wetranscripts | Entries tagged with promotion

Writing Excuses 16.26: Working with Teams

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/27/16-26-working-with-teams/

Key Points: Game writing tends to be more collaborative. A good team player unlocks the best in everyone. Recognize that you are all on a project together. You are not working in a silo, so acknowledge and do what the group decides. Learn to compromise. Empower those around you. When you correct people, step on their toes, but don't scuff their shoes. Honor other people's skill sets, give them freedom to inspire you. Praise coworkers, be fans of their work and ideas. Steer with praise, aka positive reinforcement. The game industry is not a zero-sum game, where praise for a coworker detracts from you. You can advance in the company and still be friendly and team-oriented. Sometimes you have to push. Be careful not to overinvest yourself emotionally in promotions or projects. Keep or make your own creative outlets. Don't do other people's jobs. Avoid head canon. If it's just in your head, it doesn't exist. Write it down, get it accepted by the team, and then use it.

[Season 16, Episode 26]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Working with Teams.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] Oh, I'm sorry. Was that my job?

[Giggles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] There is no I in mistakes.

[Laughter]

[James] Yeah. And Howard is funnier.

[Howard] Oh, wait. There is an I in mistakes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, this is… We're going to wrap this up today, our wonderful intensive course we have had about game writing, by talking about working with teams. Writing can often feel like a very solitary thing if you're in standard kind of novel short story. But other industries are much more collaborative. Game writing is one of those. So, tell us, what do we need to know about how to work well in a team?

[James] Yeah. So, in my experience, how good you are at working in teams is even more important than how good you are at actual game design. Because a good team player will unlock the best from everyone around them, while a bunch of cantankerous geniuses, which describes a lot of the game industry, will frequently crash and burn when they don't need to. So I wanted to just talk with everybody about how you work well in a team. Cass, what do you have for working well in a game team?

[Cassandra] I think the most important thing is recognizing that you are all on a project together. Whatever you do, you're contributing to the main body of this animal. You're not working in a silo, it's easy to think that, especially as a creative. But ultimately anything you do connects with every single other department. So you should absolutely show off your ideas. But at the end of the day, you need to acknowledge and you also need to do what your group decides, at least within reason. Because there's always the risk of people who are a little bit more controversial trying for things that are not quite so nice. So it is a little bit of a balance. But being able to understand that you are part of a group is valuable.

[James] Yeah. Something I always used to tell my team members is you never get to a point where you get to stop compromising. As a new writer, you want to show off your ideas, like you said, but in the end, you need to sort of salute and do what the group or your boss decides. But the flipside of that is that, as I learned as a creative director on Starfinder, being a good creative director means flexing that muscle and that authority as little as possible. You want to empower those below you, technically, in the hierarchy. The thing to remember there is that if your default is yes, then when you do have to say no or why don't we go this other direction, then you will have built up the good will that hopefully people will really listen to that and take it to heart, rather than just automatically butting heads.

[Howard] I was a terrible team player when I worked in the software industry. I was just not good at it. I got put in charge of $100 million product line. That's not a great environment in which to learn good practices, because there's already so much at stake. One of my bosses pulled me aside and said, "Look. When you correct people, yeah, it's because they're wrong. Go ahead and step on their toes. But don't scuff their shoes." The point being it is possible to issue corrections, it is possible to tell people, "No, that's not fitting the course we're going." It is possible to do that and let people retain personal self-worth, retain pride, retain whatever. You don't need to smack talk people in order to make your point. I don't want to suggest that that's the level to which I was a terrible manager of other people. But that's the advice I got, and it has stuck with me.

[James] So, one of the things I think about a lot with this regard are art orders. When you're ordering art for a game, you want to give other people room to be creative. Something an art director I worked with told me once was, "After two sentences, the artist stops reading." That can feel like a smack in the face as a writer, where you're like, "But I have 10 pages of description about this character." But the thing to remember is that you want to honor other people's skill sets. A visual artist is likely going to be way better at coming up with cool creative compositions than you are as a writer, because, like, that's what they do. So giving people just enough information… So a good art order is something like, "This is a black woman wearing practical knight armor, with a phoenix on the shield." You don't need to say which hand she's raising her sword with, you don't need to say everything about what type of armor she's wearing, unless it's really key to the project. The more freedom you can give that artist, the better the end product is going to be. You're giving them a chance to inspire you and make it a conversation, rather than just a top-down, "I am telling you what to do and you are doing it."

[Howard] Yeah. This is a combat alchemist who needs quick access to lots of different chemicals. The artist is going to go crazy designing shoulder things for test tubes and whatever. Let them do that, rather than you trying to describe all of those things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I always found that I got much better results when I talked about the mood of the character and the intention. Cass?

[Cassandra] I think our own skill sets is important in regards to other disciplines as well. It's not just the relationship between an artist and a writer. Working in video games, you have the opportunity to collaborate with level editors and level designers. It's easy to go, "No, you just put the nice things down. I will tell you how the story goes." But if you're willing to make space for them, you eventually will recognize, I know, because they're the ones who put things down, they know exactly the structure and how people might approach it and also have little tools and little tricks that might not necessarily be things you think about that can enhance whatever story you're trying to tell in the videogame.

[James] Yeah, absolutely. It's not just people from other departments, it's people in your own department. Every writer is coming with different skills to the project. So recognize when somebody's got a good idea. Support that idea. Praise your coworkers. Be fans of your coworkers. The most fun jobs are the ones where I'm on a team and everyone there is a total bad ass. I'm just happy to be there.

[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I will use as a manager sometimes is steering with praise. That I praise the things that I want them to do more of, and I don't necessarily have to tell them, "That other thing, I don't want you to do that." People notice. It's like, "Oh, they really like it when I do X." They'll start to deliver… They will self guide, self-correct over to that direction.

[Dan] Yeah. This is a principle that I learned early in a child-rearing class, when my first kid was born. They talked about the difference between positive and negative reinforcement. Both of them work, but one of them works so much better and makes everyone so much happier.

