very interested to hear what Victoria has to say about it, because I feel like she is one of my models that I try to follow, because you do so much career planning for yourself.

[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] So I'm both very ambitious and very prone to…

[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.

[Victoria] I love it. I love it. This side of the table, we like to plan our futures…

[Dan] Hufflepuff.

[Victoria] In very specific ways. Well, I also think I'll probably have some differing or interesting answers, only because I started when I was 21, I'm now 32. I have had many hills and valleys, and it has taught me to be very intentional about the way that I set goals, and that I try and create and shape this weird thing called a career.

[Dan] So, give us some examples.

[Victoria] Well, I think it's really important to set both short-term and long con. I'm a firm believer in both. But I had an upset early on in my career, three books in, where everything went terribly, terribly wrong. I was 25 years old and about to quit. I decided, before I quit, I was going to try and write one more book. I was going to throw out any notions that I had about audience. I was going to write specifically for a version of myself. I was writing a 25-year-old me book. So, because of that, I put in it exactly what I wanted to read. I began to cultivate this idea that when we are writing for an audience, specificity will always be better than breadth. I wrote it as weird, as dark, as strange as I wanted, and I had a lot of fun. The book that came out of that was Vicious. It would go on to restart my career. It would go on to open a lot of doors. But really, what it did was it taught me, from there on, every book that I wrote, I would write for an age of myself, whether I'm writing for 10-year-old me with my middle grades, 17-year-old me with my YA, current me with my adults, and made sure that that audience was so hyper specific. The more specific I got in my planning of my audience, the larger my actual audience grew.

[Howard] My career really didn't begin as a cartoonist until I was maybe 33, 34. I started Schlock Mercenary when I was 31. I'm fascinated that… Fascinated, and I'm saying this for the benefit of our listeners, that someone at age 25 can feel like their career is over. Because when I was… Wait, wait, let me finish. When I was 25, I had no career in anything yet. It's not about getting started early, it's about doing the thing that you discover you want to do. With Schlock Mercenary, I think I was about 32, 33 years old when I realized this comic is working for people because I'm writing the thing that I want to read. At the time, the idea that a science fiction comic strip could be funny without making fun of science fiction was a little weird. That was… Everything else in the space I was working in was making fun of science fiction. What I was writing, and it took eight years to figure it out, with the help of Brandon and Dan, what I was writing was social satire. I didn't know that that is what I loved. But it turned out that it was, and I'm happy I did it.

[Victoria] I do want to preface this with a… I'm going to throw out some what seem like very young ages. I did start in my teens. So I did put in years from before. I knew I wanted to be an author from age 16. I got my first literary agent at age 19. I was 22 when my first book sold. One of the reasons I say you can get to 25 and feel like you're ready to quit is because the mortality rate in publishing is very high, and five years in publishing… It's like dog years, where I felt like I had been in this for a very long time. Publishing can be kind of demoralizing in that way. I'm sure that you guys have covered it and I'm sure that we're going to cover it more.

[Dan] So, for me, I mean one of the mistakes that I made, looking back, is assuming that I was Brandon Sanderson.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Don't we all?

[Dan] We've been friends for decades.

[Brandon] Man, I have trouble with that as well.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, we shared an editor at the same time. All these kind of similarities. So, watching your career gave me… Not an unrealistic sense of my career, but just an assumption of oh, this is how a career works. Which is not true. Everyone's career is very different. So I was not setting goals for myself, I was just kind of like, "Oh, I got published a year behind Brandon. Everything's going to also be about a year behind Brandon." I was not setting goals for myself at all. This has nothing to do with relative levels of success, just that I was not proactively planning what my career was going to look like. I was kind of coasting on assumptions. Then I hit a point where I realized, "Oh, wait, I have to try so much harder than I'm trying right now." So I did set down and do some goal planning. This is what I'm going to do this year. This is my goal for this series. This is the kind of space that I want to be in next. In a few years from now, I want to expand into this other genre, or do these other things.

[Victoria] Well, I do want to also say I came at it through a bit of trial by fire, in that I started in YA. YA is potentially, of all the subgenres and all of the classifications, the most cutthroat in that they decide before your book is out…

[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.

[Victoria] Whether you have succeeded or failed. It is not a mentally very healthy and sustainable way to do things. So I think YA has the highest mortality rate, as I call it, among authors. They are very, very flash-in-the-pan focused, very what is hot right now and it is not hot tomorrow. Whereas one of the best things that I did for myself mentally was to expand out into adult genre, into science fiction and fantasy. I remember going to my publisher about two weeks after Vicious came out and being like, "Am I a success or am I a failure?" He said, "Your book just came out two weeks ago." I said, "Yes. You've had plenty of time to know."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Tor was like, "Check back in in a year or two. This isn't how we work." So I do think that there's a lot of these things which cause us to feel even lonelier in the process, even lacking in not only role models and ideals, but also simply in peer qualities, peer information. We don't share information very willingly. We're taught that everyone is an island unto themselves. It's a very isolation driven process.

