From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/03/17-14-structuring-for-disordered-or-order-less-reading-order/

 

Key Points: Stories or structures that can be read out of order? That ignore or bypass a specific order to events? Being able to read books in a series, or sections in a book, out of order, and it still works. Television episodes often do this. Although books usually still have to build. Fixup novels do this. Often there is a frame that explains why the story is told this way. Webcomics demand that each installment is understandable and rewarding enough that people want to find more. Series often require that readers be able to start with any of the books. Different characters and big time jumps can help readers with this. Make sure that at the beginning of the story or episode, the character has earned the reader's/viewer's trust, belief, admiration.

 

[Season 17, Episode 14]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring for Disordered or Order-less Reading Order.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes or so long.

[Peng] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Howard] And I'm not allowed to write episode titles anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I suppose I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I could be Peng.

[Howard] I'm Howard. I'm out of zoomer.

[Dan] I demand that you may or may not be Howard.

[Howard] Is that in order?

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Disordered or orderless reading order.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are books that can be read out of order. There are stories, structures that demand a specific order to events, and structures that ignore that or just bypass it. Peng, what do we mean by this? What are we talking about with orderless reading order?

[Peng] Well, there are a couple of different ways that I think we can take this. I would say that it's one of the… It's a rarer structure for sure. Because we, as readers, especially Western readers, have been conditioned to expect that you start at the beginning of the book you finish at the end of the book, or the series. So, when we say flexible orders of reading, we could mean something like reading the books in a series out of order, or, if you got books that are… Have multiple sections, you might be able to read the sections out of order. But it's basically a story in which you can read all of the pieces either in the order that's suggested by the book or in whatever order you choose and it still has to work.

[Dan] Yeah. I think it is funny that we talk about this as a rare style of storytelling. Because within books it definitely is, but that's how television was for decades. Right? Modern detective stories, something like The Killing, you have to watch those in order because there's a very large serialized story being told. But go back to the 80s. You can watch any Magnum, PI, episode out of order with no context whatsoever, and still understand what's going on. So I… It's definitely a style of storytelling that we are culturally familiar with, just not really in our prose, in our books.

[Peng] Well, I think the main difference between TV shows like that, where every episode is its own thing and you can just watch any out of order, and books that are trying to do this is that with those TV shows, they're not necessarily building towards any kind of greater narrative. It's just every self-contained episode is a half-hour of entertainment, and that's that. Whereas books that can be read out of order, or they have some kind of a flexible order of reading to them, it doesn't matter what order you do choose to read it in, it still has to build in a way that these TV shows don't necessarily. So I think that is the greatest difficulty of this form, but also a really rewarding aspect of it. Because it is very hard to pull off.

[Mary Robinette] It's a… I think it's a structure that we did… We have seen perhaps a little bit more in a type called the fixup novel. Which is where an author takes… The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, is a prime example of this. It was a collection of short stories. He put them together, then added some interstitial material to kind of stitch it together. But you can really pick up The Martian Chronicles and read a chapter without reading the rest of the book, and it's fine. There are other examples of those. Most of the ones that I'm coming up with are in the fixup novel category, which is really a collection of short stories that are masquerading as a novel. But there's one that I… I haven't tried reading it non-sequentially, but The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Ward, I think you could read it non-sequentially and still get the overwhelming sense of loss that she builds towards.

[Peng] Does that book… Does it give you instructions to read it in any order you want, or is it just something…

[Mary Robinette] No, no. It's just something that I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it. It's not a fixup novel. It's just… It is… When I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is not a three act structure or any of the other structures." Yeah, but there's no instructions that you should read it out of sequence. There are books that tell you you can read it out of sequence?

[Peng] Yeah, so there's… Oh, go ahead.

[Dan] I was just going to say I'm familiar with one called Second Paradigm by Peter Wacks that's a time travel novel that every chapter can be read out of order and the story still makes sense.

