wetranscripts | Entries tagged with self-publishing

Writing Excuses 20.17: An Interview with Christopher Schwarz

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-17-an-interview-with-christopher-schwarz

Key Points: Keep your day job while you jump off the cliff into working for yourself. Say what you are going to say upfront, and then support it. Think about weird things, how to explain them to people, and then make it applicable. Look at How-to through the lens of social commentary. Don't be afraid to self-publish.

[Season 20, Episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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

[Season 20, Episode 17]

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] An Interview with Christopher Schwarz

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] And today, we are very lucky to have a special guest with us. We have Christopher Schwarz. Would you like to introduce yourself for us?

[Chris] Yeah. I'm Chris. I am a furniture maker and writer and publisher and I clean the toilets at Lost Art Press.

[DongWon] Multi-talented, for sure. I'm very excited to have...

[Howard] I'm feeling it because I'm the toilet cleaner here at our house.

[Laughter]

[Chris] I'm the corporate toilet cleaner, so, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Sometimes that's what it takes when you're in that publisher role, you know?

[Chris] Yup.

[DongWon] Anyways, I am very excited to have Christopher on with us today. As I've talked about on the show at various points, I'm an amateur woodworker, and one of the ways I think about what we talk about here in terms of the craft of writing is sort of filtered through that craft as well. So when I first started getting into woodworking as a hobby, one of the first books I read was… Or actually, I think the first book I read was The Anarchist Toolbox by Christopher. And then I just sort of learned more about what you do as a writer and as a publisher and as somebody who obviously builds incredible furniture. And when we started doing this more of our interview series, looking at the craft of writing through the lens of other things that we do in our lives, I just thought you would be a really perfect guest to have on the show. So I couldn't be more excited to have you here.

[Chris] Well, thanks for having me, Dong.

[DongWon] Yeah. So, just to get into it, we were chatting before, you obviously make furniture, that's been a lifelong practice for you, but also, one of your early entrances sort of to this industry was as a writer. So how do you think about that divide between what you do as a craftsman and as a writer?

[Chris] I started as a newspaper journalist. That was my training, and so I was the dead body of the week reporter in newspapers. No, I love and miss the smell of a good trailer fire. But…

[Laughter]

[Chris] I eventually sort of the need to build furniture kind of took over which came from my background with my family as hippies in Arkansas, and so I tried to find a way to meld those two things. So I could write because that was something I could do to make a little bit of money and then I could build furniture which is also something to make another little bit of money. And so combining two really well paying professions, that's sort of how it happened. And I got a job with a magazine, woodworking magazine called Popular Woodworking, was there for 15 years, and then decided the corporate publishing was really messed up and started my own publishing company, which I've run for 18 years now.

[DongWon] Was starting the publishing company something that you did immediately after leaving or was there a time where you were trying to figure out, once you decided to lower longer be at Popular Woodworking?

[Chris] I'm not brave enough to just jump off the cliff, so I had started the publishing company in 2007, and then kind of figured out how to do things there, and I quit in 2011. So I really… It was about four years where I was doing both, which I think is the best way to quit your job.

[DongWon] Yeah, I…

[Howard] That is a nice window. I was a corporate software middle manager from 2000 to 2004, and I had started cartooning in 2000. It was 2004 when we went ahead and took the plunge. You don't just decide on a new career and throw the switch when you're working for yourself. It's… Takes a lot of courage. I like the jump off the cliff aspect of it, because, yeah, that's what it feels like.

[Chris] It does. And if you have something going, even if it's a little, that gave me a lot more courage to make the step. So, I encourage people to keep their day job when they want to become a full-time whatever for themselves. Keep your day job for a while. As long as you can, until it just absolutely destroys your soul, and then leave.

[Howard] One of the aspects… Sorry, you mentioned journalism. One of the aspects of writing for newspapers that I think fiction writers need to wrap their head around fairly quickly is the idea that in a newspaper, you're not allowed to write your way into the thesis. You have to say what you are going to say upfront, and then start supporting it. There are a lot of times when I look at the prose I've written and I realize, oh! Oh, the paragraph is upside down. The chapter is upside down.

[Chris] Yeah.

[Howard] I just gotta reverse the order of things. And it's not that I want it to sound like newspaper writing, it's that I've forgotten that certain things you just need to say something big and clear and important upfront so that people will follow you for the rest of the page.

[Chris] Yeah, I mean, you just say it, and then you need to support it.

[Yeah]

[Chris] You need to have the underpinnings to it, and that's what makes for good writing. Even if it's not written upside down or right side up. There's… It can all be quite hidden too, if you're good at it. But, yeah, that's the underpinnings of I think a lot of really good writing.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, just getting that message across as clearly as you can. When it came to leaving and starting the press, what were your goals in starting an independent publisher and what was the thought behind that? I mean, I'm someone who comes from 20 years of working in corporate traditional publishing, and so I have some guesses as to what those frustrations were and some guesses as to what your goals were, but I would love to hear from you sort of, like, what did that look like for you and what went into that decision to sort of really build your own path there?

[Chris] Well, I knew that corporate publishing was not what I wanted to do, because that's what I had been doing [garbled] medium, and pretty much what I did for the first 10 years of Lost Art Press was do everything that was the opposite of what corporate publishing did. Everything we do, we make everything in the United States. The books we make are beyond the library grade, as far as, like, how they're made, as far as having… We don't do perfect bindings, we do [Smyth stone], we do case bound, we do hardbacks, we try to make books that look like they're a 100 years old and that will last forever. That's really expensive and hard to do. It's not that expensive. Like, surprisingly, only a few dollars more, which is a lot in corporate America, but not a lot in real terms.

[Howard] There's a reason why you don't see that in the quote mass-market unquote.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] Well, it's just that…

[Howard] It's not easy.

