Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-02-an-interview-with-dongwon-song/ 

 

Key points: Publishing is about providing context for the story. Positioning. The story about the story. As a published author, you have your writing job, the craft, and you have your professional author job, hitting deadlines, negotiating, networking, marketing yourself. Why did you write this book? Why is this important to you? Why is this your story to tell?

 

[Season 18, Episode 2]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with DongWon Song.

[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.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that we wanted to do is take a little bit of time and help you all get to know us. We have been doing this for a long time at this point. While you got the quick introduction to us in that first episode of the year, we wanted to take some time and do a little bit of a deeper dive into the backgrounds of each of us so that you understand kind of what we bring to the table, but, more specifically, how our lens can help you. So, DongWon, you and I have known each other for a very long time.

[DongWon] Indeed.

[Mary Robinette] So I want to start with the version of you that I met first, which was the editor version. Because you've gone through several reinventions. So, what do you think, like, when you think about yourself as an editor and approaching writing? Like, what are the lenses that being an editor in specific do you think allows you to look at the work?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think being an editor was a real education. By that, I mean working inside a big five publisher as an editor. For me, that was a real education and how to think about putting books into the world. Right? So, for me, publishing as an industry, as an activity, as a goal is so much about providing context for the story. Providing context for the thing that you, the audience, are about to read. I remember when I interviewed for the editorial job at Orbit, I was interviewing with the publisher there, Tim Holman. It was one of the most stressful 45 minutes of my entire life. He asked me a series of questions that I not only didn't know how to answer, I didn't understand the questions he was asking me. Because the first thing he said was, "What's a book that you think has been published well recently?" I talked about like, "Oh, I liked this book." Or "I liked that cover." Or "I liked that marketing." He's like, "Nonononono. None of that is what I'm asking. What's been published well?" What I realized eventually, after years of working for him, what he meant by that. It was just the holistic synthesis of the whole thing. What's the positioning? What's the story that we're telling about this story? So, I think the thing that I bring to the table from my editorial experience is not just the mechanics of like how to structure things, how to fix a sentence, how to do this, that, and the other. It's how do we frame this whole thing? How do we think about the book as it is in a way that we can package it, we can communicate it, and we can pitch it for a broader audience?

 

[Mary Robinette] I love that. I love that holistic approach idea. Which is actually a nice segue to the next piece that I wanted you to talk about a little bit, because there's your professional identity, but then there's also you as a person. After I got to know you as an editor, I got to know you as a friend. You've also gone through some reinvention as a friend, as well. So I was wondering if you could tell people a little bit about the aspects of yourself that are perhaps not obvious with just voice?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think one thing that I have found over the course of my career is starting to understand the ways in which my own context influences the kind of stories that I'm interested in, the way I think about publishing, the way I think about story. Just for clarity, so everybody's on the same page, I'm transgender. I'm trans fem non-binary, I use they/them pronouns. I'm also Korean American. So I'm bringing those perspectives as a marginalized person in a predominantly white, predominantly sexed industry. There's some friction around that. Right? It gives me a certain perspective. It gives me a certain interest in the kinds of fiction I work with and the kinds of perspectives that I enjoy seeing on the page, I enjoy working with, and that I want to see more of in the industry. So that is a thing that informs not just what I'm excited about, but also how I think about story. Right? Coming from a background where I'm interested in different narrative traditions, where I kind of grew up with a different cultural context, I think that gives me a sense of other modes of storytelling, other modes of engaging with the world. I can sort of come at certain types of stories with a little bit more of a critical perspective. When I say critical, I don't mean that in a negative way, but in a way that I… With that parallax of my perspective, I can see difference and I can see different aspects of the story then I think a more homogenous industry could. For me, I think that's a real asset to finding fiction that really stands out, that really has that perspective that is very novel and exciting and engaging.

 

[Erin] That actually makes me think of a question, which is you've talked a little bit about how your identity changes the way that you negotiate story or that you think of story. What about the industry itself? Like, how do you think your own identity and your journey has… Gives you a different perspective, if it does, on the actual publishing industry?