[Wow]

[Dan] You could just open it up to a random chapter, read to the end, start at the beginning and wraparound. You could read the chapters in random order, and it all still works. It's really a brilliantly constructed story.

[Peng] That's really, I think, that's another really good point to call out about this structure is that because it is not so standard, a lot of times you… The story that you're working on, it might require some kind of a frame to give your story a reason for being told that way. So, out of order or in any way and order you want to read. It sounds like the book that you just named does that, because it is a book about time travel. So the jumping, like the book itself is conscious that it can be read in that way because it is about time travel. So it provides, like, a really good reason or frame for it to exist that way.

 

[Howard] When we think about this in terms of a physical novel where you're paging through in order to read, it's often difficult to imagine, well, why would I not just go to the next page? Why would I just open it up and start in the middle? My… And I'm going to use these words completely non-ironically… Magnum opus, Schlock Mercenary, the webcomic which ran for 20 years and you can still read at schlockmercenary.com. On any given day, if you went to schlockmercenary.com, the strip that is up in front of you is the very latest event in the story. I had to make sure as I was telling the story that every installment was comprehensible enough and rewarding enough that someone would click a button that says take me to the beginning of this chapter. Take me to the beginning of this book. Just throw me to a random location in the archives and let me see if I like it. We had all of those buttons. In fact, when we put the random archive button up, I got all kinds of feedback from people who said, "You're a monster. I click that button and then I look up and I've been reading for two hours. How did you do that?" Well, I guess I didn't build the story to be read in any order, I read the story… I built the story to make sure that the first element you see, no matter where you see it, is an invitation to go find more in whatever order you care to.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have a thought on that, but I'm going to wait until after we talk about the book of the week.

 

[Peng] Ah, okay. I've got the book of the week. It's Crossings by Alex Landragin. This is one of the… This is a pretty intense example, I think, of a book with a flexible order of reading. So I'm going to try to describe it. It's… The frame of the book is… It starts in Paris, during the Nazi occupation. It's introduced by a German Jewish bookbinder who stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings, which is the title of the book itself that you're about to read. Crossings is made up of three stories. One is a ghost story written by the poet, Charles Baudelaire, I think. The second one is a second noir romance about a man who falls in love with a woman who… She draws him into this dangerous hunt for a real manuscript that might have supernatural powers. Then the third is this memoir of a woman who claims that she has been alive for seven generations or something like that. But the really innovative thing about this book, Crossings, is that after you read that introduction by the German Jewish bookbinder who says, "I found this book, Crossings, and it contains three stories," is that he gives you the option to either read it straight through, so you just read one story after the other and then get to the end, or you can alternate back and forth between the stories according to directions he gives you in the book until you end up uncovering the reason that all of these stories are together. So if you choose to follow his direction, you end up bouncing back and forth like, I don't know, 12, 15 times between all these stories, working your way through all three at once until you get to the end. It's… I mean, it's just so innovative, so creative, so unique. It's really… It's worth reading because it is amazing how each story can build on its own if you read them one at a time or when you read all three of them together, they build up to something larger, even though you were going in a really different order.

[Dan] That's so cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's like…

[Dan] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] That is really cool. I'm like, that's like a grown-up literary choose your own adventure.

[Peng] Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's…

 

[Howard] When we put together the 70 Maxims collection, there's an annotated version of it that's an in-world artifact where the book has been in the possession of four different people. They've all made their own notes in the margins. I had a spreadsheet that tracked the chronological order in which the people had the book, and the chronological order of the events that they are making notes about. But none of my spreadsheet is actually in that book. So you are holding in artifact that has a very nonlinear, very read it in any order sorts of stories written in, no lie, the handwriting of my children and a neighbor kid and Sandra in order to capture that effect. It is structurally super weird. No, it's not how I would want to tell a mystery story, but I love what we ended up making.

 

[Dan] Cool. So that was Crossings by Alex Landragin.

[Howard] Oh, sorry, I interrupted the book of the week, didn't I?

[Dan] No, everyone interrupted the book of the week. But it was super innovative and fascinating. That's okay. But. Mary Robinette, you had something you wanted to say?