[Chris] It's just a few pennies. It's not easy, because the factories aren't there. I mean, it's hard to do that in the United States because we don't have the… We've lost a lot of that.

[Yeah]

[Chris] Most of the good publishing is in Korea or in China or in Italy. But we've managed to do it, and do it well, but… And it was also that I saw that authors were getting screwed. I was an author, and I was getting screwed, and I was also a publisher and screwing other authors. Sort of, like, this human millipede or whatever.

[Yeah]

[Chris] And so, yeah, we decided to, like, give… Pretty much double or triple the royalties that we give to authors. And to make it worthwhile for them to spend two or three years on a book so that he… We wouldn't get rich, I mean, that's why I still build furniture, is because I still have to make… Do that to make ends meet, even though we ship out 60,000 books a year. That's just the way we're structured.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] So that the authors get a really good cut. And we get really good books…

[Yeah]

[Chris] As a result. Our first book is still in print from 18 years ago.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I own several of your books. I have the Anarchist's Workbench sitting right here in front of me, and I… It's always been remarkable to me how beautiful the additions are, and the amount of care that you guys put into making what you make. So it's really nice to hear what that process is like from your end. I can sort of see a connection in between you as a furniture maker and you as a bookmaker, as a publisher. How do you think about making objects in that way? I mean, how do you think about the intersection between those two things, whether you're building a chair or making a book?

[Chris] It has to last 200 years. That's really the baseline for me, and I don't know how many perfect bound books that I've owned and just been so disappointed in that they fall apart after the first or second reading. So when we design a physical book, we're going to use everything in our power to make sure that the book can survive floods, babies, dogs, locusts, whatever you can throw at it. But also that the writing itself is worth having around for 200 years. That these are things that haven't been said in the craft, things that have been hidden. That's a big thing in our craft is that a lot of stuff has been squirreled away or most of the knowledge of woodworking is in the graveyard. And so our job has been trying to tease that out through a variety of archaeological research and other kinds of methods. So we're trying to find stuff that's worthwhile to carry the craft forward and then put it into a time capsule, which is the book, that will make the journey.

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think it's something that's easy to forget, and one thing I've realized over my years in publishing is that we're in a physical goods business in a lot of ways. Right? Like, the physical book as an object is still the absolute core of what our industry does. E-books and audio are very important as well, and… But, at the end of the day, what we're mostly doing is making and distributing books to thousands of bookstores throughout the country. So it's really nice to hear that you're putting that front and center and thinking about the book as an object first and sort of the leading…

[Howard] Michael Stackpole once said… Chris, I'm pretty sure this will offend you on two counts.

[Laughter]

[Howard] He said that writers… Publishing is the business of shipping blocks of wood all over the country.

[Laughter]

[Chris] Yeah, he's not wrong. Stackpole was…

[DongWon] He's not wrong. Yeah.

[Chris] He's not wrong. Yeah. It's a different form of wood, for sure. But the physical media is hugely important to me. And… But I love digital this, that, or the other. I'm not discounting it. It's so portable and allows so many other things. But I think that, like, albums and like cassettes… My kids are into cassettes. What is wrong with them?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] They're back.

[Chris] Yeah. What… Didn't we get into eight tracks yet? So, physical media is going to have its day, I think, fully, because you can't take it away from us. My phone, all the time, is losing this song or that song or something from years ago. It's like, no, I want to carry this around, it's an object that I revere. I have Susanna Clarke's first novel that I just carry around with me, like a… I don't know, a love letter. So that's important.

[DongWon] That's really wonderful. Yeah, I mean, speaking of Susanna Clarke, I… You as a reader, like, what kind of things do you like to read and engage with on your own time? I mean, we were talking a little bit about, before this, that you see a connection between science fiction and the work that you do, and I'm kind of curious to hear more about that.

[Chris] Yeah. I'm a science-fiction nerd to the core, and I don't get to read it as much now because when you're a publisher… Well, I spend all day reading, and so sometimes the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is pick up a book, which sucks.

[DongWon] I feel that. I don't know when the last time I read a book for pleasure was.

[Chris] Oh, it's so hard. Because when I was a kid I… I mean, I read the library's limit every week. And that was me. So my pleasure is just few and far between. I mean, Susanna Clarke, that book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I don't know how many times I've read that book, and some of the follow-ups, the little small novella she did. I mean, I'm reading… I, like you were saying, I read the whole series. I pick my battles, because I only have so much time, because I read mostly stuff on JSTOR, archaeological stuff about eighteenth century apprenticeships and stuff like that. But you were trying to… We were talking a little bit about the intersection between science fiction and what I do. And what I feel like I do is that I feel like I am kind of living in a post-apocalyptic society right now. Like, all of us right here, as far as woodworking goes. And 100 years ago, hundred and 20 years ago, the level of knowledge about how things were made out of wood is that everything in the world was made out of wood. It was this advanced civilization that existed before us. Literally everything. People… Everybody knew how to sharpen tools, then… Our baskets were made of wood, everything around us was made out of wood, little pieces of metal, and some stone. And almost all of the good knowledge about that was lost. I mean, there's a… Because of the Guild system in the eighteenth century, there… We look at these pieces of furniture from the eighteenth century and the seventeenth century and we're standing here and we don't know how they're made. We can't understand how they did them. Like, what tool… We don't understand the tools they used, we don't understand the methods, we don't understand how quickly they did them. It's that we today are this retrograde society, this kind of… These kind of cave creatures…

[Howard] And yet…

[Chris] And we get to go back… No, go ahead.

[Howard] And yet we feel so incredibly advanced because we can make things digital.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And on that note, we're going to take a quick break.

[Chris] Oh, sorry.

[Howard] While our engineer checks to see if we have a digital problem.