[DongWon] Yeah. I'm a literary agent for a lot of reasons. I enjoy the life, I enjoy the work, I love advocating for writers. But one of those reasons is I get to be pretty independent. I work with an agency. It's a pretty small group. But my structure with them is… I'm 1099 with them, I'm not employed by them in a direct way. I don't work for a big multinational corporation which is what you're doing if you're working for a traditional publisher. That means that I get to work on the books that I want to work on. I get to advocate for the writers I want to advocate with. I don't need approval from anybody to take something on that I think is worthwhile. There's a lot of risks to that, right? I often find myself ice skating uphill sometimes trying to get a certain project over the finish line. But for me, that's really exciting and really engaging. So I think my role in the industry has been shaped a little bit by the friction of being a person of color, being queer, in this industry. I have found a way to carve out a space for myself. But that really feels like a thing that I had to do, I had to chip that out. I had to carve that out. I had to push back and kind of fight for my little corner here. I love it. I loved doing it. I love the space that I am in. But it took work to build that and make room for myself, so that I can now make room for other people.

 

[Dan] Now I've got a question for you. The… We've had you as an instructor on the Writing Excuses retreat several times. So I worry that some of our listeners are hearing you talk about how to package a book, how to present a book to booksellers, and things like that, and are worried that it is so long… That for an aspiring writer, that you… That that's a concern so far down the road as to be immaterial right now. But you've proven over and over again on the retreat that you have a lot to say to the brand-new, little baby aspiring author as well. Can you talk about how you can adapt what you learned publishing wise to the very early career author?

[DongWon] Yeah. It's a little bit of a trick, because one thing that I like to talk about a lot is that I think as a professional author, as a published author, you kind of have two different roles, right? You have your writing job, and you have your professional author job. The writing is really focused on the craft. It's sitting down, putting words on the page, getting the story out. Telling the story that's important to you, that is the book of your heart. But then, the professional author side is hitting deadlines, it's learning how to negotiate, is learning how to network, it's learning how to market yourself. All of those things. So, for me, the reason I'm excited to be participating in the podcast in this way is getting to communicate some of the professional skills at an earlier stage. Right? That doesn't necessarily mean that you need to adjust your writing process to think about like, "Oh, who's going to be the audience? Who's going to be the bookseller?" I kind of want you to put that aside, but I do want you to start thinking about developing professional skills early in your career, and developing an awareness of the industry. What's being published? Who's publishing it? Where are books sold? How are they sold? Right? The more you're aware of those things, the more when you do get to that stage, you're going to be ready to hit the ground running. Right? When I work with a client, the thing that I'm most excited about is a sense of professionalism in understanding the industry. I'm not expecting them to know everything. But being engaged with it, I think, gives you a set of skills coming into the industry that means you're going to find the right agent, you're going to be able to frame how you're talking about your book in a way that makes sure that when it goes to an editor, when it goes to the audience, it's the book that you're proud of and the book that's important to you. The more you can advocate for yourself in this process, I think the more you're going to get the career that you want and get the story that is important to you out into the world.

 

[Mary Robinette] That sounds wonderful. Let's pause for a quick break, and then when we come back, let's dive a little bit more into what that's like, what pitching a project is like.

[DongWon] Our book of the week is a debut novel that is out this month. It is titled The Daughters of Izdihar by Hadeer Elsbai. Hadeer is an Egyptian American writer. The story is a secondary world fantasy, but it's very loosely based on contemporary or 20th-century Egyptian history in terms of the suffrage movement that took place there, I believe in the 1950s. Hadeer has taken those elements and filtered that through this fantasy lens to really examine what it is to exist in that society, what it means to resist, how do you build a resistance, how do you build a movement, and the cost that takes on the people who are present in that and who were those advocates. What it meant to stand up for yourself and fight against an oppressive regime. It really is the story of two women who are friends and caught up in this moment, coming at it from different perspectives. One from sort of a more working class and one from a more wealthy perspective, and how they come together to build solidarity and build a true movement. It's a really thrilling book. It's beautifully written. There's a wonderful queer romance in it. Truly, truly a book that I've been so delighted to work with, and feels really special to me. Hadeer is a client of mine. That, again is The Daughters of Izdihar. By the time you're hearing this, it'll just hit the shelves. So go and check it out.

 

[Mary Robinette] Now we're going to dive into what it's like to pitch things. Howard, you had a question for DongWon on this?