[Brandon] Yeah. You talk about mortality rate. I've always discussed it as what I call wavelength. Certain genres have bigger peaks and bigger valleys. Just because of how many books are being released and the potential audiences and things like that. YA, I've noticed, man, if you get kind of a staple in adult science fiction and fantasy, it sells much longer, has a much longer tail, but that peak sometimes can be a lot lower than in YA. I like that you're all talking about this. I think people, when they hear or read the title for this episode, they're going to think, "Oh, goals are things like I want to hit the New York Times list, or I want to sell this many copies." None of us are talking about goals like that. We're talking about, if I… What are my goals? When I set goals, my goals are usually daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. I actually have a spreadsheet, and every day, I have the spreadsheet showing me how much I've done, how much is left. The average I would have to write each working day if I want to finish by this date. That's a really useful word count for me, because I know if it gets too high, then I have to change my date. Because it becomes beyond what I can do in a given day sustainably.

[Howard] Isn't that more of a Ravenclaw thing?

[Laughter]

[garbled… You just… Howard… The other day…]

[Victoria] I think it's really interesting, and I do want to bring it up, because I think you and I, Brandon, have very opposite tactics, but we both measure. Which is that I used to measure word count, but some days, as everyone who listens to this and I'm sure all of you know, you can work for eight hours that day, you can do a huge amount of legwork on your story, and you can achieve very few words. So, earlier, about a year and a half ago, I switched from word count to time spent. It's not quite as reliable for hitting a very specific deadline, but I found that from a mental health perspective and from a productivity perspective, creating a lower threshold of what I need to accomplish in order to feel like I'm succeeding creates a much more diminished self loathing and then allows me to conversely be far more productive in any given day.

[Brandon] This is definitely something you have to do individual, because… Individually, because I don't have that worry. I don't have that… What is… If I'm recording every day and I hit a period where there's low word counts, that's important for me to know, because it means that I need to look at the story and something's wrong. Right? If I'm doing low word counts… If I'm doing low word counts once in a while, the average word count I need to hit in order to hit this goal doesn't change very much because it's over time. But I don't have this… Like, if I'm not productive, like the…

[Victoria] You don't have my self loathing existential crisis. [Garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] I don't end up having that. But a lot of people do, that's very, very common.

[Victoria] It is. It's very common. But I think this gets back to the point you were making before, which is when we are talking about goals, we are being very careful to confine it to goals that are in our control as creators, because we all know that there are so many facets of this industry and so many factors that will never be in your control. It is really fun to dwell on those instead of doing your work.

[Howard] I want to offer a goal here which may sound a little bit negative at first. When I was talking, years ago, with Jay Lake, who has since passed away. He is one of my favorite people, because he introduced me at WorldCon to other people by saying, "He's writing the best science fiction comic that exists." I was like, "Who is this guy? How did I end up on his friend's list?" But he told me that the average career length for people in this field… Not career length for the people whose names maybe you know from seeing them on bookshelves forever, but for people who get published, and then go on to do other things, was like 5 to 7 years.

[Victoria] Mortality.

[Howard] Yeah, the mortality rate. Then he told me, "Howard, you've been doing this for 12 years, you're a fixture." Except he began… He inserted an adjective before fixture.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It made me feel wonderful, but it was also a little terrifying. Because the career goal that I didn't have, and the one that I'm offering to all of you is, I want… When this career ends, I'm going to accept that it may end at some point, I want to know what I want to do next. I want to live my life in such a way, I want to do this career in such a way that when it draws to a close, it doesn't draw to a close in a panic, it draws to a close because I still have a plan.

[Victoria] This is fascinating to me. I just celebrated a decade in publishing, like I celebrated it, like I had hit… Like, my 100th birthday.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I was so excited on it. Because… I think I did that because around six or seven years in, people started calling me an overnight success. I was amazed and insulted, because I think we have this idea, we love to fetishize the metrics of success, which are not in an author's control, and in so doing, erase a huge amount of the work that is going to create where you are at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons we'll always be focusing, or we try to re-center this on the minutia of the daily word count goals, or of the annual creativity goals, or of the hopes for the longevity or shape of our career, or the caveat plans that we make. Because, like you… The same way that you write a book, one word at a time, you get through and you make a career one word at a time, one year at a time. You finally get to say… And look, like five years in, right around the time that I sold Vicious, I also did a work-for-hire project for Scholastic. I found other ways to stay in the career, because a day job in writing was still going to give me an opportunity to be writing. I think sometimes we get to purity focused on like you're either a full-time writer, or you're not a real writer at all. The fact is like there are so many shapes that these careers take. There are so many hills and valleys, even on an escalation towards whatever we call success. You're still going to have years where you feel like you didn't do as much, where you feel like your position wasn't as high, regardless of where you are. I think that can be very un-grounding. So I think focusing on what are our individual… What are our goals when we're writing a book, what are our goals for the next step in front of us? Because really that's all we can really contain.