[Chris] So, hey, the thing of the week? I'm reading a book right now called The Bookmakers by Adam Smith which… Basic Books, came out in 2024. And if you like books, if you're interested in the physical book, this is like a mind blowing book. It's like 18 little nonfiction vignettes of the history of bookmaking. And if you thought you knew who Benjamin Franklin was or who William Morris was or how paper was made, it's just going to blow your mind about what books were before, and they're not like… They've changed so much to what we have today. So it's just a delightful little read about how we don't know anything.

[DongWon] That sounds incredible, and it sounds like essential reading for me in particular.

[Chris] It's awesome. I mean, yeah. I hate Benjamin Franklin now, but that's okay.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Pretty much everybody should go into the reading of a book with the idea that they don't know anything.

[Chris] Yup.

[Howard] I love… Love, love, love learning new things. On the woodworking front, I just need to share this anecdote real quick. We decided to do some finish-it-yourself cabinetry. No, we can't build cabinets. We do not have that skill set. But we figured we could learn how to sand and varnish. And we just could not get what felt like a furniture grade finish on what we were doing. So I did a little reading and realized [gasp] there's a stage of sanding after you varnish.

[Chris] Yeah.

[Howard] You sand and you buff the book… Who knew? And we started doing that, and now the cabinets that… Sandra has to get all the credit, because she's done all the work. All I did was find the information and say, hey, guess what? I found a step that we didn't think existed. And I guess, circling back, it's just so cool to learn something that flies in the face of everything you thought you knew, and then you try it, and you realize, oh, I was so wrong, and now I can do a thing.

[DongWon] I was going to say, my little exposure to it I find that finishing can be an infinitely deep rabbit hole. And this kind of connects to what you were saying, Christopher, about so much of what you do is archaeology. Right? So much of what you do…

[Chris] Right.

[DongWon] Is going back and trying to understand how they did it in ways that we've lost for a variety of different reasons. And that puts you in this post-apocalyptic mindset. Right?

[Chris] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, it's really cool to sort of here how those things connect. What does that process look like for you? When you're doing that archaeology, when you're trying to get back to understanding not only what did they do before, but how to explicate that to a modern reader?

[Chris] Yeah. This is… So, a good example is the first workbenches that we know about were drawn on frescoes in Pompeii. And they look totally different than the workbenches we use now. They're really low and squat and simple. And I'm thinking, how did these things work? There's no manual. Nobody's ever written down how the Romans used these workbenches, but, they built furniture that is just like ours. Frame and panel. Just really high-end stuff. So, after a lot of research, I found there was this old Roman fort in Germany, [on the lemus] that still had three original Roman workbenches that they had dug up from a well. So, I got to go there, and had a full period rush where I got to hold the workbench. Pick it up. And measure it and examine it very closely. Then I came back to Kentucky, and I built the thing. And it's just like the Romans had it. And then I tried building furniture with it. And then I invented… Invited all my friends over who were furniture makers, and I was like, how would you build a cabinet on this? And we kind of worked it out. So it's a lot of experimental archaeology, but it's not just like, oh, what… It's not random. It's stuff that we have a long history of doing this stuff, but… How do you adapt it to this really foreign way? And try to get in their shoes. Use their tools, and produce that work. And it's really just kind of… You get this [garbled] you don't feel like a Roman or anything, but you're just like… The deep connection to somebody 2000 years ago that knew more than you. A lot more than you.

[DongWon] Yeah. A thing I run into fiction, in fiction, all the time, that really frustrates me is when people kind of don't think about the material design of the world that they live in. Right? When you have… When you introduce and object into your fictional world, there's all these implications that descend from it about how people exist in that world. Right? If you have a workbench like this, then you're going to operate in a different way. I mean, I remember the first time I saw a video of a Japanese woodworker working on a workbench, which was, like, very low to the floor. They're usually operating barefoot in those studios and using their feet to hold the workpiece and things like that, and it really just had all these different implications about how Japanese society operates, the physical environments that they're in, what they value and all of that. And so, I love that your sort of doing that process in reverse. Right? You're taking the object and rebuilding the lived experience of these people around it. And I think that is so applicable to thinking about fiction and thinking about worldbuilding and the kind of work that we do on our end.

[Chris] Yeah. I mean, starting with an object that you don't know how it was created. It's like finding a laser gun in a desert, and you're like, where did this come from? That's really what I do. That's what gets me up in the morning, is, like, just thinking about these weird things and how to explain them to people. And then make it applicable. Because, like, who cares that the Romans had a workbench this way. But this workbench actually turns out to be something that's great for apartment woodworkers. If you want to start making furniture you don't have a shop, this little bench looks like a coffee table. So you can do it in your apartment. You could do it if you are in a wheelchair. You could do it if you're disabled. This workbench opens up the craft for a huge swath of people that were restricted to this mindset of I need a garage with the tablesaw and the planer and all this other crap. So that's the value that you get from going back and doing this archaeology, is, you build a bigger world today.

[Howard] The value is actually… It's actually bigger than that. There was a… I can't remember the documentary, but I've seen a documentary, I've read a couple of articles about it. Roman concrete…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] Oh, yeah. Roman concrete. Yeah.

[Howard] They did some stuff with their concrete that makes the concrete heal when it cracked.

[Chris] [Gypsum] water. Yeah.

[Howard] And I don't remember the details of it. But the modern engineers who were looking at it were saying, okay, we need to figure out how to apply this. Because it will make our concrete better. It will make our buildings sturdier. This is a secret that's been lost to us for 2000 years and we need to employ it now.

[Chris] Yeah. And that's science fiction is undiscovered worlds. And our… I mean, it's just writing about this undiscovered world that is just all around us.

[DongWon] And the technology is not linear. Right? There's things that we understood that get lost over time, and we have to reinvent or rediscover them. And I think we have this idea of history as progressive and it just keeps marching forward. And I think there's a lot more ups and downs and cycles to it.

[Chris] Absolutely.