[Howard] Yeah. I'm going to lead by saying that I've had a couple of sales jobs in my life, and I hated both of them. I had extensive experience. They lasted for like two, three days each. When you are working as an agent, in my imagination, your job is to sell one thing to one person by convincing them that they can sell it to a million people.

[DongWon] Uh-huh.

[Howard] Did I get that right? Is that kind of how it goes?

[DongWon] Close.

[Howard] So tell me how that works. Because that seems zany.

[DongWon] Yeah. It is zany. It's a very unique job, and kind of a weird job, and one that I deeply, deeply love. But what's funny is my first job in publishing was at a literary agency. I'd just gotten to the point where I was taking on clients, starting to pitch projects, and I was like, "I hate this." I kind of had the same reaction you did, Howard, in terms of like sales jobs are so hard, I don't like doing it, I don't like cold calling, I was bad at networking at that point, so I was like, "Oh, I think it would be easier to buy things and sell it, so I'm going to go and be an editor." The joke was on me, because mostly what editors do is pitch stuff to the other people in the company. Instead of trying to get an editor to buy it, now you're like convincing your boss, you're convincing art, you're convincing the sales force, all of these things. So, ironically, becoming an editor was the thing that forced me to get good at pitching and really learn to love that process. But, I think we're coming back to the agenting side now having those skills, but where it really diverged from my initial idea of what the business was and from those sales jobs you were talking about is I'm not pitching to the public world. I'm not pitching to a thousand people. You're right, that I'm trying to get one person to buy it. But when I send a project out, I'm sending it to eight people, 10 people, maybe 20 if it's really… Depending on the category. But I'm sending it to people I know. People I have relationships with. Right? I love to work with people I have built a friendship with, a professional trust with over many years. So I can go to those people and I have a little bit of a shorthand and say, "Here's what this thing is. It's like this other thing." Or "You know me. You know what I like. I know what you like. I think you're a great fit for this because I've seen you do X, Y, and Z, and your great at X, Y, and Z, and that's what this author needs." Right? So we can have this like deeper conversation about what the fit is, like why this is the book for them. So the sales pitch becomes as much like giving them the tools to turn around and go pitch it to everybody else, to pitch it to that broader audience. But it's also me convincing them and giving them the tools to go do all that convincing for other people. So it's a little bit of like a second-order thing. Not to horn in on your territory, Mary Robinette, but it's a little bit like puppeteering. You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Ahuh.

[DongWon] Like, I'm pulling strings on a second order. I need to pull this strings so that that person can go do those eight other things I need them to do. Right?

[Howard] Thank you for strings, because the other kind of puppet would have your hand in a bad place.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I thought… I was actually [garbled] theater, but then we get into a whole different deep dive.

[DongWon] I know there's technicalities on this thing here.

 

[Howard] I have a follow-up question.

[DongWon] Please.

[Howard] How does that pitch reflect back to… I mean, the knowledge that you need to develop that pitch, how does that reflect back to your client, the author?

[DongWon] Absolutely. So this goes back to the first thing I was talking about which we call positioning in the business. Positioning, the way I talk about it, is the story about the story. Right? So much of publishing is what story can we tell about the story that you have written. Right? So this reflects back on the author because I think the more the author understands what the story that they can tell about their own story is, the more that does a lot of free work for me and for the editor and for the sales force. Right? We're obviously going to have input on it that's going to evolve over the conversation as we all bring our different perspectives to the table. But I love it when a writer shows up in my inbox or comes to me, and as we're talking with this is why I wrote this book, this is where I think it fits, this is the kind of thing that I'm trying to do. Then that gives me all of these tools to build around. Right? If I know why it's important to you, the writer, and if I know how you see this in the world. Like what movies it's like, what other books is it like. Who do you think your readership is? Then that gives me a ton of tools to build a pitch around that I can then take to the people I have relationships with and convince them to take that and run with it. Right? So, ideally, in the best cases, I think a book shows up on my desk with a pitch in place, and that's the same pitch I go to the publishers with. That's the same pitch they go to their sales force with. That's the same pitch that goes to the reviewers, and then to the readers. Right? If there is that connection, if there's that like real through line, that to me says we're getting it right, we're nailing it. We're doing the thing that fits your vision for the book.