[Brandon] One of the best writers I know, flat out best writers I know, has never sold a book. This is partially because lots of health issues, some mental health issues, mean that for her, simply writing every week is a fight and a struggle, and writing something good… She keeps going and has kept going for 20 years, and writes amazing fantastic stuff, where the question for her is not, "Will I hit the bestseller list?" It is, "Do I get my writing done this week, through all the other things in my life that are so difficult?" She's really inspiring because of that.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Ghost Station.

[Dan] Ghost Station. So, this is mine. About four years ago, as I started to realize, oh, I have hit the end of a phase of my career, and I did not plan for a second phase, what am I going to do now? That's when I sat down and, like I said earlier, I started to look at genre. This is a weird thing for me to say, because I'm already in like four different ones, but I decided part of my career goal, my career plan, was I wanted to move into something wildly different. Reach an entirely separate audience that I had not yet been reaching. I love historical fictions, so I started writing historical fiction. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. But, last November, it came out as an Audible original called Ghost Station, which is my historical thriller. Cryptographers in Berlin in 1961 about two months after the Wall goes up. They're trying to figure out what's going on, and they're trying to reach their double agent on the other side. It's all just Cold War thriller. It's totally different from everything I've written before, but I loved it. I love everything about it. I'm hoping that this can build a new phase of career.

[Brandon] That's an Audible Original, so if you have an Audible subscription, it's one of the freebies that you can get every month, is that what that is, or is it…

[Dan] It's not… It's not necessarily going to be free. But you can get it dirt cheap, yeah.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah, because I think with your subscription, they have some weird thing. So go look it up. It is Audio Original.

[Dan] Yeah. So, a year after it releases, so next November, we'll be able to bring out a print edition of it. But…

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] For now, it is Audible exclusive, and they've done a fantastic job with it.

[Brandon] So, kind of coming out this topic from a different direction, we have two questions here asking basically the same thing. How do you balance writing what you love versus aiming for mass appeal? I like this question, because a lot of our listeners might be thinking, "Man, I wish I had Dan Wells's problem."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] "Of, man, I have to have four different careers going." They're like, "I'd like to have one." So, backing it up to aspiring writers…

[Victoria] Yeah. I have very complicated feelings on this, and I'll try and articulate them all. But I was actually thinking about what you were saying, Dan. I was thinking about the nature of your career, Brandon. I was thinking about the ways I fall somewhere very specifically in between them. Which is, I was thinking about author brand. Right? The thing is, like all of your books, Brandon, happen inside a universe that you have designed. So they all have a connective thread. Very few of my books have a connective thread, but I feel like we have… we both have an author brand. The idea that my readers can go from my middle grade, my YA, my adult, they can pick up any of the books, they're still going to feel like me. Damn, you were talking about the fact that you're entering into a genre that you haven't written in before, but I've now read your work in several genres, and I would say that your books always feel like you. So, like I know… I would be completely inauthentic to say, "Just write what you love. Never think about audience. Never think about brand." Because even when I'm thinking about audience, it's me. But I'm thinking about very specific versions of me, targeted to very specific audiences. I think one of the greatest things you can do as a creator is begin to think about what your through line is between your books. Is there something that kind of Pied Piper leads readers from one to the next? Is there a reason that readers should not, se… A series fandom should not stick with you for only one series, but should follow you from book to book. Because I think that's one of the great challenges that authors have, perhaps when they start with a series or a trilogy, and they finish that trilogy, and they go to write a new thing and they haven't cultivated an author brand. So they have a series brand, and people don't follow.

[Howard] Next week, we're going to be talking with Pat Rothfuss about prose. It just occurred to me that… This is harkening back to stuff that we said last month about the voyage, point A to point B. The story that you want to tell may well be that voyage, that point A to point B. What kind of person takes that trip in a sports car? What kind of reader takes it in a minivan? What kind of reader takes it in a four-wheel-drive truck? The prose that you use, the words that you use, the pacing that you used to tell your story, I think that is going to have more bearing on the market than the point A to point B. So being true to yourself may be what kind of story do I want to tell. Then, market chasing is how am I going to tell it?