[Howard] There is a point is a team member… If I'm on Mary Robinette's team and she's telling me all of these things that she likes and there's this thing that I enjoy doing that she hasn't praised… At some point, I should ask Mary Robinette, "Hey, this one thing I'm doing, you haven't said much about it. Can you please tell me how you feel about it?" Then we get to have that discussion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… At the same time, like… Getting mad at someone because they… Because you… They keep doing a thing that you haven't told them not to do. Like, you should do clear communication, but it shouldn't be… It doesn't need to be retributive to say, "Don't do that thing." You know, like, "You stupid wankedoda!" It's like… "This is… This piece of it is not in line with the overall aesthetic that we're working for. Can you… But these pieces that you do. I love that. I love this, I love that."

[Cassandra] This is something I heard very recently from a friend who works with animal. Clicker training works with humans, and it works surprisingly well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's depressing, but true.

[Dan] Oh, that's wonderful.

[Dan] All right. We're going to take a little pause here for our game of the week, which is me again. This is one of my absolute favorite new role-playing games. It's not new, it's a couple of years old, but I discovered it very recently. It's called Heart, The City Beneath. It is by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor. It's kind of a dungeon crawl game. It's very free-form and it's very narrative. But the thing that I love about it, and the reason that we're doing it on this episode, is the experience system of how your characters grow over time is based on something called beats. Every character class and every character kind of calling has a bunch of like two or three lists of what they call beats that are things like "Take a certain amount of damage" or "Betray someone you love" or like all of these story elements. Then every session, each player looks at their list of beats and says, "Well, I need to pick three of these." You pick them and you tell the game master. Then that becomes this very collaborative way of you as the player have control over what you want to do and how you want to steer your character. The game master knows exactly what gets you excited and how to build the story in order to enable those beats. It becomes this wonderful collaborative session. It's one of my favorite game mechanics I've ever seen. So, Heart, The City Beneath.

[James] So, jumping back into working with teams and working in the industry, I want to throw out… We were saying be a fan to your coworkers, praise good work, honor other people's skill sets. I think sometimes people misunderstand and the think that there's… That the game industry is a zero-sum game, and that if they praise what their coworkers are doing, then they'll be less likely to succeed, or, on the flipside, they feel like, "Oh, well, I can't self advocate, because if I do, my coworkers won't like me." I think that, like, that is absolutely a thing that people run into, that especially runs into issues of privilege as well. But I do believe that you can absolutely climb the ladder and self advocate, while still doing your best to be responsible and friendly and team oriented. If you do good work and you're pleasant to work with, hopefully, if you have a good team, people will be happy to see you rise. But I guess another thing I'll tag onto that, is, I at the same time, advancing in a company, in my experience, you… Sometimes it's about just being there a long time and doing good work, but sometimes you really have to push, because there's often not a lot of structure in game companies that are smaller. People just sort of put things together, so they don't necessarily have a plan for after X years, you become senior designer or whatever. So you need to show the company what you can do for them. I feel like every promotion that I got as I went to… Senior editor, executive editor, creative director, all those things. It was always about me going to my bosses and saying, "Hey. You've got a problem. I can solve it if you empower me. If you give me this team, I will give you this game that you want." I think that can be hard, because it's not about what you deserve, it's not about necessarily who does the best work or who's been there the longest. There's not a clear path like that. It's really about what you can convince your employers to give you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think along those lines, one of the things that I want to remind people who are… Women, people who are from marginalized communities, is that women especially, we are socialized to not push. It's not universal, but as a general rule, we are socialized to let other people have the space. So it's important to understand that when you go in and say, "Hey, I can do this thing," or "Give me the opportunity" or "Here is an idea that I'd like to present," that you're not… That that's normal, that's what people are supposed to do. So you're allowed to take up space in a room.

[Cassandra] I think it's important when talking about teams and talking about promotions, to not overinvest emotionally. Which I know sounds a bit self-contradictory, compared to the other points. But it's just… If a promotion is not there for you at that moment, it does not mean you're a terrible person or you're not deserving of it were that people are keeping it from you, although the latter is sometimes. It just means it's not the right time. That's fine. Similarly with projects, if you have ideas, things that are precious to you, and you run into say, a creative director, who goes, "I like that idea, but it doesn't work for this project," you should be able to let it go. Working in teams does mean you have to be able to stand your ground, but also not overinvest and become caught up in the minutia.

[Howard] I've got a couple of friends who are very interested in building things that are much larger than themselves, much larger than what one person can build. Neither of them have worked as part of a team with a large organization to build something. In both cases, they're looking at things like Kickstarter or [garbled going dark?] and going out and finding other self-starters, whatever. The piece of advice they don't want to hear from me, but which I keep repeating, is "Until you've worked with a team to build something, nobody with money is going to trust you to spend money to build a team to build something." You have to learn this first. It can be a small thing. It can be… Go volunteer for Habitats for Humanity and build a barn over the weekend with a group of people. That will teach you some of the skills you need.

[Mary Robinette] If anyone would like to volunteer for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, I'd be happy to set you up as project lead on something.