[Dan] So, how often, when you say a book shows up on your desk with that kind of pitch, how often is that pitch overt on behalf of the author? Or more likely, I assume, that pitch is buried somewhere in the query letter and you are able to draw it out based on your experience.

[DongWon] Yeah. Most of the time, it's a little buried. Most of the time, it's me reading between things are having a conversation with the author. I'm very direct. I'll just straight up be like, "Hey. Why'd you write this book? Why is this important to you? Why is this your story to tell?" Then, out of that conversation, I can start putting together, and start seeing why this is important and how to do it. Right? Not everyone works this way. One thing I really want to get across, you're going to hear a lot from me about how I see the business and what my perspective is. That's me. I'm one agent. You put five agents in a room and asked them a question, you will get 7 to 8 different answers. Right? Like, we all have different ways of doing this that are very different. Publishing is a big business with a lot of different perspectives. There's room for those perspectives. I come at it from this way, this is a little bit part of like why I like to talk about my own marginalizations and my own cultural perspective. Because there's a seriousness to vision that's important to me. Right? Because that's how I engage with the world. That's how I've learned that I have to engage with the world. So I look for that in fiction, too. There are other ways to do this, but for me, understanding why this book is important to you, why you're the only person who could write this story, that's really top of mind for me anytime I'm considering taking a project on.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about you is that you do bring your perspective to it. You also always want to lift up other creative people. Which is why you started this newsletter. So I want you to briefly tell folks about the newsletter, because I encourage our listeners to start subscribing and following you along. Then, if you can tell us that the homework is that you have for us, after you talk about the newsletter, that would be amazing.

[DongWon] Absolutely. So, a few years back, I started a newsletter, in part because I love talking about the business, I love talking about the industry, and I love doing the educational component. From teaching at Writing Excuses, from doing other workshops, I found like I really loved doing that. I was also teaching at Portland State at the time, I've taught at NYU. Sort of teaching people who want to be in the business how to work in publishing. It is a tough business. It is a very difficult business to work in. The money can be very tight, the amount of work you're doing is overwhelming, there's a lot of people fighting to improve labor conditions in the industry right now. Hopefully this is resolved by the time this comes out, but the HarperCollins union is currently on strike. There's a lot happening to try and push the business forward. So, to me, one thing that was important to me was to communicate what the subjective experience of being in publishing was like. So I started this newsletter that, inevitably, there's some advice for writers in there, but really what it's about is providing a perspective on the business for you to understand this is what the life of being an agent is like, these are the things I think about, these are the things I struggle with. There are ways that I try to communicate that and frame that so it's useful for writers to then approach the industry or think about the business. But it's a thing that I write for myself it's almost personal essay as much as it is educational in terms of this is what it's like to sit in my seat on my side of the table. It's a really tough job. It has a lot of really hard days. So, thinking about how to talk about that, I ended up just putting it up front. I've named the newsletter Publishing Is Hard. You can go to publishingishard.com, sign up for it there. All the content is free. There is a paid tier if you feel like contributing. So I'm doing that. I'm also starting to do monthly Twitch streams that are Q&A sessions. That is what those subscriptions in part are for is my ability to do those and bring on a writer and make sure they are compensated for their time, too. So, I'm going to be doing those going forward. Sign up for the newsletter. It's very irregular, don't expect everything every week. But I try to make sure there is one or two things a month that I… That really sort of talk about one of my experiences and what my perspective on the business is.

 

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. Our homework assignment for our lovely listeners?

[DongWon] Your homework assignment. I'm a literary agent. I want you to start thinking about who the right agent for you is. It's a good thing to think about early in your career. That list will evolve and change over time. People come in and out of the business. But starting to pay attention to who's out there, who's doing what, what's exciting to you, what are you looking for in an agent. I think it's a good thing to do early on. Right? Because you're looking for a business partner that you're going to grow with. So my advice to you is to go make a list of five agents that you're interested in working with. Again, this doesn't have to be ultimately who you end up submitting to, but go… Do a little bit of research, Google around, do some searching. Some resources are to go to your bookstore, look at the acknowledgment sections of books. Most writers will think their agent in there. You can look online. Twitter's a great place, a lot of us hang out there. Although we are in an interesting era of Twitter, so people are leaving that to some extent. So you might have to hunt around a little bit more where people are landing. But there's lots of resources out there for writers trying to find an agent. So I would encourage you to do some research. Put together a list of five names. Then just keep an eye on those people, see what books they do and see what's exciting to you about how they work.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/21/16-8-smart-promotion/