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So what Howard was talking about, about how he had to make sure that when a reader lands on a new strip, that it was comprehensible and also part of a build. That is something that… For those of you who are like, "Uh-oh, nonlinear. I can't even… Uh-uh." Which is, honestly, where my brain lands when I'm thinking about this. But it is something that I think about when I'm thinking about plotting novels in a series. Because I really genuinely want anyone to be able to pick up one of my novel as their starting point. But that means that I have to think about all of the previous books as prequels. Even though I didn't write them as a prequel, I have to think about having them function as a prequel in case someone comes into the series at a different point. So I think that even if you decide that you don't want to structure an individual story or novel in this kind of read it in any sequence way, learning some of the tools can help you with your… With the overall thing. Like, The Lady Astronauts universe started with a story… The way a lot of people come into it is The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is set years after The Calculating Stars, but it was the first thing I wrote. So people will ask me, "What order should I read this in?" I'm like, "It honestly doesn't matter." You can read… You can go Lady Astronaut of Mars, Calculating Stars, Relentless Moon, Fated Sky or you can go Calculating Stars, Fated Sky, Relentless Moon, Lady Astronaut of Mars. It doesn't matter. But it took a lot of… It's basically me making decisions about what things I want to hold as an emotional… A piece of emotional oomph. And what things I don't mind being backstory. As soon as I decide that they are backstory, that means that I no longer think of them as something that I want to avoid being spoiled.

[Peng] That's a really good point about that the most important thing if you're going to approach a book or a series with… By giving it a flexible reading order, would be to hold like the emotional resonances or the theme as the most important thing, whereas the plot might not be. So I was wondering, I was going to ask you, because you said one of your books takes place 60 years after the one that comes before it, even though you wrote it first. Would you say that if you're going to attempt something like this, that having a different character for every story or having bigger time jumps between them might be a way to allow for greater flexibility, because readers might be more forgiving if the character's going to change or if there is a big time jump versus feeling like they need to go in order if it's the same character the whole time or the time jump isn't very big in between?

[Mary Robinette] That sounds right to me.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Dan] It sounds…

[Mary Robinette] I mean…

[Dan] Yeah, it sounds good, although I… In my cyberpunk series, the Cherry Dog books, the Mirador books, I specifically intended them all to be episodes and you could read them in any order. But they all take place relatively at the same time. The… I was kind of specifically aping the TV model. Right? Where the characters are all the same age, they kind of exist in a timeless space. That seemed to work fairly well.

 

[Howard] One of the things that I keep in mind is the principle of whether or not a character has earned the reader's or the viewer's love and belief at a given point in the beginning of the story. As an example, the very first episode, for me, the very first episode of The Mandelorian, the Mandelorian earns the right to be awesome without a training montage or anything. He just… He earns the right to be awesome. The first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett, Bobba Fett does not earn the right to be awesome. All he has is the name Bobba Fett and the legacy of a bazillion Star Wars things. If the first episode of The Book of Bobba Fett is your introduction to Bobba Fett, I had to ask myself, "Why am I interested in who this character is?" So that dichotomy, for me, if there's the possibility that books are going to be picked up out of order and one of my characters needs to do something that requires the earned trust, the earned belief, the earned admiration of the reader, I have to put something in there for them to earn it. It can be another character saying, "Hey, Bobba, would you mind terribly being awesome for a moment? We need you..." And then Bobba does it, and now the reader's onboard because the other character was on board. So those kinds of tricks… Every time I started a new Schlock Mercenary book… Eh, from about book 10 to about book 20, I kept that in mind. Who are my characters going to be, how do I make them earn this early on?

[Dan] I think that's probably the reason that every James Bond movie starts with the last scene of a previous one we have never seen before. Because right off the bat, they're establishing, okay, this is who the character is. This is why you like him. He is awesome. Now we're going to tell a story.