[DongWon] One thing I've always loved about your writing, Christopher, is that you really managed to put your point of view into the books that you're writing. Right? It's never just ABC, here's how to do the steps of the thing that you're making. I always can feel your worldview and perspective coming through that. How do you think about that design process, the writing process, and how you as a creator tie into those things?

[Chris] Well, how to has got to be as dry as a popcorn fart. As a…

[Chuckles]

[Chris] Way of writing. It's just slot A, tab B, blah blah blah, like an IKEA instruction manual. So when I came to it, I was like, I want to look at it… How to through a different lens. I know you guys are talking about lenses this season and… So the lens that I look through how to in this case… It could be science fiction in one case. In that case, it's social commentary. So, how do you critique modern society through a how to book? And I do that all the time. The Anarchist Toolchest is about consumption, and about how we consume too much. And so, if you build this chest and you fill it with good tools and if you don't have room for another tool, that should tell you something. That you don't need anything more. So it's a way of making a critique without… But also giving them something that they really need. Which is, what tools should I buy?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's what made a book that I thought was just going to be about how do I build a toolbox kind of life-changing for me in a lot of ways. It reframed how to think about this craft in this hobby that I was getting into, and really gave me a lot of perspective on that. So thank you for that.

[Chris] No problem.

[DongWon] And I love hearing sort of, like, how your approaching that in terms of how to make a how to more engaging. Right? And also… So there's, like, the practical component, but then there's also you, as a writer, are [accentuating] your worldview and engaging with the world around you.

[Chris] Yeah. There's a lot of ways to do that. I mean, you can take how to and look at it through a variety of lenses, and it's all fun. I mean, it's a fun way to… And that sort of the homework I'm going to be talking about.

[DongWon] And I love hearing you talk. I mean, you're talking about approaching writing from a journalistic perspective, from this how to perspective, from the research and archaeology perspective. Is there a key to sort of combining those different aspects into your work, or do you see it all as the same practice, or are these different lenses that you're bringing to how to think about your writing and how to think about the publishing work you do?

[Chris] Well, I'm… [Garbled] I'm a journalist, and so…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] That's the lens that I look at the world through, is, like, how can I present what I think is true? What I think is true. I know that there's always subjectivity. But it is, like, trying to shine a light on things. So that's always the most important thing to me. But I also just think it's important as a writer to take on other perspectives. Even though I don't write fiction, I try to slip into other perspectives. Like, I try to write something like a recall letter, like for your car. And… But do it in woodworking terms. Like somebody was… Your something was getting recalled. How will I write like a corporate memo? Can I write this like an obituary? As an exercise to try to get my head out of writing just the way that I always write. So I'm always messing around. And that's my blog, is messing around with different writing forms.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] And… To experiment. And without any consequences, other than trolls.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] But…

[Howard] I've got a question, and it's one of my favorites to ask. Has there been a really memorable failure for you that you've learned from? And has there been a really memorable triumph about which you justifiably feel incredibly smug?

[Chuckles]

[Chris] I've had so many failures. I started a newspaper with a partner before I started Lost Art Press, before I worked in woodworking, and I just had my butt handed to me. I knew nothing about finances, I knew how to write, but it was a complete failure on so many levels. It ruined so many people's lives, including mine. It was just… It was terrible. I ended up beating up a paper folding machine with a table leg. There a lot of bad stories that go with it. But I got up after that and I started another business and this time I knew what I had done wrong. Or I thought I knew what I had done wrong. And, so far, 18 years, it's doing great. So I'm glad that I failed.

[Howard] You keep the loose table legs away from the paper folding machines.

[Chris] Yeah. I… There are no table legs in our whole factory here.

[Chuckles]

[Chris] No, I'm… I won't allow them.

[Laughter]

[Chris] But, the triumph, I think, that I feel smug about is, sometimes I can poop out a book and people think it's not going to be a good book and then it runs away. Like, sometimes you spend two or three years making a book and then you write it… Like, my most recent book. It's not going to sell. But I've worked two or three years on it, and it's going to just be fine, whatever. But I wrote a book a few years ago called Sharpen This, which is about sharpening, which is a dumb topic, but… It's an important topic. And I wrote this book in two weeks. And we've sold like 10,000, 12,000 copies in the last couple years. Which is a lot for a little press. And… So, yeah, I feel pretty smug about doing two weeks of work and having something that has just broken a lot of sales records. But that's lucky. You don't get to poop out a book every… You have to eat a lot to poop out a book.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] That's for sure, and I'm familiar with the things that you have no reason to think is going to take off suddenly blows up, and it's always those little passion projects that just sort of catch you by surprise.

[Chris] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] And it's always… It's such a delight when that happens. Yeah. Publishing is an always evolving landscape, and I'm curious to hear from you, as an independent publisher, running a small press, doing the kind of work that you do, what are… How have you seen that change over the last few years and do you have any thoughts about where we're headed in the years to come? Like, advice for writers as to thinking about getting into this space, for new writers, even people who are more established, how to navigate and survive this ever-changing landscape?

[Chris] Yeah. Well, don't be afraid to self publish. I would say that. That's really becoming a good way to make a good living is that if you can reach an audience through social media, through a blog or sub stack or whatnot, you can sell a book, and you can make a really good living, and there's no stink on publishing yourself. Sorry, I know you work for a corporate publisher, but…

[DongWon] [garbled] I'm very clear eyed about the business I work in.

[Chris] Yeah. I mean, you don't have to have that big organization behind you to… If you are not trying to sell a million copies. If you just want to, like, get your ideas out. And… There's a lot of scams out there that will try to take your money. But there are a lot of other good organizations that can help you work through that and get your novel self published. But I would say try to do everything yourself as much as possible. I mean, we do our own distribution. We don't do… We don't go through any… We don't go through Ingram, we don't go through any of the traditional distribution channels, we don't sell through Amazon. The only people that we sell through our people I've had a meal with who sell woodworking tools.