 

Key Points: Promotion has revolutions, so focus your effort on writing your next thing. Make sure you have a solid website with a newsletter that you control. Pay attention to the way readers are finding out about books, not just where writers congregate. Don't forget that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful promotional tools. Then, start looking at social media. Pick the places where people are talking about your books, and that you find easy to use. You want to be part of the discussion. Pick the areas where you can write good content.

 

[Season 16, Episode 8]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Smart Promotion.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are talking about smart promotion, how to promote yourself smartly.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, it's… This is something that I am terrible at, so I am genuinely excited to hear what Brandon has to say, because it's very easy to waste a lot of time and energy on promoting yourself in ways that have no return on your investment. So, what can you tell us, Brandon, about how to do this right?

[Brandon] Well, number one, write your next thing. This has been the only constant throughout my entire career, because promotion has had a huge, multiple huge revolutions during the time that I've been a writer. I started trying to break in in the late 90s and even mid-90s, when email was not a thing you could assume people had. Right? I ended up breaking in in 2005, before Audible and e-books on Amazon were a thing. I had broken… I broke in before Twitter existed. Right? I broke in when MySpace was a thing. I have watched social media revolutions happen over and over, but the only big constant is you should be focused mostly on writing your next thing. We're going to talk about promotion, we're going to talk about all the different ways you can promote. The thing about it is, these ways have consistently stopped working for… They'll work for some authors, and not for others. They will work for a time, and then stop working entirely. The entire game changes so frequently that if you're not consistently working on the next thing, you're going to be in trouble because that's the only standby thing you can know will be useful.

[Dan] I can give a great example of this. Back when I was doing Partials, so we're talking nine or 10 years ago, book blogs were all the rage. They were huge. I did a blog tour on a bunch of different book blogs, and it launched Partials through the stratosphere. It was fantastic. Three years later, when I launched my next YA science fiction series, book blogs were gone. They… I mean, they're still around, but they're not effective anymore. They're not a useful form of author promotion. So, we had to completely restructure all of our promotion for that series.

[Brandon] Yeah, when I broke in, I remember going to San Diego and driving to every bookstore and delivering… Hand delivering a copy of my paperback. I would walk into the store and say, "Who is your science fiction reader? Can I give them a free book?" I would say, "Hey, if you'll read this, I'll give you this free book. Here's a short pitch on it." I was able to go to 24 bookstores in San Diego. When I last was there, and look to see which bookstores I could go to, there were four that carried my books. So, things have changed dramatically. Now, that's partially because San Diego was saturated with Borders. Places where Barnes & Noble had a stronger foothold have still… More of those metropolitan areas didn't lose as many stores. But even still, the physical book market… My most recent book, Rhythm of War, which came out in November 2020, it was over 50% audiobook in its first week. The fact that… And even now, it's evened out at about 40% audio and around… The rest is split, hardcover and e-book. This is a really different world. If I'm going to say right now, the big revolution happening right now that's happened the last couple of years is book marketing has become pay to play. That's been the trend over the last few years. Unfortunately, all the major social media sites, now, if you want to get eyeballs on your posts, you need to pay for them. Indeed, the big, big change was Amazon deciding to charge authors a lot of money to promote books on different pages. If you are now… If you are an indie author, the biggest change that probably happened in the last few years is, once uupon a time, you could put books up on Amazon… There was a wild west period in 2010, even lasting into the mid-2000 teens, where if you were writing really fast and putting out good books and beating the traditional publishers to the market, you were able to sell huge numbers of books. To sell those books now on Amazon, you need to pay six figures income. I had two indie authors in my writing course at BYU last year, and both of them were spending 5 to 6 figures on marketing their indie books to make back about that much money. Which means that Amazon used to pay you a 70% royalty. They still do, but actually they're charging you half of that back in advertising money, and Amazon is no longer paying more money to indie authors than traditional publishing pays to traditional authors. That's gone now. That's a really big change in the way that marketing happens on the… In the modern era.