[James] I also want to just throw out, tagging in on that, don't overinvest emotionally, I've seen a lot of friends get really hurt because they poured all of their creative energy into the job or they gave a company the ideas that they'd cherished since childhood. Their one big setting, they sell to a company. Then they can't… A, they can't do anything with it outside of that company, which can be really hard, and Be backspace, like, they've got other people who want to mess with their thing because it's their job to mess with that thing and try and make it the best it can be. So, one of the things that I have found really kept me sane in the 13 years that I was working at Paizo as part of the teams on Starfinder and Pathfinder was to have a creative outlet outside of work that could be just mine. Or at least different. So I'd pour all my creativity at work into those settings, but then I would go home and I would work on a novel or I would play with the band or do something that allowed me to get that same creative release without having to always be compromising with the same people, because it can really chew through friendships if you're trying to get along with your coworkers and they keep touching your things.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… One of the best pieces of advice that I got… A lot of my experience came from starting off in theater. One of the best pieces of advice that I got was about boundaries and not doing other people's jobs. There's two reasons for that. One is that if it's a job that someone else is already doing, you're going to annoy them that you're doing it, that you're trying to micromanage or change directions, and they have to reset it. But the other piece of it, and this one is really hard, is that if you do someone else's job, it will eventually become in your job. So I was in a show and one of my cast members didn't preset a prop. So I preset it for them. I saw it and I moved it into place. The show had already started. So when they came offstage, the prop was there. I'm an intern at this point, but being treated as if I'm a full cast member. It happens again another day, and I do it. The third day, one of the other cast members says, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Well, he forgot to preset this." He's like, "If you keep doing that, it's going to become your job to preset that. You need to let him fail on this." The hardest thing I've ever done was to leave that prop in the wrong place. Even though I knew exactly where it was supposed to go. Like, I didn't just leave it there. I said to him, "Hey, you've been forgetting to preset this." He's like, "Okay, okay." He didn't preset it again. Even after having been reminded. He came off… Tearing offstage. Prop wasn't there. He had to go running around to find it. He never forgot to preset it again, and it didn't become my job.

[James] I'd like to throw out one more rule that I have for myself, which is no head canon. What I mean by that is when I'm working on a game or something, until it's written down and has been published or at least accepted by the team, it does not exist. Because it's really easy to fall into the trap of you've decided a thing in your head, but you have not communicated it to your team or the audience. So then later on, somebody else on your team comes along and introduces something that conflicts with it. You get mad because it conflicts with what you've already decided, but you haven't communicated that desire. So I think it's really important to… I always say, when I leave the office, like, I turn off that part of my brain, and I don't invest extra time in it, both for my own mental health, but also because I don't want plan a bunch of stuff that I don't actually get to implement because it's just going to lead to version control problems down the road.

[Dan] Awesome. This has been a really great discussion. I think that we could talk for a long time about it, but we do need to end.

[Dan] So, Cass, give us our homework for today.

[Cassandra] Your final homework is spend some time brainstorming a game idea with a friend. Try to draw out and explore their best ideas. Encourage them to make changes to your homework, and make sure you're both contributing equally. This is a chance for you to try out working in a team.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds like a fun thing. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion

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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/03/16-01-your-career-is-your-business/

Key Points: Look at becoming a writer as a business. You are starting and running a small business. You have to manage your business, the publisher and the agent will not do it for you. They are partners, they will help, but it is your business. What do you want, what do you imagine it becoming? Think about a creative mission statement. Make sure your career is deliberate, not accidental. Ask yourself questions. How are you going to handle health insurance? How will you balance your time between writing and promotion? How are you going to handle email? You might silo the non-writing things into one day a week, or chunks of time spread through the week. How are you going to handle taxes? Hire an accountant or DIY? Think about placing a dollar amount on an hour of writing time, and use that to decide whether to pay someone else to do it or do it yourself. Try balancing money, audience, and shininess. Money, how much does it pay or cost. Audience, how many people will you connect with. Shiny, how much do you want to do it. Think of your writing as a career, a business, and make deliberate, informed choices.

[Season 16, Episode 1]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Your Career is Your Business.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] As you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary…

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] Robinette.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] We're all fine. I'm Mary Robinette, we've done this a lot.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] This, as you can tell, is the very first episode of 2021. We are excited to be here. We've got a cool thing that were going to do for the entire year, is, we have split this year into a series of what we are calling Master Classes, or intensive courses is maybe a better way of thinking about this. So each of us has come up with a topic and we'll spend eight or nine episodes diving really deep, kind of teaching the rest of the group about that specific topic. So we are going to start with this really cool kind of inside look at the publishing world class that Brandon has put together. Brandon, do you want to tell us a little bit about your course in general?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, the idea is to have a course that starts training writers to look at becoming a writer as a business. This is something that took me by surprise when I started into this. I was not aware that writing is a small business. I didn't know I was starting a business. In fact, I didn't incorporate for several years. That's very common. But not knowing that led me to make a large number of mistakes before I'd got my feet underneath me. Even still, I'm making some of these mistakes. But I thought, you know what, one of the things that I really wish I'd known when I began was that I was starting a small business. I wanted to give some tips to writers starting on this journey or who are in the middle of it who just may not have given enough thought to this aspect of it. We all want to be artists, that's why we become writers. This whole thing isn't to dissuade you from your artistic intents. But it is to start you this class and this mindset that just isn't often shared in writing courses. Because we all want to be artists, and sometimes it feels like talking about the business side of things is crass, and we don't want to monetize our artistic intentions, but when you start on this path, you are starting a business.

[Howard] Speaking briefly as the parent of four hungry adult children, who still don't all have their own jobs, I very much want to monetize every last little bit of my everything that I do.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Crass or not crass, I want to eat.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I am very fortunate in that one of my best friends got published about a year and 1/2 before I did. So when I did get my contract, Brandon, the very first thing he said to me was, "You need to think about this. Think of yourself as a small business owner," and gave me some really great advice. So what are some of the bits of advice you want to give us, Brandon, about starting to think of ourselves as business owners?

[Brandon] Right. Well, the first idea is just this mindset change. Which was the biggest hurdle I think I had to overcome. That's why I named this first episode Your Career Is Your Business. A lot of writers, myself included, when we begin, we have in our head that once we get published, the publisher and the agent are going to be in charge of the business. We're going to have people managing all of the business side. We will be able to spend our days in artistic pursuits. This just isn't true. An agent is not a business manager. An agent will certainly help. An agent is, if you're going traditionally published, an agent is the number one resource you will have for these sorts of things. So certainly it's nice to have them. But it's your business that you're starting. It's not their business. They have a lot of different clients they'll be working for. You're going to be expected to care about your career.