[Chuckles]

[Chris] The closer that you can keep it to the chest, and the more real, the less you… You'll make a lot more money, but you won't get a lot of glory, I guess. And I'm much more interested in making good things that a few people enjoy, and I don't care if I'm not a household name among every housewife in Schenectady, New York. So…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I mean, I think that's a good way to approach this business. I think that's a good way to approach a writing career. And so, I just want to say thank you so much for your time and for joining us here. If people want to find your work, where should they look online?

[Chris] You just go to lostartpress.com or some people will say Löst Art Press, and all our stuff is there. Links to our blogs and our substack and our whole world.

[DongWon] Fantastic. And before we let you go, I believe you have some homework for us.

[Chris] I do have some homework. I think that a lot of writers, and I do this with some of our people, is I assign them a little piece of homework, which is, like… Go to wikiHow.com or one of the other how to things and pick out one of the weird how to things and use it as you do a writing prompt for a way to explore one of your characters. Like, if you got on wikiHow… I went on the wikiHow page today, and there was how to use a belt as handcuffs.

[Laughter]

[Chris] And I'm like, come on, that is a writing prompt right there. I mean, you can… You should… Or have a character encounter that. On one side…

[Howard] That's a great dialogue moment…

[Garbled]

[Howard] You're wearing a belt.

[Laughter]

[Chris] Right. But you can see being on either side of that equation, that it would be really interesting. Or how… There was a wikiHow on how to make a [prism writer] from a battery. This stuff writes itself. So if you just go to this wikiHow, you could… Like I was… I did one once for myself, where I was a white supremacist making wood bleach to turn wood whiter.

[Chuckles]

[Chris] And going through the mental things of why would a white supremacist do this? He doesn't like walnut, it's too dark? But, yeah. Use wikiHow as an enormous source, and it also like… It's how to do stuff. That's… You've got a structure there to work from that you can just pile some meat on, some narrative meat.

[DongWon] Excellent. I really…

[Howard]. Summarizing your homework. Go to wikiHow, learn a new thing, and then work it into a story.

[Chris] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] I love it.

[DongWon] Thank you again for joining us. It's been a real pleasure having you here.

[Chris] Thanks, guys.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go learn to do a thing and then write about it.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Nine.

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

[Pause]

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] Isn't it great?

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

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

[Dongwon] Choices have been made.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] Who are the people who…

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Howard] Oh, there's absolutely…

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Piper] It is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Dan] We want some of your money.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Piper] Yeah, maybe.

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

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

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

[Dan] Hey!

[Piper] Hey-o!

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, fine.

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

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

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

[Dan] Exactly.

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

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

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

[Piper] Agreed.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's going to be great.

[Piper] Make it light! And fun.

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

[Laughter]

[Dan] From where?

[Howard] The ruins of civilization.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.

[Nandi] 15 minutes long.

[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tamie] And we're not that smart.

[Bridget] But we are all self published.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

[Whoo! Applause!]

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

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

[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.

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

[Howard] That's a solid number.

[Bridget] For my first year.

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

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

[Howard] Tamie?

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

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

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

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

[Nandi] Yes.

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

[Nandi] Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.

[Howard] Okay.

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

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

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

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

[Victorine] Yep. Yup.

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

[Howard] When you say three of us…

[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…

[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Nandi?] Absolutely.

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

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

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

[Garble]

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

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

[Cheers]

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

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

[Howard] Who's got our homework?

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

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

[Whoo! Applause.]

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/27/14-43-sequencing-your-career-genome/

Key points: What do you do after you sell the first book? Or what do you do when the series did well, but... then there's a slump? You can't predict exactly what will happen. Look for decision points. At least have a sense of if this happens, I'll do this. Good or bad things! Know when to change approaches. You can stop and take time to plan! Think about multiple exit routes. You may want to balance several things, not just do one thing full-time. Think about careers you might like to emulate. Take a look at self-publishing, freelancing, write-for-hire. There are many outlets. Think about income streams. Know your bandwidth! What are your limits, both up and down. Don't get locked into one genre. Think about production schedules, think about lifestyle. What is your creative throughput, and how do you want to use it?

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 43.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Sequencing Your Career Genome.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We're going to talk about the sequence in which you do things to plan your career, based on the kind of career that you want your career to grow up to be. I shortened that into something that sounds all science-y, but we're not going to break out the CRISPR in order to…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Bacterially inject your career with pieces of my [immune?].

[Dan] Oh, man. I wish you would, though. That would help me so much.

[Mary Robinette] That would be so much easier than actually trying to think about what I wanted to do.

[Dan] Yeah, genetically engineering a career instead of raising one from birth.

[Howard] I think Dongwon's headband… We wear headbands to keep these microphones on our head. Dongwon's headband actually has some of Brandon's DNA in it.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no. I'm wearing Brandon's.

[Howard] Oh, are you wearing Brandon's headband?

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Dongwon] We're really just going to Frankenstein into one large monster by the end of this.

[Laughter]

[Howard] So, Dongwon, this is an episode you pitched to us. How does an author, new or established or even old, make these kinds of career plans?

[Dongwon] Well, career planning is not a thing that we talk a lot… Talk about a lot in the industry. Especially, I don't hear it being discussed at writing conferences, and especially for new writers. In part, because you're so focused on how do I find an agent, how do I sell this first project? But the thing that I always see happen is once you sell that first book, then there's immediate pressure to have a second book. Since you spent the first 10 years of your life… Writing life, writing that first novel, now suddenly you have to produce a second book in a year. Everyone panics and runs into a very common problem, which is the second book in a series or sequel is not as good or is a much more painful process than writers really want it to be. So one thing I really like is if authors can start thinking about what they want their career to look like in the early stages. Then you can start planning for not only this book but what's next, and then what's going to come after that.