[Dan] Let me give an example of this from my own work. This is not something that I had realized was my through line until a reader pointed it out. That in all of my books, there is a character who is obsessed with something and you get very deeply into it. Whether that is serial killer lore or virology in the Partials series or computer programming in the Mirador series. Even my middle grade is essentially a hard science fiction as a kid learns about space travel and microgravity. So what I have realized since then is, "Oh. My characters tend to get really excited about something. They delve super deep into it." That is what excites me as author. So I can write in anything. That's why I wrote a book about cryptographers, because they get super excited, enthused, and we learn all this stuff about cryptography. But then there's a totally different story around it.

[Victoria] I definitely think if I'm looking at similarity, I have 16 books. The thing is that they're all about all kinds of different things. The two things they all have in common is that they're weird. Like, they're not realism. They have some kind of thing that's left of center. But also, I try to balance the accessibility of the prose with the poetry of the prose that I like. I am really interested in writing books that convince people that they don't like a genre that they do like the genre. So I'm very much about finding that central space that doesn't alienate, but opens the door and says, "Come in." Like, I know that you don't know if you like the space. I know you find this space daunting. But I love being an entry point into a deeper space of the genre. For me, a lot of that comes down to, as Howard was saying, to the way I tell my stories. I specifically gear them toward a central audience that is perhaps a little bit wider, a little less niche. I do that because I know once I can get them in the room, I can tell whatever story I want. But I want to get them in the room first.

[Brandon] We are a little overtime…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So we're going to wrap it here. We could probably keep talking about this forever. But, Victoria, you have some homework for us.

[Victoria] I do have some homework. We've been talking in this episode about making sure you not only have goals, but those goals are delineated between things in your control and things out of your control. An exercise that I actually go through with my agent every year, and that I did before I was agent did as well, is called the 1-5-10. I sit down, because I love lists. I feel like most of us really like making lists, because it gives us a false sense of control over the universe. I make goals of what do I want to achieve in one year, in five years, and in 10 years. Where do I want to be? Thinking of it that way allows me to look at my most immediate goals, finishing a project that I'm working on, maybe the five year allows me to shift my place in what kind of stories I'm writing or take on something that's a bit of a daring challenge, and the 10 year starts being about career, starts being about the shape of the imprint that you're making and the goals that you hope to do. I think it's really important. I want you to try and make three lists, a one, a five, and a ten. I want you to be ambitious, but I really want you to try and keep those goals to things that you can actively influence and control. If you need to make a second list of 1-5-10 for hopes and dreams, that is absolutely fine, but I think it's really important that we don't conflate the metrics of success, like hitting a bestseller list or selling X number of copies that the industry controls so much of with the things that we can actually control as creators.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/19/15-03-self-publishing/

Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun!

[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.

[Nandi] 15 minutes long.

[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tamie] And we're not that smart.

[Bridget] But we are all self published.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]

[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]

[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]

[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]

[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?

[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.

[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.

[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.

[Howard] That's a solid number.

[Bridget] For my first year.

[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?

[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.

[Howard] Tamie?

[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.

[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?

[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.

[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?

[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.

[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?

[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.

[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?

[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.

[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.

[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.

[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?

[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.

[Howard] Okay.

[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels

[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.

[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.

[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.

[Victorine] Yep. Yup.

[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…

[Howard] When you say three of us…

[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…

[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.

[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.

[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.

[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?

[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.

[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?

[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.

[Chuckles]

[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.

[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.

[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?

[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.

[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?

[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.

[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.

[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.

[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.

[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?

[Nandi?] Absolutely.

[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.

[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…

[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.

[Garble]

[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.

[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."

[Cheers]

[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…

[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.

[Howard] Who's got our homework?

[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.

[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/28/14-17-its-like-car-talk-meets-welcome-to-nightvale/

Key points: Comp titles, or comparative titles, are titles that a book reminds you of. Who is this book for? E.g., a pitch like X in space. Or traditionally two books, with your book in the overlap. Not the sum or combination, but the intersection. Comp titles early in the writing process can help you refine your book. Comp titles can define genre and category. Think about the elemental genres. Comp titles can help identify your audience and target a market. Consider the set dressing and structure when picking your comp titles. Comp titles is not just A meets B, you can say which elements you are referring to. You can also throw in a wrench with a third element to give it a twist. Be aware that readers may not understand the shorthand of comp titles. Use comp titles as the base of longer explanations. Comp titles are a clarifying exercise, to help identify the core elements of your story. Beware the comp titles that have been overused, like Harry Potter.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 17.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale."