 

[Howard] One of the things that I… A soapbox I've been on for 15 years now, that I'm happy to still have as a functioning soapbox, is the idea that your brand, your identity online, needs to have a home that you own. Your domain name, your server, your blog posts or photos or comics or whatever, and you don't let go of that. Everything else you do, whether it's Twitter or Instagram or whatever else, all of those things are under someone else's control and they can cut you off in an instant just by going out of business, and a lot of them will. So this…

[Brandon] Now this is… This was point number two on my list, Howard. Of things to say.

[Howard] Oh, okay.

[Brandon] We didn't… I didn't even share this, but you nailed it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Number two. Once you're writing your new book, number two is to make sure to have a solid website with a newsletter sign-up that you are keeping up-to-date. People don't go to individual websites as much as they used to. Your individual website is not going to get the hits that your social media does, but it can't be taken away from you. It actually can't. Remember, when we talked about how publishers are not your friends. I've had multiple friends that when they launch a big new series, their publisher comes in and says, "We're going to build a really cool new website for this series." They said, "Great." They're like, "We're going to spend like money on this," and it's been great, except the publisher owns that website. That website is in all of the books. It is branding the series and not the author. My recommendation to you is to say to them, "No, thanks. My website should be the main Brandon website. You should not be building one on Scholastic.com for me that you are sending people to. We're not going to publish in the books that website that you want to put up." Put your foot down, because that's going to brand the series and not you, and it's going to take the power away from you in one of the few areas you can maintain it in your publicity career.

[Dan] Yeah. Once the publisher decides that it's no longer going to support that website, then all of those people who are being driven there from the books, they're finding nothing. You have no control over it, you can't use it for updates, you can't cross promote other books. It's… Now better than just saying don't do this is providing an alternative. Suggesting how about we take some of that same marketing money and we do this with it. But, Erin, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

[Erin] I was going to make a horrible analogy and say that it's sort of like when your work… Like, anybody worked and, like, they gave you a Blackberry, like, a work Blackberry, and they're like, "Just do everything on this. Cancel your personal cell phone plan." Fast forward like five years later, you're quitting that job, and you're like, "Oh, wait. My entire life is on something that I didn't actually have control of, even though it was in my house and I felt like I did. I didn't." One other thing though that Brandon said reminded me the idea of having not as many people going to your website and more people going to social media is that I think there's also a difference between what writers do and what readers do. It's always important to remember that you are both a writer and a reader. So, where are you, as a reader, finding out about the books, the stories, the things that you're consuming? A lot of times, I love Twitter, and, like, I love talking to people on Twitter about my work, but I find more writers congregate on Twitter and talk amongst each other about the field, whereas when people are looking for a book recommendation, they may be more likely to find that through some other source. So I think it's important to think about, like, what are you doing, and would you find out about your own book in the way that you're promoting it. If the answer is no, then you should probably change that up a little bit.

[Howard] A fun example from… And I have… We have three of the key participants here. Typecast RPG, which Dan launched, two years ago now? Two and a half years ago?

[Dan] Yeah. Something like that.

[Howard] It's a live streaming of role-playing games. Dan's the GM, I'm one of the players, Erin's one of the players. For a year and 1/2, we were trying to do Twitter marketing, Instagram marketing, whatever. We talked a little bit about setting up a Discord channel for us. The response was always, "Why would we do Discord?" Then, we're recording this in December of 2020, literally three weeks ago, I sat up and realized at the end of an episode, we end these episodes and our audiences having this fun interaction in the chat room in Twitch. Then we stop, and they all have to go home. They can't keep talking. If we set up a Discord channel and link them to it, suddenly our fans, our viewers can keep having their conversations, and by having those conversations, and I've said this explicitly to them so it's okay, by having these conversations, some of them may become evangelists for our show, talking about it in other places and doing our marketing for us. I feel like an idiot for not making this connection 18 months ago. I guess the lesson there is we all get to feel like an idiot for not having made the right decision sooner. But that decision is always going to be one that you have to look at. The landscape is going to be changing, and you're going to discover that something that you previously said, "Why would I even use that?" is actually the thing that you should absolutely be using right now.