[Howard] One of the things that I like to… I developed this mindset when I was in the corporate world. My career in the corporate space really was defined by the people I was working with, but my career as a person who makes things, a person who imagines things, a person who wants to be paid to operate the oven that bakes the cookies that only come out of my brain, that is not a career path that can be managed by somebody else. That is a career path that has to be managed by me. So a literary agent is a business partner. A publisher is a business partner. I already had, when I started doing comics, I already had a big framework in my head for what business partnerships look like and what they don't look like. So that gave me a quick leg up, and it made a lot of things easier early on. But Brandon, you're absolutely right about this mindset. You have to start from that point, believing that what you are doing is your business and, it is, to layer the meaning, a little bit, it's your business, it's not anybody else's business. They're going to try and get all up in your business from time to time, but it's really all about… It's all about what you want and what you imagine it becoming.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm really glad Howard mentioned what you want, which I'm sure Brandon is going to get into. But I come into this from theater, and being a freelancer for my entire adult life. So, for me, the small business was transforming the small business that I already had. Which was puppeteer, audiobook narrator, and then writer. One of the things that I find helpful when thinking about this small business is to actually have a mission statement. You can think of it as your creative mission statement. But it's going to change over the course of your career. So, initially the mission statement that I had was fairly simple. It was to be able to turn down the gigs I didn't want to do. I've gotten to the point in my career now only gigs I've got are the gigs that I want to do. So now I have to figure out actually what kind of work do I want to be doing and who do I want to be and be presenting myself as. Because I have to start figuring out how to turn down the gigs I do want to do in order to focus on really refining who I am, and this thing that Brandon is talking about and Howard about monetizing. Because it's not… It's not always a straightforward path.

[Dan] Let's pause really quick. Do our book of the week. Which is coming to us this week from Howard.

[Howard] Well, I wish I could take more credit for this one. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I read it years and years and many years ago, and absolutely loved it. It has one of my very favorite uses of footnotes. It's widely regarded now as a classic space in which it sits, and recently was made into a TV miniseries available on Amazon Prime. I have really enjoyed and benefited personally from comparing the two. I'll circle back around to that later at homework time.

[Dan] Awesome. So that is Good Omens from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

[Dan] Now, I loved what Mary Robinette said about mission statement, which ties into what I've heard Brandon talk about a lot in the past, is making sure that your career is deliberate rather than accidental. Brandon, what do you have to tell us about that, and how to do it?

[Brandon] So, there are all kinds of questions I feel like you should be asking yourself during your unpublished years and during your early parts of your career that you have answers to for when the need arises. For instance, a good one if you live in the US, unfortunately, is going to be how are you going to approach health insurance? This is a big question that you need to think about. I never thought about it a single time in the early part of my career. You would think that that would have come up, but it wasn't until I was married and publishing my first books and realizing, wait a minute. In America, for some stupid reason, health insurance is attached to your job. I'm just not going to have that. How do I get that? Talk to other people, who are self-employed, and figure out how you're going to approach this. Other questions are how are you going to balance your time as an author? How much time are you going to spend on doing the actual writing, how much time are you going to spend on promotion? We'll talk about promotion in a later week in this master class, but right now, the question is when are you going to put these things in? When are you going to do email? I wasn't expecting how much more email would come in…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And how much of it would involve publishers' panic… Panicking about little things. I had to set aside specific times. What I've done in my life right now is I have taken all of the things that are not writing, and I've tried to silo them into one day a week. Thursdays. This is when I'm going to do all of these things, the longer emails. The short emails that can get a quick answer, I'll do at the beginning of my workday. But if there's something that is going to take a long, in-depth thing, I'll say, "Hey, I'm going to respond to you on Thursday." If there's an interview that I need to do for promotion, I always schedule them on Thursdays. If there are company meetings, I put them on Thursdays. This allows me to take off my writer hat for a day and approach being a business person for a day. With me, this helps keep me from being frustrated. If I have good siloing of these sorts of things, I'll stop being resentful of the time that I have to spend not writing.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to chime in here, because I'd heard Brandon talk about this before, so I also tried siloing my non-writing things to one day a week. It turns out that doesn't work for me, because my brain is wired differently. That wound up causing me to have more fatigue. But I did have to block out time. So I have blocked out specific chunks of time, but spread them through the week. This… I just want to point out that, much like when we talk about writing, there's no one process that will work for you, but the principle behind the process, which is to be deliberate about it and make space for it, is going to be consistent. You just have to figure out which form it takes for you.

[Dan] I'm going to give a third perspective on this for the very, very early career writers. This is one of the very first bits of advice I got from Brandon when I got my very first publishing contract. I said, "This is happening. It's real. What do I do next?" He said, "What you do now is you sit down and you write as much as you possibly can, because this is the last time you'll have all of that free time to write." That did help me a lot. I was able to finish, I think, a full book and a half of new stuff before all of the revisions and the emails and the editing process in the proofing and all of that business side crashed down on me. So, just for the very early aspiring writer, that is, I think, a fantastic piece of advice.

[Brandon] I do have more time to right now than I did when I was working a job while trying to write. But, one of the most shocking things to me was that by going full-time, I didn't gain nearly as much free time as I thought I would. Because all of these other things crept in. Doing my own taxes. My first few years… I was used to doing my own taxes. Indeed, again, in the US, we have to do our own taxes, for some stupid reason. So… But then publishing made it infinitely more complicated. Because suddenly I was getting a 1099 instead of a W-2. Suddenly, I had sales overseas. Understanding that you're either going to have to hire an accountant or you're going to have to learn how to input sales from other countries and money coming in from other countries and all of this stuff with 1099s instead of W-2s. That's a huge time sink once a year for US writers that I had just not even understood was going to come along and steal a week of my time.