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are talking about comp-titles. Those things that you cite when you are trying to describe the thing that you've created in terms of other people's stuff. Dongwon is back with us this week. Dongwon, in your line of work, agenting, you use comp-titles kind of a lot.

[Dongwon] Comp titles is how we think about the universe. So, comp titles are, just for clarification, it means comparative title. So any time you're talking about any given book, what you're usually doing in the back of your head, if you're a publishing professional, is automatically coming up with the one to two to three titles that this book reminds you of. Part of the reason you're doing that is, in publishing, one of the main questions is who is this book for. The way we talk about that is we use other books as a proxy. So if your book is like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, then that tells you something about who this book is for and, hopefully, how many copies it's going to sell.

[Dan] Yeah. I just sold... at time of recording, I have just sold a middle grade to Audible, based almost entirely on the pitch, Home Alone in Space.

[Dongwon] Hell, yes.

[Dan] That is working everywhere. The editor's taking that around the company and says, "Hey, can I get some resources?" "For what?" "Home Alone in Space." "Yes. Here's all the money that you need." So a really good comp title can have incredible value.

[Mary Robinette] That is basically how I sold my first novel. It was Jane Austen with magic. Then I also have Thin Man in Space.

[Dan] Which I've wanted to read for so long.

[Dongwon] I will point out that every example of a comp title that we've given so far has been one book with an extra element. That is one way to do a comp title. But most traditionally, what you really want to do is have two different books. In the Venn diagram, the overlap between book A and book B is where your book lives. Right? So, the ones that we've been giving so far can be really useful just to give a feel for what the book's going to read like, but it's not telling enough yet about who this book is for in terms of the audience. That's sort of an interesting gradation that you'll see [garbled]

[Howard] The first time I ever had to come up with a comp title for my work, I was making a pitch to a media guy who, of course, never got back to me because that's the way a lot of these things work at Comic Cons. I described Schlock Mercenary as it's like Babylon 5 meets Bloom County. Babylon 5, science fiction that pays attention to story, science fiction that remains consistent. Bloom County, comic strip with short serial elements.

[Mary Robinette] So in that, is Schlock Bill the cat?

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you pay close attention, both Schlock and Bill the cat have mismatched eyeball sizes.

[Ooo!]

[Howard] So the answer to your question is not no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My work is not just highly derivative...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It is markedly and easily identifiably derivative.

[Dongwon] We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the things that I think is interesting about comp titles is that... I find that when I come up with the comp titles early in my process that it also helps me sort of refine what it is that I'm working on. That sometimes it's like, "Oh, yeah. This is an element out of that Venn diagram." So as we're going through this, I kind of want to talk about what we mean by the Venn diagram of where the two books overlap. You're the one who introduced me to this idea, Dongwon, so I'm going to put you on the spot and make you explain it.

[Dongwon] So the Venn diagram is really useful. I think the way people think a lot about A plus B is they tend to think that it's the combination, it's the full territory defined by book A plus book B. That's the wrong way to think about it. What you're doing is, you're looking at the narrow overlap between those two books. One of the reasons this is really useful in pitching, for example, is it does a lot of the work to define genre and what category your book is before you start telling people the details of your book. So if you start saying that it's Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, then you already know that this is for someone who likes dinosaurs and laser swords, right? It's not... The combination of those two things, it's you're putting the laser swords into a park full of dinosaurs or something to that effect.

[Howard] It's also worth calling back to our... Oh, was it Season 11, Elemental Genres? Calling back to the Elemental Genres. Let's talk about Star Wars and Jurassic Park. It will not always reverse engineer this way, but if you are talking about Jurassic Park because there are cool monsters and it is a horror story in which there is a sense of wonder, and you're talking about Star Wars because Campbellian monomyth and swords. Then, if those are the elements in your story, Star Wars meets Jurassic Park is a great way to say which elemental genres you are using. But it could also be dogfighting spaceships meets biological technology that hasn't actually gone wrong...

[Dongwon] I'm now picturing raptors learning how to use X-wings. It's a really delightful image.

[Mary Robinette] I would totally agree the heck out of that.

[Dongwon] There you go.

[Dan] Now Mary mentioned, Mary Robinette mentioned earlier the... That it's often a very good idea to come up with this comp title, this comparison early in your process. One of the reasons that that can help is it can help you identify your audience and it can help you target your market a little better. I sold my YA cyberpunk to the editor, to the publisher, using "This is Veronica Mars meets Bladerunner." Which is great, but he's my age. It very quickly became obvious as we started figuring out how to market this in the YA market that when we sold this six years ago, there were no good well-known cyberpunk properties for teenagers. We tried everything we could think of. Today it would be easy. Because we have... There's a new Bladerunner movie that's been very recent, there's all these other cyberpunk things that are popping up. We've... I use it now, I usually pitch it as Overwatch. But six years ago, if I'd taken the time to think about it, I could have identified maybe... Maybe there isn't a slot in the market for this. Which is what turned out to be. It was a very poor seller because the market... I was maybe two or three years before the market was ready.