 

[Dan] Mary Robinette, you have our homework this week.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I actually have two homeworks for you. Because I recognize that one of them may break your brain. So, depending on how your brain works. So I'm going to give you a choice. You can do both if you want. So. Look at your current work in progress. Are there pieces of backstory that you could unpack into a sequel? For instance, as I mentioned, Calculating Stars is a prequel to Lady Astronaut of Mars. It's basically me unpacking her backstory. So is there a story that's in there for you? The second one, and this is the one that may break some of you. Take your current work in progress. Make a copy of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So that you can do this safely. If you're using Scrivener, this is going to be easy. Otherwise, however you want to do it, shuffle it. Shuffle it, and then see what bridging pieces you need to put in, what elements you need to add in to make it still make sense in that new order.

[Peng] My brain broke because that was so exciting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Peng] I'll go do that one now.

[Dan] Okay. I am excited to hear, dear listener, from those of you who attempt this shuffling thing. Because I think it could be really fascinating. So. This…

[Mary Robinette] I'm…

[Dan] Yes?

[Mary Robinette] I am going to say that this came as an exercise because of a real-life incident that I had in which my cats played across the notecards… Played a game of tag across the notecards that I was using to plot my book. When I picked them back up, I was like, "Huh. That's actually a more interesting order."

[Chuckles]

[Peng] Cats are geniuses.

[Dan] Let your cats plot your books, I guess, is…

[Howard] That's the next [garbled]

[Dan] A take away you should not have from this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/07/16-6-building-your-brand/

 

Key points: Branding for your audience, staking a claim in the writing industry. What do you do really well that makes you stand out? How can you avoid being locked into a series? Make the fans follow your writing, not the series. What makes your writing unique? See what people are responding to. Your brand isn't necessarily the whole soul of your writing. The articulation of your brand isn't necessarily the message you want the fans to internalize. Take the highlights of your work, and turn them into pitches. Expand your brand into different genres. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 6]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Building Your Brand.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Awesome. We are back here in our intensive course on publishing business, and we're going to talk about branding and what kinds of things we need to think about. What do we mean by that, Brandon?

[Brandon] So, this is something that I have come to realize I think about a lot more than most of my writing friends. Which is, when I was breaking into the business, and even still, a major idea in my head was how to brand myself to my audience. How to stake a claim on a part of the writing industry or part of the continuing dialogue or great discussion that is the publishing… A genre. Right? I very deliberately wrote a bunch of books and decided what it was that I did really well that made me stand out. I made that a major feature of my career. What this allowed me to do… My goal from the get go, I looked at the careers of a bunch of different authors and I identified some that… Whose career path I didn't want to follow because they would often talk about being locked into a series, a certain series, and being only… People only wanting to read that one series from them. Then there are other authors, Neil Gaiman is a great example of this, that whatever that author wrote, the fan base went and read. I realized Neil Gaiman had done a really good job of branding Neil Gaiman as a writer, rather than branding Sandman or branding any other thing, it was whatever Neil writes, people are going to go read. Nora, N. K. Jemisin, has done a really good job of this recently in saying this is what she writes and the feel of her writing and whatever she puts out, we're going to go read. Because we are into her writing, rather than branding to a series. Whereas some places that this happens the other way, a lot of YA writers I noticed accidentally fall into the series becoming the brand. So it becomes very hard, for instance, for Suzanne Collins to get another series or get people interested in something else. I have some other YA friends whose names I'm not going to mention because I don't know if they want me talking about this with them, but have released other books, not in a series that they are well-known for, and they just vanish. Even though these authors can demand huge advances and lots of attention when they write in their series, anything else they try just fails. I think this is partially a branding failure rather than their other books not being good, because I've read some of these other books, and indeed, they're very good.

[Dan] Yeah. I suspect that some of that, with YA specifically, is just the nature of the YA audience that has a very specific kind of blockbuster mentality that we don't see often in others. But this branding issue is definitely there. I've done this myself. The first year that I was on twitter, my twitter handle was John Cleaver. It was Howard, I think, that finally convinced me to change that out and become Dan Wells instead and really work about building my own brand as me. It's especially… I feel kind of especially stupid for doing that, because in terms of my actual books, I did make a strong effort to make sure that my second book series was as wildly different from my first as possible. So even if you're thinking about this in some areas, it's still an easy mistake to make in others.