[Dan] Career planning is something that I wish I had known more about when I got started in this process. Because I feel like I did a pretty good job of the first one. I had a series. My second series actually hit the New York Times list. I thought I was doing pretty well, and then hit a slump. I had not planned ahead for it, I had not planned for it, creatively, emotionally, or financially. If I had had… If I had known then what I know now about how to plan ahead and look further into the future, it would have been so much easier to avoid that, to avoid kind of just relying on the publishing industry to stay consistent, which it never does. I know now that, okay, if I have more irons in more fires, and branching out into a… More forms, more mediums, more outlets for my fiction, then it would have been so much easier at that time to kind of navigate that when it happened.

[Dongwon] One thing I want to sort of reinforce as we talk about this is this isn't about having perfect predictive abilities, right? It's not about clarity about what exactly is going to happen when you publish your second book or your second series or your fifth series or whatever it is. It's the fact that the publishing industry, like many businesses, but especially media businesses, is extremely random. What happens from one book to the next book could be affected by anything from… I think Mary's talked about this in the past. Your book coming out the week of a disastrous election result, or there could be natural disasters, or I had a recent issue where one of the publishers ran out of paper, which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What?

[Dongwon] These are apparently things that could happen. I mean, this has been resolved, it's fine.

[Howard] That's the last time he prints a book on the skins of small children, but…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But that's how you summoned the demons, Howard, and the demons are how you make mon… Anyway, sorry.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Alex, we're [templating] this.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So, keep in mind, career planning isn't necessarily about here's I'm going to do A, then I'm going to do B, then I'm going to do C. Career planning is looking at decision points. In two books, I'm going to have to make a decision. Do I stay with this publisher or do I go to a different publisher? Do I stay in this genre, do I go to a different genre? Do I write a sequel to this series or do I come up with something new? What you want to do is have some sense at least… You don't have to have a super concrete plan, but some sense of okay, if this happens, if the good outcome happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this book tanks and nobody ever buys it, here's what I'm going to do. In part, having a plan in place when you hit the wall, when the bottom falls out of something, means that you're not also going to collapse with it. You're going to have a plan in place, or at least an outline of a plan, and be able to recover and continue to build to something new. Or, on the flipside, when your thing blows up and there suddenly 10,000 people clamoring for your attention, you're not going to panic and die, because you'll have a plan. You'll have already started that next book in the series that suddenly has a huge demand and a huge audience for it.

[Howard] I have two examples here, both from my own life. One when we first started going full-time with Schlock Mercenary. We established a trigger point at which Howard was going to go look for a day job. The trigger point was when we have paid the bills for two months using credit cards. Because that is the point at which we are no longer realistically financially planning things. We are living on the blind hope that some payday is coming down the road, and we have failed to bring the money in the way we meant to, and we must now do something else. I can't… I cannot overemphasize that to you. Knowing when… Quit is the wrong word, but knowing when to get off this bus…

[Mary Robinette] To change gears.

[Howard] To change gears, to take a different route. That is… It saves lives. The second… When we did the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter. It funded in like a minute and a half, and overfunded through the first two stretch goals within 15 minutes. What I posted was, "Wow. Thank you for your enthusiasm. We are flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Sandra and I are now going to take 24 hours in which to reconsider our plans for the rest of this project, because you want it more than we expected you to. Forgive us for being silent during that time. We don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but we also don't want to fail to deliver after having funded." That's the mistake that most commonly gets made. That thing that I said got quoted dozens of times through the Kickstarter marketplace as people realized, oh, my gosh, they ran up against something they didn't know how to plan for, and they told us that they were going to go plan. That is so smart.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] There's the old saying that when a door closes, a window opens, or something along those lines. It… In my experience, it really helps if you go and make sure that the window's unlocked and maybe put a stick under it so that it's propped open.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So when that door slams shut, you have another exit route. Right? Like those… So, belt and suspenders is a really useful thing. If you start thinking about what are your exits from this room, then you won't end up trapped in it forever.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that a lot of writers think, "Oh, someday I want to write full-time." This is when we're talking about career planning. Is that something you want to do? Because writing full-time means being a freelancer. So that exit strategy thing… That's something that I've had to do for my entire adult career. My goal has been to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. That is… When I reach those cusp points, it's like, well, I can write this. But it's a project I don't want to do. Is that going to push me down a path where I'm going to have to keep doing that kind of project, because I am now reliant on that income stream? Or do I pick this other path which will allow me to find different income stream sources? So I feel like… That's when you're talking about not just the door shutting, but it's like, do you want to go out the window? What are the choices you want to be making to get closer to the career you want to have? Like, I don't actually want to write full-time. I want a career where I'm balancing puppetry and audiobooks and writing. Because I enjoy all three of those. But I want to do the audiobooks I want to do. I want to write the books I want to write. I don't want to have to go do ghostwriting just because I want to be a full-time writer.

[Dan] Well, we've actually had that conversation about Writing Excuses as well. The four core podcasters sitting down to say, "How big do we want to let this thing get?" We've actually made some decisions where we turned down opportunities because it would have taken up too much of our time, and therefore too much of our lives, and kind of locked us into a path that took away some of our freedom to do other things.

[Howard] I will make very, very different decisions if I'm trying to be a full-time podcaster versus if I'm willing to let Dongwon be the smart one. Not that that was a choice that I was making.

[Howard] On that subject, we're talking about, in part, scheduling and time. Dongwon, I think you have a book to pitch for us that has time right in the title?