[Dongwon] And yet… Sorry.

[Howard] I just… I wanted to pause for a moment for a book of the week, because that sounded like a nice point to transition. Except Dongwon had a thought and I didn't want to step on it.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I'll say my thought really quick. Dan has stumbled on, I think, one of the reasons why publishing can be a very conservative business sometimes. It's one of the flaws in the system. It's how we think about things, but it's one of the issues is if there isn't a prior example that's been successful, it's very hard to do something that is very new and very different from what has come before. Now there will be breakout moments when that thing happens, and you get to do this big new thing. But often times, there are a number of books that preceded it that didn't get traction. Often, when somebody says, "Oh, this is a brand-new genre," that's not actually true. That work has been happening, it just hasn't been selling particularly well.

[Howard] Well, that's kind of a down note to talk about a book that we want to [inaudible]

[laughter, yeah]

[Dan] A positive spin on that particular thought is that my kind of tepid reaction to cyberpunk actually paved the way for the new Blade Runner movie to be a big success.

[Chuckles exactly]

[Dan] That's where I'm going to go with this.

[Dongwon] You provided a lovely steppingstone.

[Howard] Who's talking about Arkady Martine's book?

[Dongwon] I believe that is me. So, our book of the week is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's a brand-new space opera that's just out from Tor Books. The comp titles that I'm using for this book would be that it is John McQuarrrie meets Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It is a political murder mystery set in the heart of a future massive galaxy-spanning empire. A young diplomat is sent to the heart of this empire because her predecessor, she discovers, has been murdered. She needs to prevent her tiny nation from being annexed by this empire. It's a really wonderful fraught political thriller full of massive world building and a very sort of complex view of how people interact and how empires work which is where the Ann Leckie part comes in. It's a wonderful read, and I hope you all enjoy it very much.

[Howard] Outstanding. That was A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine?

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] Available now?

[Dongwon] It should be available now.

[Howard] Should be. Because we record these things in advance…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And our listeners never get tired of us talking about this weird time travel thing that we do.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, according to some of our listeners, they really do get tired of it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Will cut all this out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It is absolutely available now.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one thing that I wanted to kind of circle back to about when we're talking about the comp titles and how to pick one is that there's kind of two things that you're looking at. One is the set dressing of the thing. The other is the structure of the thing. So the set dressing are things like Jurassic Park, if we think of Jurassic Park and the set dressing of that, we think of dinosaurs, we think of a park. But the structure of Jurassic Park is thriller and horror. So when you're picking your comp titles, I think it's imp… I think that it's worthwhile making sure that you're trying to find a comp title that has both axes in alignment with what you're picking. Otherwise, if you're like, it's like Jurassic Park, but it's all gentle and soft. Unless your other comp title brings the gentle and soft into it, you're going to wind up sending a false message [garbled]

[Howard] It's like Jurassic Park meets Gummi Bears.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then I think people… But see…

[Dan] Ooo, yeah.

[Dongwon] Then your raptors are just bouncing around the park. That's [unsettling, upsetting]

[Dan] I'm digging that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but that…

[Howard] That sounds just delicious.

[Mary Robinette] That could be like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man version of…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] rampaging Gummi bears.

[Dongwon] One thing to point out when talking about comp titles is you don't have to just say it's like A Meets B, right? You can say different things about it, right? So you can say it's the voice of A and the world building of B. Or you can say it's the plot of this meets this set dressing element. An example I just gave for the Arkady Martine, John McQuarrie is providing the elemental genre, it's a thriller, it's a political thriller. Then Ancillary Justice is providing voice and setting, more than anything else. One I talk about a lot is Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, which is… I talk about it as an Arthur C. Clarke big idea story as told by Octavia Butler. So it gives you this is old school big idea science-fiction, but told with this contemporary voice that has a cultural focus.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing you can do is add a third element to throw in a twist. My Partials series, we marketed that as this is The Stand meets Battlestar Galactica, starring Hermione Granger. That third element can kind of be the wrench that helps the other two twist around.