[Dan] We've got an episode coming up about networking, but this tax idea, the finances of being a writer, is a really good reason to rely on other people. My agent, before she became an acquiring agent on her own, worked as a tax person for an agency house. So she was able to help me a lot, which was fantastic. Brandon and I and several other local writers all use the same accountant because the accounting process for professional writers is very different from a lot of other careers. So, using these networking opportunities to find out hey, how do you handle this, is a good way to help you figure it out.

[Brandon] One other thing that I would recommend that you think about… This doesn't work for all writers. In fact, this is one of these things I've noticed that can be debilitating for some writers. But it is something that I do that is very handy for me, is, I find out what the dollar amount of an hour of my writing time is worth. Now, you can't be writing 16 hours a day. But, once you become self-employed, as Howard so elegantly put it in an early episode, you… It's great being self-employed, you get to work half days and you decide which 12 hours it is.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Meaning, there is a danger here in that you can work all the time that you want which would lead to burnout. So be careful about that. But I keep a dollar amount assigned to an hour of actual writing time to me. Then, that dollar amount of an hour of writing time allows me to understand what things I can pay for to gain an hour of writing time. If doing my taxes is going to cost me three hours of writing time, and indeed, I will make more money writing that I would hiring someone to do that, it just gives me an opportunity cost method of determining what I should hire out and what I should do myself.

[Howard] When we started putting Schlock Mercenary books into print, we quickly realized that between cover work and bonus story and whatever else, it took a block of time to put a book out, and putting a book out generated several tens of thousands of dollars of money all at once. I could look at that and say, "Well, I have books that are not yet in print, because I've got this archive online." Going to Comic Con saws three weeks out of my life. There's the week of prep, there's the week at the event, and there's a week of recovery. It's miserably stressful. I did the math and realized that unless I was bringing home $15,000 from Comic Con, it didn't even begin to be worthwhile. We looked at it and said, "Well, gosh, instead of doing Comic Con, if I really want to sell T-shirts, I can just spend that week making a T-shirt and selling it and make more money." Now, we've never done that because I don't love making T-shirts. But that was what I had to balance it against. Without knowing how much your time is worth, without establishing a benchmark over time, you will make lots and lots of very, very bad decisions about your time and not realize what you're doing until you wake up one morning and realize that you're stressed and broke and hating the things that you're doing.

[Dan] This kind of deliberate financial thought is how I knew when it was time for me to hire an assistant. Because I hit the point where I realized, oh, giving me an assistant will allow me to write one extra book per year, which will more than pay for the assistant. So that made it a very easy choice to make. We need to wrap up soon, but I know Mary Robinette has something else she wants to say.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Which is, when you're super early career, the idea of assigning a specific number value to your writing work, especially when you haven't actually sold anything yet, that's difficult. So let me give you another metric which you've probably heard me talk about when I've talked about how to decide where to send a story to. A short story. Which is that you're balancing three thing. Money, audience, and shininess. So money is literally how much is this going to pay me. Or, how much is this going to cost me. Audience is how many people will this connect me to. Then, shiny is just like how much do you want to do it. So, like, going to NASA, it cost money, does not actually connect me to audience, but it's so shiny. So that's a choice that I make. I also know that it's something that I can use, and then will, later, down the line, have the potential to bring me audience and money. But depending on where you are in your career, you're going to value those differently. Like, when you are very, very early career, you may say, "Hey, it's totally worth it for me to go to a convention, because it is… Spending that money will allow me to connect with my peers, and audience, and that networking, the audience layer of it, is totally worth it, and the shininess aspect of it is totally worth it." So it's going to be this constant balancing act, and it will again shift over the course of your career.

[Dan] Exactly. Ultimately, this idea of thinking of it as a career, as a business, and making all of these choices deliberate and informed is what's really going to help. So, thank you everybody. This is a wonderful start to our new year.

[Dan] We have homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. In 2003, at Comic Con, my friend Jim met Neil Gaiman, and Neil introduced himself, saying, "Hi, my name is Neil. I write comics." Okay. That's a fun story. Neil Gaiman rights way more than just comics. He wrote the adaptation that took Good Omens from being a wonderful novel to being a really amazing television series. You don't know, or maybe you do, the path that your career is going to take the number of different things you might write. I posit that it will be extremely valuable to you to take something like Good Omens, your book of the week, and the TV show. Consume them both and make notes. What kinds of writing decisions were made between the two that you would have made differently? What kind of writing decisions were made that just blow your mind? The adaptation between mediums may, at some future point, be something that you get to do. As an added bonus, I think this homework will be fun for you.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.12: Writing the Other – Being an Ally

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/22/15-12-writing-the-other-being-an-ally/

Key points: What demonstrates being a good ally? Don't just promote your book, but also boost the work of others. Make them the center of the conversation. Build a relationship with a whole person, not just the identity. What's an ally? Someone who will ride or die for you on your terms. Empathy writ large. Think raid group makeups, the tank, the person who makes safe spaces for others, lots of different roles. Beware Leeroy Jenkins! What about the ally who overshot and missed the mark? People who step up and speak for me, taking away my agency. You don't get cookies, credit, a prize for being an ally. When was someone a good ally without blocking your voice? White people shaming a woman who used the N-word in karaoke rapping. The support of a micro-community when you need it. People in a large conference who smiled, made room, and invited participation. When writing the other, listen to your sensitivity readers, and do no harm. If you can't write the other, maybe you can challenge inequity, and the systems that create it. Be aware that there are lots of different marginalizations, and lots of different kinds of ally-ship needed.

[transcriptionist note: I may have confused Piper, Tempest, and Erin in the transcript. I have very little hearing in the high tones, which makes it easy to confuse female voices. My apologies for any mistaken attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 12.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Being an Ally.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Piper] We've been joined by our special guest, Erin Roberts. Erin, could you please give us some background on yourself?

[Erin] Sure. I'm a black speculative fiction writer. I mostly write short fiction. I do a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of science fiction, a little horror. I think the thing that I'm proudest of in my career so far is that my story, Sour Milk Girls, was in both The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.