[Brandon] Indeed. One of the things that really helped me in this was deciding what made my writing unique. Another… Pointing back to N. K. Jemisin, this is something very easy to see in others. Sometimes it's hard to see in yourself. What does Nora write? Nora writes stories that are in the traditional fantasy tradition but that are using modern literary techniques borrowing from literary fiction. Kind of making a blend where you have the characterization and pacing of traditional genre fiction and the literary styling of literary fiction, and kind of marrying these two together. Each book or series she writes finds a different way to marry a different type of literary flourish with a different type of science fiction or fantasy. The series that won all the awards was, hey, she's going to do a really cool magic system and marry it to somehow second person voice, right? Which is just like so literary, and it worked. For me, my branding, the thing that I did, is I said, "I'm going to be the magic system guy." I was writing a new world with every book I was writing during my early years. I really fell in love with writing these kind of rule-based magic systems, kind of sometimes called hard fantasy. I don't know if that term actually really works. But the idea is that you're going to get a really interesting take on magic that's very rule-based in every book of mine you pick up. I was able to pick that because I had written a bunch of books and known whatever I end up writing, this is something that I just naturally put into every book that I try.

 

[Erin] I would say, if you don't know that about yourself, you might be like, "I don't know, I'm just trying to write the things. What is my brand?" As you start getting work out there, either publicly or even with your own critique groups, is to look at what people are responding to. Sometimes you can learn your brand by having sort of other people put a mirror up to you. I, for example, I write a lot of racy dark work. I don't know that I would describe myself that way naturally, but when people over and over again are like, "Oh, no. Erin, I'm so excited about your next racy, dark thing," I'm like, "Oh. Maybe that's…"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] "A thing that I can cut out for myself." If you're all saying this and it's not in opposition to what I write, why not embrace it? I would also say some parts of your brand, you can't control. As a black writer, there are going to be certain maybe assumptions or things that people might put on you based on who you are that affects the way they see your writing. So not everything that someone sees in you, you have to necessarily claim as your brand. But it's good to know how people see you and decide what of that you want to maybe lean into and what of that you want to push back against.

 

[Brandon] That's really smart. One of the things that I want to mention that that kind of jogged in my brain, Erin, is this idea that the brand doesn't have to represent the whole soul of your writing. Honestly, like when I branded myself as the magic system guy, I made some deliberate choices on that. But in reality, behind the scenes, I'm like, "I really don't want to be the magic system guy. I want to be the really great characters guy." Right? That's what I think every writer wants. I want to be known for writing great stories. I don't want to be known for this little niche. But the way that marketing works, the way that writing works, the way that the minds of fans work is they kind of notice things that make you stand out. Hopefully, we're all doing great characters. So the fact that you do great characters who… Like, one of the things that's really great about Mary Robinette's writing is she has mature relationships between adults who legitimately love each other. That's not going to be in every book she writes. But it's a hallmark of her career. She's like, "I'm going to show how relationships can actually function." Because a lot of writers write dysfunctional relationships, because that's a source of conflict. Where she has actively said, "You know what, good relationships are also a source of conflict. I'm going to deal with these things." It's a hallmark of her writing. Doesn't mean that great characters aren't, but that's something that stands out. So the thing that stands out about you doesn't necessarily always have to be the thing that you're thinking of as the soul of your writing.