[Dongwon] Dan is very good at this game. I'll point that out.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'd like to take a moment and leash this just a little bit. Because in my experience, I'm excited to hear if it's at all universal, the comp title tool does not work well with large bodies of readers. If I go to the customer and tell them this is like Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, they do not have necessarily the vocabulary, the syntax, to know that I'm not saying the nostalgia you have from Star Wars and the nostalgia you have from Jurassic Park, you're going to get both of those in this book. When I've seen people try and pitch their books in that way, often hand selling, it feels fraught. Whereas if you're having a conversation with an agent or a publisher or an editor or a bookseller, they speak that language and they know exactly what you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that you're right that if you do a shorthand, if you just toss it out just as those two comp titles to the average reader, they don't have the insider shorthand. But I also think that if you use those as the basis of a longer sentence, that it is very, very useful. It's one of the things that… With the… The way I talk about Calculating Stars to readers is I say, "So, it's 1952. Slam an asteroid into the Earth, kicking off the space race very early when women are still computers. So it's kind of like Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact." They're like, "Oh! Oh, sign me up for that."

[Howard] See, that is a… For me, that is a perfect pitch. Except not… Perfect pitch has a different…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It is an outstanding elevator pitch for a book because it goes very, very quickly, and at the end, you have planted a hook. That, for me, is one of the most important parts about these comp titles is that it's supposed to give you a bunch of information, but also invite you to ask a question. Which is, Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact, how bad does it get?

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that I'm also focusing… Using that initial sentence, I am telling the reader which parts of the comp titles to focus on. So I do… It's like you have to decide what is important and why you picked that comp title, and then set it up when you're talking to a reader.

[Dongwon] Also, the comp titles are really a clarifying exercise. It helps you to focus on what are the core elements of your story that you want to be telling to other people about the book that you've written. So, once you have your comp titles in mind, all of your copy, your longer pitch, that can descend from that. So even if you don't end up using the actual comparative titles when you're talking to a reader, if you meet them on the street or in a bookshop or whatever it is, you still have in your head the target audience in mind that is shaped by those overlapping properties.

[Howard] Dongwon, I think that's a great place to phase into our homework, except Dan's telling me he wants to say something.

[Dan] There's one important thing I want to point out before we leave comp titles.

[Howard] Go.

[Dan] Which is in line with thinking about your audience. Especially when you are pitching this, when you are presenting this to an agent or an editor, keep in mind that they have already heard four bazillion of these. So don't use the really obvious ones. Don't use Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. Because they've seen those so many times.

[Dongwon] Well, the thing I want to add to that, just a little bit of clarification about why those are bad, is because the comp title's a proxy for the audience. So if you say Harry Potter, what you're saying is my book is for every human who's ever existed on the planet.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That's not useful information. It made plot wise be correct or it may have elements that are correct. So you can cherry pick an element, you can say starring Hermoine Granger just because that's good shorthand for a character. But you can't use Harry Potter as a comp because it doesn't tell me anything useful. You're only… Your Venn diagram is a circle of the human population.

[Howard] I think that that's probably the places in which I've seen the hand selling fail. Because if you tell me it's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park, I don't believe you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's not the result that you wanted.

[Howard] We have homework.

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to come up with six comp titles. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you take some work in progress and you come up with three comp titles that are from works in progress, and that you come up with three additional ones that are for work that you have not written but you just think would be a cool combination. Literally, the Thin Man in Space, which we have just sold to Tor at the time of this recording, that began as a comp title. I had the comp title before I had anything else. So, six comp titles. Three for existing works to help you clarify what you're working on, and three as an initial brainstorming for something that you might want to write.

[Howard] Once you've got those three that you might want to write… [Garbled may be planted]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] It may be time to write it.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you may be out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.46: Reinventing Yourself

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/11/12/12-46-reinventing-yourself/

Key points: Transitions can be conscious, and risky, because readers/fans don't always follow you. Read your reviews -- the four stars, especially, provide information about what to keep, and what needs tuning. Be conscious of your choices. But they do have benefits, too. You need to stay interested and engaged. Be aware of the market, but try to avoid letting yourself be trapped by it. How do you keep learning? Do new things, try them, learn how to do them. Talk to people who have experience doing what you want to do, and study how other people have done it (read!). Pick out places that your writing is weak, and then figure out how to correct them.