[Whoohoo!]

[Erin] So [garbled – we'll have to get] around that.

[Piper] Yeah. All right. So I'm excited because I love these takeovers. Particularly this topic is about being an ally. So I'm going to kick it off and ask all of you, what are some things that people have done that you view as having demonstrated that they are good, positive allies?

[Tempest] Well, around this topic in particular, the writing the other, being an ally, one of the most important things that I have seen is when people who are… Say they've written a book, in which there's marginalized characters that are not that writer's identity, they not only talk about their book in the promotion of it, but they also say, like, "I have read so much great fiction by people who actually do come from this identity. These are the people that I went to." Or "These are the books that I read for research." As many people would tell you, one of the most important things for writers is to have people like boosting your work, right? Like, to have people saying, "Yay, I love this," and just like letting their audience know. So, if you're, just for example, say a white person who is writing a book in which you have a black protagonist, you're going to have a whole bunch of people looking upon you, all of a sudden, on your twitter or whatever, and for you to then boost up black authors writing black protagonists is a really good thing to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah, I think being a good ally is so much about centering the voices that you're trying to support, right? The mistake that I see so often, not to talk about the negative sides of this too much, but the mistake I see is that somebody's trying to be an ally, and what they're doing is, "Hey, look at me, I'm doing a great job at promoting this other person." But if you're doing that, then you're really talking about yourself. It really is about taking the other person and making sure the spotlight is on them, they're the center of the conversation. Not to flatter our group too much, but I think the Writing Excuses group is doing a great job. They put the four of us on this podcast to talk about these issues. They're not looking for us to give them accolades, even though that's what I'm doing right now. It's really about promoting voices from people who come from other communities, who can speak on the topics that they want us to speak on.

[Erin] I also think that what's… What I really love is when people care about you beyond how you can inform their story. So something that you sometimes see is somebody will come up to you and say, "Well, I am writing this book with a black protagonist. Tell me about the black things." You're like, "Okay. That's lovely." But I like if that person has a relationship with you, that somebody cares about the parts of you that don't just inform your identity, but you as a whole person. Because identity is just a part of who you are. It shapes who you are, but isn't all of who you are.

[Piper] Awesome. I guess this may be a little belated, but for people who might be unfamiliar with the topic or the point of discussion, what's your quick, clearest pitch or definition for what is an ally? If someone were to just come up and ask you, "No, really, what's an ally?"

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Well, an ally is a person who not only wants to… Who not only likes says, "I really want to support you and make it so that like the spaces that you come into and the communities that I belong to are safe for you or safer for you," but actually like does that work, and actually is, like… I get in our communities, say, will you ride or die for me? Like, allies will ride or die for you, but they will ride or die for you on your terms. Not on their terms, but they're like, "What do you need? Do you need me to step forward or to step back? Do you need me to be the loud voice talking about these things or do you just need me to be the quiet voice stepping up and going yes." Because it's going to change, it's going to be different, depending on the situation. But allies, real allies, always look for their cues from the people they're being allies to.

[Erin] Yeah. I always believe that empathy is at the core of ally-ship. It's empathy writ large. So, looking to the other person, and how they're feeling and what they want from you and realizing the power that you have, the power that they do or don't, and then, trying to do what's best for the other person. I think sometimes where ally-ship can go a little bit awry is when you make it about yourself and your reaction. I want to show I'm a good person by being an ally as opposed to I want to make the person I'm allying with their life better or make the situation better for them.

[Dongwon] I think about it sometimes in terms of like online gaming, like raid group makeups, right, like…

[Yeah]

[Dongwon] Sometimes you need an ally who's the tank, right? They're going to draw [agro?] from whatever's happening out there. They're going to get in front of the issue and say, "Hey, pay attention to me right now." So that other people have time to figure out how they want to respond and what they want to do. Especially in a dangerous situation, or in an online dog pile kind of situation, right? Then there's other people who are out there trying to make safe space for people. Make sure that there is a place to have a conversation, a place to sit and recharge, a place to kind of do the work behind the scenes that needs to be done sometimes to sort of figure out, okay, how are we going to move this conversation forward, how are we going to make improvements in the communities that we're part of, right? So there's lots of different roles that allies can play out there, and thinking about how you get into it, what kind of skill sets you have, and what kind of presence you have can be a really great way to figure out how to be a great ally, and how to support the communities and the marginalized identities that you're trying to work with.

[Piper] So I guess one of the things is that occasionally someone who really wants to be an ally pulls a Leeroy Jenkins…

[Laughter]

[Piper] And all of us are just standing there like, "Don't…"

[Dongwon] But come back… Oh boy.

[Tempest] For those of you who aren't aware of this… I wasn't aware until like criminally recently, this is a reference to a video of like a group of people, like, they're getting ready to go raid something, and then one guy just breaks off, and he's like, "Leeroy Jenkins!" He runs into the fray. They're all like, "No! We have a plan…"

[Piper] They all had to go in after him and they all died.

[Tempest] They all perished.

[Laughter] [horribly]

[Dongwon] Somebody add…

[Piper] A quick line on fried chicken. But anyway. So, in any case, yeah. Say Leeroy Jenkins as you…

[Tempest] Let's be real.

[Piper] What's one of the most… The experience that stands out most in your mind of someone who tried to be an ally and just overshot? Missed the mark? Anybody?

[Dongwon] So there was this event that was for people of color in publishing. It wasn't officially with the group, POC In Publishing, but it was an event that was intended for POC in a certain community to come together and sort of celebrate and talk about the issues that we're facing and an ally decided to take the mic and talk about what a great job that they had done to support everybody while… And were literally taking upstage time and presence away from the actual POC in the room who might have had something to say. That was a frustrating moment.