 

[Howard] There's a marketing 101 concept here that I've talked about before, but I think I need to reiterate. That's the idea that the articulation of your brand… I'm the magic system guy… The articulation of your brand is not the message that you actually want to be received at the subconscious level by the market. The subconscious level that you as a writer who wants to make money want to deliver to the market is, and I'll use my own name because of course I'll use my own name, "Oh, Howard Tayler. That's the guy who I buy all of his books." Okay? That's the message. Now, I can't come out and say, "I'm Howard Tayler. I'm the guy you want to buy all your books from." Now, part of my articulated brand is humor, and self-deprecatory humor. So I can actually get away with saying that thing and people will laugh. But that's not the same as the message being internalized. So what you need to do when you are building your brand is understand that at one level there are the things that you are articulating about yourself. I write jokes, I write humor that's in dialogue rather than situational comedy type things. Science fiction. I'm kind to people online. I try not to be a jerk. These sorts of things that I articulate about myself are things that get distilled down to the reader, and as they absorbed them, some of those readers will be like, "Oh, my gosh, it's a Howard Tayler thing. I just want that because I love his stuff." Others will be, "Oh. It's all silly. I don't love it. I'm not buying his stuff." The value there is that… And again, this is marketing 101 stuff… You really don't want your brand being in the wrong place. I don't want people who hate funny books to pick up my stuff and then be mad. Because now someone has a super negative association with me, which is that I wish I hadn't spent money on Howard's book.

 

[Dan] We, much later than usual, are going to stop for a book of the week.

[Howard] Sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's okay. I'm actually throwing this back to you, Howard. Because you have our book this week.

[Howard] I do. I do. The book is called Blowout by Rachel Maddow. You're probably familiar with Rachel Maddow's brand as a commentator on MSNBC. Blowout is a nonfiction exploration of the petroleum industry written by Rachel Maddow, and she narrates it. I loved the book. I mean, as a… At a high level, the meta of we have a commentator who is doing a book and this is an extension of the brand, that's all well and good. Understanding the way the petroleum industry influenced current events, influenced historical events, is not something that I had in my head until I read that book. It was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. The audiobook is narrated by Rachel Maddow, which, she's easy to listen to and that's part of her brand.

[Dan] Okay. So that is Blowout by Rachel Maddow.

 

[Dan] Now, we don't have much time left, but I do want to ask a question. I love the way this discussion has been going, I love what Erin said about having other people help you find your own kind of brand identity. One thing that was pointed out to me several years ago that I had never intentionally done and had not seen on my own is that all of my main characters in all of my books across the six or seven different genres that I write, the one thing they all have in common is that they are all obsessed with an expert in some very specific niche of knowledge. I had not done that on purpose, but it's absolutely true. Even in my historical fiction that came out earlier last year. So, what I have not yet figured out is how I can take that piece of knowledge and turn it into a useful marketing message like Howard was just saying. So, Brandon, what advice can you give us of how to turn your brand into a marketable thing?

[Brandon] So, one of the things to do is watch… Erin mentioned this… What are people saying about your work. What are they saying as the highlights of your work? You, as a writer, are going to have to come up with pitches to sell your work. When you are sitting on a panel, when you are even just writing a blog post, you're going to have to give a three sentence pitch on each new thing you do. One of the ways that you can start making this a brand for you is incorporating these things into your pitches. So that your fans know how to talk about your books. If you were provided these pitches, then they will kind of start picking up on them. It's kind of this feedback, back and forth.

[Erin] I would say panels… The mention of panels made me think that if you are somebody who goes to… Who's able to go to conventions, they're a great way to… If you're able to speak on panels, number one, see where people place you is a good way… Sometimes it's random, but if you're on like 10 panels in a row about like unreliable narrators, maybe that's a thing that people associate with you. Two, you can try to ask for panels or on a panel, like, talk about the things that are within your brand or that mesh up with your brand.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's also a great way to kind of try out some ways of talking about it. Because most people are just going to absorbed the panel and go about their merry way. So you can kind of hone your messaging a little bit while trying to convey information about writing as a whole.