[Dan] You can go right now and join our Discord if you want to be part of our Typecast community. I'm sure will put the notes in the liner notes.

 

[Dan] We need to do a book of the week and this week it is coming from Brandon.

[Brandon] So, one of the fun things about being a published novelist of some renown is that you get offered a lot of books before they come out. We looked at the schedule for this year and work sure that I was going to be on an episode, because were frontloading my episodes, when this book comes out, so I'm sorry, I'm promoting it to you several months early. But, the book of the week is Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. Andy Weir, you may know, is the author of The Martian which is a fantastic book and movie. Project Hail Mary is his new book coming out in May. I loved this book. Just absolutely. 100% loved it. I like it more than The Martian, which is a great book. This is more of a me book. It's got a little bit more of a far future feel to it, even though it's kind of happening now. The science and technology is more science fiction-y. It's… There's just something, just pleasantly fun about this book and the problem-solving, and I can't even tell you really what the book is about without giving you huge spoilers. But it is written… There is a non-linear fashion to it, where you're getting flashbacks to find out character… It's what we call a white room book. Character wakes up without any memories in a white room, and he has no idea how he got there, what's going on, and what his situation is. He slowly pieces together his past and his history as he is trying to keep himself from dying and to solve a big problem. It is delightful, and I recommend it to anyone. One of the things I love about Andy Weir is he is kind of bringing hard science fiction to the masses. I count myself in that. I bounce off a lot of hard science fiction and I force myself to read it because I know it's good for me, and there are some really interesting hard science fiction books. Andy Weir's, I never feel like I'm forcing myself to read. I'm having a wonderful pleasant time. So, Project Hail Mary.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Brandon] Also is a really good pun, because the character's name is Grace. Hail Mary and Grace play into what's going on in an interesting way that is never mentioned in the book, and is just a delightful pun.

[Erin] You know…

[Dan] Well, awesome. Sounds good.

 

[Erin] Listening to that, I have to say, reminds me that word-of-mouth and people telling you to read something is one of the, like, most powerful promotional tools out there.

[Brandon] It really is.

[Erin] It's so important and something that I think about in terms of marketing just generally, is, "Is your book, is your work, in… Like, on the lips of the people who are talking about the works you love and that you want to be in conversations with?" If you're like, "I am also writing hard science fiction for the masses,"… I'm not, but let's say I was. Like, I also want people to say, like, "Oh, if you like that Andy… If that's what you like about Andy Weir, you'll also love Erin's next novel." So, really figuring out what are those people doing who you want to be, like, your book and your work to be mentioned alongside. How are they promoting themselves? Who are they getting in front of? What can you do that similar? Is a good way to try to like get that word-of-mouth that is so powerful.

[Brandon] That's actually a brilliant thing to bring up that I didn't even have in my list of notes here, Erin, because I have several friends whose careers him were made by the fact that a series got really big, that they had a book similar to, at the same time. Kind of just been bought or just on submission. That they were able to then get on those bookstore talkers, where they're like, "If you like this, here are books like it," and get that halo effect, and it made their careers. You could say that I… My career was made kind of by that. By picking up the Wheel of Time in a similar way and things like that. But I do want to get to the third point on my list of things. Number one is write your next thing. Number two is make sure you have a solid website with a newsletter. We didn't talk enough about the newsletter, we've talked about them before. Newsletters are one of the most valuable resources you can have, because those are people who opt in and who want to get an email from you telling them when a new thing is out. You will have, generally, a smaller number of people on your newsletter then you will have following you in various social media settings. But the buy-in, you don't have to… Like, on Facebook, you make have 100,000 followers, but when you post on Facebook, you don't promote it, 15 of them will see it. I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your newsletter often will have a 30 to 40% response rate, is very common. They're annoying to set up, you have to get something like MailChimp, it takes a little bit of upfront set up an understanding, but it is absolutely worth your time to have a newsletter, and to be writing one at least every year, or I try to do them quarterly.

[Dan] Well, I wanted to just jump in quick and say, per our earlier discussion, newsletters have been one of the longest lasting promotional outlets. They have outlived five or six generations of other promotional systems, and they're still effective.