[Dongwon] I would, and it does have time in the title. I would like to pitch This is How You Lose the Time War, which is a book that is co-written by Amal el Mohtar, which you guys know from the podcast, and Max Gladstone. They wrote this book together as a… As an epistolary novel, so it is letters exchanged from one character to the other character. The two characters are rival agents in a war that is fought through time as the title implies, and they both represent two possible futures. They are trying to affect things that happened down the threads to make sure that their future is the one that wins. It is slightly possible that these two characters, as they engage in this brutal, bloody battle that sets civilizations on fire and conducts massive battles in space, that they might start to have some feelings for one another, and maybe that will go somewhere. I'm just saying it's a possibility.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

[Howard] So. What are some careers that we've seen that we would like to emulate? I think… Well, one of the ones I think of is… I panned one of his books because it wasn't actually one of his books. James Patterson, who writes everything. But I haven't actually done any research to find out how he made that work. My kids love the Maximum Ride books. But that isn't all that he does. Are there authors whose careers you've looked at that you love?

[Dongwon] One of the first questions I ask, whenever I'm looking at signing a client… I like to have a phone call with that writer. The question that I asked them, and it stymies them about half of the time. But it's always an interesting conversation, is, if you could have the career of any author in the marketplace, whose career would you want? I'm not asking what do your books… What kind of books do you want to write, in terms of the craft or the style. But, in terms of the publishing cycle, how many series they do, who their books are bought by like who their audience is? That answer's going to be really different if that person is Neil Gaiman or Seanan McGuire, even though they write in some ways very similar things about magic in our contemporary world. But their careers look extremely different.

[Dan] I want whichever career means I don't have to work. But still get paid for it. Whose career is that?

[Dongwon] I mean, that's a really important question. Mary was talking… Mary Robinette was talking about this a little bit earlier, in terms of do you want to write so that you don't have to have a day job? If you're not going to have a day job, that usually means you're going to have to publish more frequently or publish… Or get bigger book deals than you would in another situation. So, the way you get bigger book deals involves a slightly different strategy that if you want to publish once a year in a sort of a series-oriented format. Right? There's different ways you can optimize. You take bigger bets. You take wider shots, or longer shots, than you would if you had a reliable income and you wanted to be doing something that had a reasonable readership, but not necessarily needing to shoot the moon on every book.

[Dan] As you're thinking about what kind of career you want as well, almost everything we've been talking about in this episode is traditional publishing. There's so many more options than that outside of it. There's so much self-publishing stuff. There's so much… And we have talked about freelancing, and write for hire. There's so many outlets for you to find work in. Choosing which one of those you want to use, and if you are saying no to an income stream, can you afford to say no to it? Are you willing to put in the work to rely on the other income streams? Making these decisions ahead of time so that you know what you're getting yourself into and how to make it work.

[Howard] There's a…

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, that's one of the reasons that I don't self publish. Because I don't want to be a publisher, which is me turning down a gig I don't want to do. That's not anything about whether or not it's a… That's a personal choice about where I want to be spending my time and energy.

[Howard] There's a writer, illustrator, teacher who I… Whose career I admire. Jim Zub. He studied animation, went into like project management and sales for a company that was selling art cycles to the big three comic publishers to say we can take over on this issue for this title so you don't slip your dates. Then they kind of became their own publisher. He went from that… He did a web comic for a while. He went goo goo over… Or gaga, I guess, over Neil Gaiman when he accidentally met him at a party and Neil said, "Hi. My name's Neil. I'm a writer." Jim was like, "Oh. That's what I want to be. That's… I want that level of humility that is absolutely not required because I'm that guy." He now writes, I think, half a dozen titles per month for Marvel plus some of his old work, and is regarded by many people as one of the hardest working writers in comics. When I met him as a web cartoonist, that is not the career plan I envisioned for him. That's not my job. I don't know how much of this he planned, but he kept his job as an instructor at Seneca University, because, like Mary, he wants to have more than just the one thing.

[Dongwon] One thing that's really important, though, is you need to have a really clear self-assessment of what your bandwidth is. Right? What I see so many times, and you're describing someone who is very hard-working, but he also has the capacity to do that. A lot of people simply don't. It's okay if you only write 30,000 words a year. Right? It's okay to write a novel every two years, three years. You can still build a career out of that. What you can't do is build a career of somebody who writes a book a year when that something you're not going to be able to do. The more you can be aware of what your limits are, in both directions. I've also seen writers take on writing 500-600,000 words a year, and really skirt that line of burnout and risk not being able to deliver on a number of deadlines, which would be disastrous for their career. So, what you need to do is have a really clear-eyed sense of what can I actually do, and then experiment within that to make sure that those are your limits, or maybe you actually can write more than you think you can. Or, oh, this feels like too much, the quality is starting to slip. I need to back off of that little bit. Those are all really important questions you need to ask yourself, and have a really clear sense of what your process is. Then you can build a career around it. There's no wrong answers to that question. Some might be easier than others, but the most important part is you are realistic about what your goals and what your bandwidth actually is.

[Mary Robinette] The time to do this is when you are early in your career. Like, a very deliberate choice that I did make with my career was that I wrote in a bunch of different genres. Because I had seen often enough a friend sell a book and then get locked into that genre. It just happened to be the first book that they sold. Like, the book that I wrote before Shades of Milk and Honey was a science-fiction murder mystery. The book that I wrote after Shades of Milk and Honey was an urban fantasy. But Shades is the one that sold. After that… We finished that series, the decision that Tor made was we wanted to have me try a bunch of standalone to see what hit. So when you're thinking about what kind of a career do you want to have and who do you want to emulate, you're not thinking about the genre that they're writing in. What you're thinking about is their production schedule, you're thinking about the lifestyle that they live. That's the kind of thing you're thinking about, not the genre.

[Dongwon] Often, how many careers are they maintaining at once? Are they a comics writer, a YA novelist, an adult novelist, and a screenwriter all at the same time? I know people who do that, and they do it very well. That may not be you, if you have a really demanding full-time job, or you just don't have that much creative throughput in any given day.