( Learn, plateau, learn... climb! )

[Brandon] Mary Anne, you have some homework for us?
[Mary Anne] Yes. So, this is continuing with what Brandon was saying. What I do when I'm switching genres is I going to immerse myself in the genre. Because often, it's been a while since I've had time to read a lot of it. So, I would go, decide I'm going to try fantasies, science fiction, horror, whatever it is. Find a year's best anthology. And from… And a recent one, because things change over time. Just read through it, that's going to give you a huge variety. Or, if you're not a short story person, then go to the award winners from the previous years. The Nebula awards, the Brom Stoker awards, whatever it is, and read the nominees for best novel.
[Brandon] Excellent. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/09/17/12-38-what-do-editors-really-want-with-toni-weisskopf-and-cat-rambo/

Key Points:
Q: What do editors really want?
A: Chocolate and bourbon. To give you a contract for your bestseller and $50,000. The next XXX, but not the same. To buy a book that works. The writer to do the work!
Q: What are they looking for when working with the editor?
A: The ability to take direction, to achieve the author's vision. How do we bridge the gap between "Don't write to the market" and "Editors buy for the market?" The first audience is yourself. Readers, like dogs, can smell crap. Write what you are passionate about.
Q: When an editor finds a problem, what is the next step?
A: A challenge to the author. Editors suggest fixes, but good authors don't do that, they do it their own way, in their own voice.
Q: What are some common pitfalls or advice?
A: Be timely. Don't try to be perfect, just respond, and keep the communication going. Ask yourself, "Will this news get better if I wait?" Editors are not parents or bosses. Collaboration is the name of the game.
Q: Is there an exemplary or hilarious incident from the trenches?
A: Don't respond to a rejection slip with the news that your mother liked the story. Arguing with rejection letters is pointless.

( Chocolate and bourbon, over and over... )

[Dan] So let's finish up. I'm very excited to hear our homework. Which is what I have written down as the Weisskopf possum theory.
[Toni] Oh, God. We don't have enough time for that.
[Laughter]
[Toni] Telling the possum story would be at least 10 minutes.
[Dan] Oh, well, we can't do that. Can you give us like a 10 second version of it?
[Toni] Cat, go first.
[Laughter]
[Cat] Here's my writing advice.
[Dan] Okay.
[Cat] Try something new this week. If you always write indoors, go right outdoors. If you always write by hand, try it on a typewriter. Just mix it up a little. See what happens.
[Dan] Awesome. That's great advice.
[Toni] All right. This has nothing to do with possums. But listen to dialogue. Sit down and write down, if you can, how people actually talk. This is not how you write dialogue, but it will help you writing dialogue.
[Dan] That's great advice.
[Howard] When she says listen to dialogue, listen to people speaking to each other. Not TV dialogue. Listen to people talking.
[Toni] Yes. Thank you.
[Dan] Aaron Sorkin…
[Toni] That's why you're the writer.
[Dan] One of my favorite bits of writing advice he gives is go sit in a coffee shop for an hour and just listen to people talking to each other.
[Toni] Yup.
[Dan] Awesome. Well, that is our show. Thank you very much, Cat and Toni, for being here. We are very excited.
[Cat, Tony] Thank you.
[Dan] Everyone else, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/27/12-35-short-fiction-markets-with-spencer-ellsworth-and-guest-host-beth-meacham/

Key Points: The short fiction market has grown enormously. Where should you submit? Consider size of the audience, how much you get paid, and how shiny it is to you (attractiveness!). What's most important to you? Express yourself first, don't try to impress the editor or write like someone else. Short fiction teaches you to get the important stuff on the page, and shave off the unimportant stuff. Plus, it's fun! You need to read short fiction to know what's already been done, and then tell a new story. Finally, slap your muse. (aka don't write the easy story, look for a unique new story!)

( The Big 3/4/5/ became 10 or 20? )

[Howard] Who's got our writing prompt?
[Beth] Spencer does.
[Spencer] Okay. So. Since I assume a lot of you came here because you're Brandon Sanderson fans, anyway, and you like long stories, I want you all to think about a long story you really… The type of long story you really enjoy, the type of storytelling you like to see a big book, an epic, an epic of Gilgamesh type thing. Then I want you to sit down and write it in under 4000 words. See if you can communicate the same thing… The kind of thing that you think needs 500 pages, in 4000 words.
[Howard] Outstanding. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write short.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses #12: Submitting to the Editors Part 1

From

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/04/27/writing-excuses-episode-12-submitting-to-editors-part-1/

Stacy Whitman, Not Howard
( Lots of little stuff )
Just before the break, someone (Dan?) said: Know the rules before you break them.

The second part of this will be in Writing Excuses #13.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Music: Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy), Big & Rich

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with market

Writing Excuses 19.07: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Intention

Writing Excuses 18.19: What is Publishing For, Anyway?

Writing Excuses 15.34: Writing Deliberate Discomfort

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

Writing Excuses 12.46: Reinventing Yourself

Writing Excuses 12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

Writing Excuses 12.35: Short Fiction Markets, with Spencer Ellsworth and guest host Beth Meacham

Writing Excuses #12: Submitting to the Editors Part 1

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