[Brandon] Yep. You can't… They can't be taken away from you. Again, you control that newsletter and you can send it to people. Now, there are ways to do this right so that you're not ending up in spam folders, and there is the fact that people generally get a lot of newsletters because unscrupulous sites sign you up for their newsletter knowing that it is one of the best marketing tools. I would recommend that you be upfront with your newsletter and not have one of those big pop-ups and not just automatically sign people up. Treat your fans with respect. These are the people who are going to be spreading the word-of-mouth. Give them a good return on their newsletter. Generally, a good tip is to put some exclusive stuff in the newsletter, like exclusive fiction, previews of things, or, oftentimes a newsletter promotion is very handy, and things like that. But point number three is, after you've done those things, then you can start to look at social media platforms. Understand that social media, we're still in the wild west in social media. It's less than 20 years that social media has been a force. Early in social media, new platforms would rise and fall every couple of years. That's stopped happening, and big platforms have started to get a foothold, but what we found is that people tend to calcify on their given platform, and, like, you'll find Facebook and Twitter having this problem, they don't pick up new people very often. The people who were active on them stay active, but they don't pick up the new people. The new people go to a new generation of platform and are there. So you can drive yourself mad trying to be on all the platforms and reach all the people. I would recommend doing what Erin has said. Find out where the discussions about your books are happening, or find out the social media platforms that are most easy for you to use, that you will be consistent on. Because being consistent is more important than being in the place that is the most popular. If you're in the place that's most popular, but you are bad on that platform, it's not going to do you as much good as having a nice Twitter timeline where you are consistently updating and are writing interesting things.

[Howard] One of the most powerful things about social media, and, again, Erin mentioned this with regard to word-of-mouth, is the idea that other people are talking about your work. I've had people say, "Howard Tayler is writing the finest hard science fiction in the market today." That is not something I would ever dream of saying about myself. People are not going to believe it if I said about myself. But if someone else says it, I can retweet it and say, "Thank you. You are very kind." Now I have accomplished some promotion and expressed an opinion or amplified an opinion about my work that I could not have done myself. The social aspect of it is key. I can't just shout my brand into a void, I have to participate in a discussion.

[Brandon] Yeah. Knowing what your social media is trying to do is another thing to think about. During the years when blogs were a big deal, becoming a platform writer was a thing you could do. John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow both kind of broke out as platform writers, where they were having a big platform where they were writing really interesting things and people work coming to them for the other things that they were writing. Also, they started writing books and selling to that audience. Harder to do now than it used to be. You can still do it. But that's very different from, for instance, my social media presence. Because I have the luxury of having a large audience already. My social media platform does not have to draw new readers. My social media platforms are there for existing readers to get information that they want. That's a very different type of social media platform. Like, my Twitter is very different from Howard's. If you want to read a Twitter that you're just going to have fun with, go to Howard's Twitter. Right? If you want to know specifically about what Brandon is doing, that's the reason to go to my Twitter. I'm not going to entertain you on my Twitter. I don't have to. But I will probably entertain you on Reddit, where I'm posting still mostly about my books, but in much more expensive ways and doing updates and things like that, because I'm on Reddit and I'm just there as part of that community. It was very easy for me to do updates on Reddit that are interesting and engaging for me to write an interesting to the people who are going there. So I have made a focus in the areas where I am most likely to write good content.

[Dan] Now, that kind of leads into… I know that we still wanted to talk about targeting your audience, but I'm afraid at this point we have to can-of-worms that for a future episode, because it sounds like effective promotion is something we could talk about forever. So we promise we will come back to this at some point in the future.

 

[Dan] But this episode is wildly over time, and we need to cut it off now, with a little bit of homework from Brandon.

[Brandon] So, this can actually tie into that targeting your audience thing. Which is, I would recommend you take the authors that you read and go see what their social media presences look like. Because you can learn a lot by looking at what different people are doing and seeing what you think is effective. Take that author and kind of… You're going to have to kind of lump them in groups based on their sales and their awareness of them in the market, and see what kind of responses they're getting on various social media platforms. Use this to kind of start building an idea for yourself how you would want to approach this. These are things you can start while you're not published yet. You can spend too much time on them, so don't do that. But be watching what people are doing and be thinking about this.

[Dan] Awesome. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.