[Tempest] Yeah. I would say, for me, I've had quite a few instances where someone tried to demonstrate being an ally by stepping up and speaking for me. I have to say, one of the things that I really appreciate about my partner, about some friends who've known me for a long time is I don't need help being loud. But I am usually the tank that needs to heal. Right? So having someone stand at my shoulder and give me agency has often been what I prefer personally. So, the times when it's missed the mark for me is when someone literally has stepped in front of me to say words that would not necessarily have come out of me and took away my agency for how to handle the situation.

[Dongwon] To generalize a little bit, the place I see that most… We kind of hit this note a couple of times, but when I see that happening in a variety of circumstances, it's usually because an ally is saying, "I want credit for what I did." But there's no cookies for being a good ally. You don't get a prize at the end. The prize is you do the work, because the work needs to be done. It's important, and it's hard, and it's uncomfortable, but no one's going to say, "Good job," and give you a trophy at the end of it, right? So if that's why you're doing it, I need you to sit back and reconsider. What is my role in this community? How is that being an ally to somebody, if I'm trying to get a benefit out of it? Right?

[Definitely]

[Dongwon] Those are things I need people to think about as they're approaching these communities and as they're trying to be helpful. But sometimes somebody trying to help, as we're kind of hinting at here, can do more harm than good.

[Piper] I'm going to pause us for the book of the week. I think, Dongwon, you have that.

[Dongwon] I do have that, yes. Thank you for reminding me that I have that. The book I want to talk about is Paul Krueger's Steel Crow Saga. It is a secondary world fantasy that takes a lot from East Asian cultures. It has sort of analogues for a bunch of Southeast Asian and East Asian cultures. It takes place in the aftermath of a period of colonization and empire, where three of the nations have come together to throw off the fourth imperial power. So, it takes… It follows four characters, one from each of the different countries, who are all trying to figure out what to do in the aftermath of this big war. How do you make peace? How do you rebuild a world that's more equitable? How do you keep other powers from swallowing your country when maybe your country is smaller and has less military might than some of the others. Just because you won the war doesn't mean peace is easy to achieve and that people's desire for empire and control and power stop. This is also a book that I talk about as postcolonial Pokémon. So it's got a great magic system, there's lots of anime nonsense. If you like Fullmetal Alchemist, if you like those kinds of things, you're going to love this book.

[Piper] Awesome. All right, so I'm going to slightly switch gears for us in the fact that I'm going to ask for real experiences again, or memories that stand out to you, but instead, I'm going to ask for an example of a moment when someone steps to your side and really was an ally without blocking your own voice. Thoughts?

[Erin] I have an example that has nothing to do with writing whatsoever, but it was a very sort of real moment for me. So, I am a big karaoke enthusiast, as my friends and family all know. One of the issues that you sometimes have an karaoke is that you'll have a white person go up to the stage, they'll sing a rap song, the N-word comes up, and they decide that this is the moment to say it out loud. It's not, for the record, ever. So, I was at a karaoke bar and that happened. I was in a bar where I think I was like one of the only black people there. All of the white people in the room when the woman did it like gasped and like sham… They like sent shame stares at her. The woman stopped doing it. I loved it because this is something that really bothers me, but it has nothing to do with their lives. But their like visceral reaction really made me feel like, "Okay. Other people care about the things that are part of my identity experience, even though it's not part of their's."

[Piper] Awesome.

[Tempest] Yeah, I… I've been talking a lot recently about the value of community, and the value of, like, small, teeny-tiny communities as well as big ones, and just, like, encouraging especially my artist friends, and like artists include writers, to not only like find their place in large communities but their fun micro communities, groups of like five, six people maybe, that you can have like a group chat with, whether… Whatever you use to have group chats. So that you can get the support you need without necessarily having to expose all of your stuff to everybody in the group, and everybody in the group is just like, "We don't know how to help." But, like, you expose some sensitive stuff to like five really close friends, it's a different experience. So I have… I'm very lucky to have a lot of these little micro communities, micro groups. That is where I find most of the expressions of awesome ally-ship. Because I will come in and I will be like, "Oh, my God, this is happening." Or, "Did you see?" Or, "Let me tell you…" The best thing that they can do is they can just say like, "What is it you need me to do?" I'm like, "I just need you to sit here and just listen to me go off about those white people over there who did that thing that made me sad, right?" They're like, "Cool." Then they do. Or, I'm like, "I really need you to like boost this thing that's going on on Twitter." And like…

Or very publicly be like, "Shut up, people. Like, Tempest is awesome." Or whatever it is. They're like, "Okay. I can do that." I do that for them, too. Not all the people in these group chats are necessarily people who are outside of my identity group. Like, some of them are and some of them aren't. But, like, regardless of what they are, what I am, what the situation is, these are people that have my back. I just think it's really important to have people that have your back, in general. But then, like, that is where sometimes some people begin to understand what good ally-ship is. You don't necessarily have to have a close relationship with a person to be able to do that. To ask those questions, to be like, "Is there anything that you need me to do, like, what do you need me to do in this moment to be a good ally?" Sometimes, it's to run out on Twitter and start like yelling. Or sometimes it's just to listen. But, yeah, like that's the biggest thing with ally-ship is that you have to learn how to listen to what people need you to do and need you to not do.

[Piper] I can say I attend a lot of different conferences, both having to do with writing and the writing sphere and also having to do with my day job and my career in a corporate world. Especially, in my corporate position, I am often the only Asian American in the room. Sometimes it's really hard to walk into a really big place. For example, before I came to the Writing Excuses Cruise and Retreat 2019, I was at a summit of 1700 people. Often times, I was one of maybe two or three Asian American people in the room of 1700. One of the biggest things that really helped me be able to walk in and be confident and be a part of everything was the fact that a couple of my colleagues recognized me with a smile, made room for me at a table, were like, "Hey, we're going out." Acknowledged me, acknowledged my existence. Even if you don't know someone, the openness and welcome you can give by giving them a smile and seeing them… Or, if they're sitting by themselves, saying, "Hey. Are you eating alone? Do you want to be alone, or would you like to join us?" Just being open to that, and not being upset if your kindness is not taken well. Because they could be under stress. But just having it there, leaving it out there, and then stepping back, is an amazingly valuable thing in any kind of conferencing situation, any kind of public situation. I would say those are some of my best memories.