[Howard] That brings us around beautifully to the homework. Identify an author whose career you would like to emulate. Research their career timeline, including the release dates of their books. That's pretty easy. Possibly, the order in which these things were written, and maybe actually the things, the order in which these things were actually sold. Who were their editors? Who is their agent? Look at all of this, and try and give yourself an accurate picture of what goes into that thing that you want to be or have. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.50: Hand-Selling Your Book to Potential Readers, with Michael R. Underwood

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/12/11/11-50-hand-selling-your-book-to-potential-readers-with-michael-r-underwood/

Key Points: Hard selling can poison the well. Don't do it. Start with a conversation. Questions are good. Get them to talk about their favorite books, then pitch something similar. Find out what problem they have, what they are interested in. Set up your table in clusters. A big backlist or working with other authors can help you meet their interest with something that matches. But find out what their problem is, and then suit your pitch to that. "What do you like to read?" and "What kind of fun are you looking to have with a book?" Be enthusiastic! If you have a big backlist/series, prime yourself to talk about a good entry point to get past paralysis of choice. Try out different pitches, and then think about what worked and didn't work. Get the book in their hands. Your pitch is a story you are telling to an audience of one, make it a good one! Don't forget the economic pitch -- sales bundles, special deals, etc. Build relationships, don't force today's sale and lose a long-term reader.

( A special deal, just for you... )

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to call it right here. But Michael, you said you have a writing prompt for us.
[Michael] I really love looking at the sociology of science fiction. I think this is may be related to a prompt that Mary has given, so I'll apologize if it's a little bit of a retread. When you have an idea about like oh, say, here's a cool technology. So, come up with a cool technology. Then, to figure out who your protagonist is, look at who has the most to gain and the most to lose, and how it will change any given industry. Then you can find a protagonist there. From that, you've created a couple of points, and go forward. Write an outline or write a story.
[Brandon] Excellent. Well, Michael, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
[Michael] Thanks so much for having me. That'll be $20.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] And the audience from our Writing Excuses cruise. Thank you guys.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: flickering

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Writing Excuses 11.11: Self-Publishing in 2016, with Michaelbrent Collings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/03/13/11-11-self-publishing-in-2016-with-michaelbrent-collings/

Key points: Self-publishing. Indie. Kicked in the door, shot a bunch of people, and is casually sipping its whiskey at the bar over the dead bodies. But... It's a lot of work. The question is not "Can you get published?" The question now is, "Can you get noticed, read, and reread?" The secret to authors making a living is having other people sell their books. Also, your first book sucks. Be aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You are a business. Be objective about it. Kindle Select or diversify? Promotional lists? Investment? It depends. The big thing is volume -- once they read one great book, make sure they can find more! Best online resource to learn about self-publishing? Google. Lots of options, from small press, to farming it out, to DIY all the way.

( Do It Yourself? )[Brandon] All right. So we're going to stop here for our homework. Actually, Michael's going to give us his favorite writing exercise.
[Michaelbrent] Okay. So take a first line of any book and turn it into a scary line. Take the scary line and create two separate short stories based on that scary line.
[Brandon] Oooh. That's cool. Thank you to our audience here, at Life, The Universe, and Everything.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] Thank you to Michael for being on the podcast with us.
[Michaelbrent] You're welcome.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're all out of excuses, now go write.
[Mary] Writing Excuses is a Dragonsteel Production, jointly hosted by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Taylor. This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson.

Current Mood: soggy

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Writing Excuses 7.22: Microcasting

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/05/27/writing-excuses-7-22-microcasting/

Key Points:
1. What are your thoughts on prologues? They can help, but they can also be a crutch. Good for epics, groundwork, setting.
2. Tips for using drawings to establish setting. Cheat! Implication and suggestion.
3. How do you name your characters? 1) Raid the spam box. 2) The Ever-Changing Book of Names. 3) behindthename.com and other online name sites
4. If you were doing it now, would you self-publish? Brandon: No. Big epic fantasies do better with mainstream. Mary: No. Too much overhead. Dan: No, prefer publisher.
5. How do you make sure powerful character isn't too strong? Weakness. Stakes outside powerful area.
6. How do you avoid too much foreshadowing? Write the book, and fix it in post.
7. How do you trim your fiction? Look for redundancy. Apply "In late, out early" to trim the start and end of scenes and chapters.
8. What about flashbacks? They can be useful. Make sure they are triggered by something the character is experiencing. Avoid flashbacks that kill forward motion.

"If you can make it work, it will work. Don't worry about rules telling you what you can and can't do." Dan
( The details... )
[Brandon] Okay. We are out of time. And... Oh, man, I had a good writing prompt, too.
[Mary] Write a flashback.
[Brandon] I guess, write a flashback. Sure, we'll do the easy one.
[Dan] In a prologue, with the mirror scene.
[Brandon] With the mirror scene.
[Howard] Oh, gosh.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Howard] No, they have a very, very good excuse.
[Brandon] Yeah, I know. That was lame. I should've written it down. Oh, well.
[Howard] G'night, kids.

Current Mood: pained

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 21: Pitfalls of Self-Publishing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/18/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-21-pitfalls-of-self-publishing-with-larry-correia/

Key points: Self-publishing is not easy. You still need all the stuff that a publishing house does, and you have to do it yourself. You have to avoid the con artists. You have to be a businessperson, marketeer, and accountant. You need a business plan!
( The self-publishing rag )
[Brandon] I've got a writing prompt for everyone. Story about someone who self publishes a book which for one reason or another becomes a threat that will end the world. So someone self publishes the Necronomicon.
[Larry] So you read my book?
[Brandon] Thank you to Larry. The book is Monster Hunter International. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: unpolished

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with self-publishing

Writing Excuses 20.17: An Interview with Christopher Schwarz

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

Writing Excuses 11.50: Hand-Selling Your Book to Potential Readers, with Michael R. Underwood

Writing Excuses 11.11: Self-Publishing in 2016, with Michaelbrent Collings

Writing Excuses 7.22: Microcasting

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 21: Pitfalls of Self-Publishing

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