[Erin] Yeah. Another thing, specific to writing the other, one way that one can be a good ally is to do all the things that we have said on this podcast, I have said in other places, etc. That… To make sure that you're going to your sensitivity readers and listening to your sensitivity readers when it comes to the stuff that you're writing. To make sure that, like, the stuff that you're going to be putting out isn't going to be doing harm to the community. Do no harm is sort of like the philosophy that I try to instill in people with this. That is like one of the best ways to be a good ally as a person who is like trying to write other identities, is to make sure you listen to the people from those groups that you are trying to represent when they say, "This is harmful, let's change it."

[Tempest] Yeah. Don't just look for permission. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Piper] No, that's okay. I also really think that a lot of times… I think diversity is very important, but I also think equity is really important, and that in writing… So you don't necessarily… It's always good to have a diverse cast, but also, thinking about the systems that have created inequity and challenging those in your writing I think is also a great way to be an ally. Maybe you're not at a point where you're like, "I can actually successfully write the other." Like, "I tried it. It was a bad idea." Like, "I'm not there in my craft." But maybe I can challenge the way that justice works in my system. Maybe I can challenge the way that's sort of racial essentialism works in my world. By doing that, you put new ideas out into the world that I think also help to promote equity and change the way that we think about the world.

[Tempest] Yeah. One of the best examples of this that I've seen, and I'm pretty sure that we've talked about this on the podcast before is Justine Larbalestier. She's a YA writer, and the first several novels that she wrote, she always had a protagonist who was mixed race, POC in some way, they were all different. She did that at first, just with her first book, she just did it because that's what fit the character. Then she realized, like, how important it was for kids to be able to see themselves more. So she's like, "Oh, okay. It's cool. Now I'll just make this happen." But then, at some point, she realized that actually, because she was doing this, then the publishers are like, "We already have a book with a black protagonist, we don't need to buy one from a black person." She's like, "Wait. Oh, no. That is not what I wanted. That's not why I was doing this." So then she shifted, and she decided that like in any book that she wrote where she had one protagonist, like one POV character, that that protagonist would be white. But that didn't mean that she wasn't going to include people of color and people of other marginalized identities in the work. It's just that they wouldn't be the protagonist. Because the protagonist is the one that like publishers tend to focus on, people tend to focus on. Right? But she did that so that she could… That was her way of being a good ally, it was her way of making a space, and saying, "I am no longer going to be the one taking up this space. They can't use me as an excuse not to buy your book."

[Dongwon] One thing I want to point out is we've been talking about a lot of sort of POC oriented issues. We're talking about race and those kinds of elements, but there's a lot of different kinds of ally-ship out there, right? Disability, queer, there's a lot of marginalizations that people experience, and even within POC communities, there can be a lot of tension between different racial groups, right? So, one thing is just because you're marginalized in one way… This kind of plays into the conversation about intersectionality… You have to remember that just because you're marginalized here doesn't mean you get to be a bad ally over here. Right? We all need to be looking out for each other, and looking out for other people's communities and paying attention to different vectors of marginalization and trying to make sure you're supporting voices and respecting other people's identities. Because, even if you have an own voices project, you're only one or maybe two of those identities represented in the book. Ideally, you've got a bigger range of that in your project, right? So you have to make sure, even if you are a marginalized person and coming from that background, that there are other things you need to be really attentive to and make sure you're not stepping on those things. The work isn't done just because you're own voices, is really what I'm saying.

[Piper] All right. So we're going to have to wrap this up with homework.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Did anyone think of homework?

[Erin] Oh, yeah. I have the homework.

[Piper] Oh, you have the homework. Whoo!

[Erin] I'm ready with the homework. Here is your homework. I want you to find the most recent short story's, book, any piece of literature, novella, whatever that you have consumed recently that you liked. Then, I want you to do two of the following five things at least. But you can do all five. You can… I want you to leave a review on Amazon and on Goodreads. Even though they're kind of the same thing, they're kind of not. Leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Tweet about it and say why did you love this book. Facebook about it, because Twitter's not Facebook and Facebook has a longer reach sometimes. Tell other writers. Explicitly be like, "Do you need my copy? Let me just put this in your hands. Please read this, please look at this." The fifth thing has gone out of my head, so I'm going to say… Instagram?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Pull a Instagram, take a picture, take a selfie with the book. Everybody loves a selfie. Take a picture with the book, and be like, "Read this book, it's great." But do that. Because that's a way of being an ally. Just putting out your love for that author and their story or their book or whatever it is.

[Dongwon] Can I suggest a number five?

[Erin] Yes.

[Dongwon] Tell a bookseller or a librarian.

[Erin] Yes! That was what flew out of my head. This is why we have Dongwon. Yes. Tell them. Because then they can be like, "Oh, really. We'll get more of that in."

[Piper] Awesome.

[Erin] That's your homework.

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

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 20: Marketing 101 for Creators

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/02/22/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-20-marketing-101-for-creators/

Key points: Promotion, advertising, public relations, or publicity are only part of marketing. Marketing includes pricing, promotion, positioning, and product. Start with positioning: who am I selling to and what makes me different. Know your market, and what differentiates you. Know your message -- the core of what you want to do -- and the delivery method for that message. Something that will grab people in 10 seconds.
( many words )
[Howard] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses episode 20. And the writing prompt: come up with 25 words that distill everything that you want to say about your next work.
[Brandon] Thanks for listening.
[No idea] Dun, dun, dun
[another voice] Lalala.

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.26: Working with Teams
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Writing Excuses 16.26: Working with Teams

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