 

[Brandon] You can also kind of expand your brand. If you want to put something like I am the magic system guy, right? Well, magic system guy really focuses on fantasy. I wanted to write science fiction, and even I wanted to write some detective stuff. I thought a lot about how do I expand this to match what I'm doing in these other genres. So I actually have a couple of brandings. One is the Cosmere. I have an interconnected universe. So when I started doing my science fiction, I'm like I'm going to be doing a little bit of that. But there's also this idea that more than magic system, it's like these rule-based speculative elements that I was able to apply to my detective fiction. Because it's a… There's a magic system, even though there's no magic in the world. The way that the person approaches solving crimes is very like one of my fantasy novels, even though there's no actual magic involved. So being able to expand that brand and know how you can talk about these things in different genres is also really handy. Mary Robinette's another good example of this. Instead of branding as historical fantasy, she's now branding as I take some sort of cool historical item and then I change one thing. She's doing like a larger alternate history sort of thing rather than just doing fantasy. Now she's got science fiction in that and things like that. So you can still have… You can expand these things and make them umbrellas and cover a lot of things. Dan, you're… You talk about you've got specialists in your stories. Well, I mean, specialists, a lot of different types of genres use specialists. If you could find a way to say, "I do deep dives into topics…" Michael Crichton made his whole career about a team of scientists get together and have a problem. That works in a medical thriller as well as a science fiction as well as… He did the great train robbery, which is a heist, all with a team of specialists get into shenanigans.

[Dan] That is a very good point. Lots of good things to think about here. We encourage you all to work on this.

 

[Dan] We're going to give you some homework to help you work on this for yourself. Brandon?

[Brandon] Yeah. So your homework is to do something Erin was talking about, actually, is to go to your friends. You may not have readers yet, you may be newer, you may not have readers you don't know, but you hopefully have a writing group or you have alpha readers and beta readers. You have been sharing your work with them. Have them make a list. Impose upon them, hopefully it's not too much of an imposition, but say, "What are…" Ask them to write down the things that stand out for you as a writer in their mind. Do this with a couple of people. Because it's so hard to see in yourself. See what different connections and themes are showing up time and time again in those lists that your friends are making.

[Dan] Fantastic. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/01/15-44-rebooting-a-career/

 

Key Points: You might be orphaned by editors. Or maybe your books stop selling, the series doesn't click? You have to stick with it, keep going. Dedication, hard work, keep pivoting. Look at your brand right now, and think about how to build on that to do the thing you want to next. Diversify! Multiple pen names, projects, brands. Your skill set can carry across a pivot or reboot. You can use short fiction to explore where your strengths are quickly. "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place." If you quit your day job and write full time, you are a freelancer. Diversify your income stream. Plan ahead. Learn how to track where your money is coming from. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 44.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Rebooting a Career.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm looking for something now.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] Well, we have got something new for you. We teased this episode all the way back in our very first episode of the year. Which, for us, we recorded 10 minutes ago, but you…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Had to wait 11 months for it. Thank you for your patience. So, this is something, again, that came up in an audience question. I love this topic, because it has happened to me. I'm actually in the middle of it right now. I sincerely hope by the time this airs that everything's stable and wonderful. But I have been orphaned twice by editors.

[Mary Robinette] Let's define what orphaned means, in this context.

[Dan] Orphaned… Okay. In this context, what it means is the editor who acquired my book initially at a given publishing house, I am no longer with that editor. I was moved to a different one. Then that one actually left the publishing house altogether. A year later, I am currently, as of this recording, do not have an editor at that publisher. Which is sad because now the books are not being shepherded, and my own career is a little bit in flux. So this is something that I've dealt with personally, but I'm not going to answer the question, I'm going to ask the question of Dongwon. What does an author do when they've had some success, they've had some books come out, and then they either get orphaned, or their books stop selling, the new series they have come out just doesn't take off or it tanks completely? They need to change something. How do you know when you hit that point, and how do you know what changes to make? Now talk for 15 minutes.

[Dongwon] I really… I could talk for an hour here. I really love this topic, because it's a really, really important one. I think the greatest determinant in whether or not a writer is successful in their career is their ability to ride with the tough times. Right? That's sort of stick-with-it-ness, that's sort of like ability to just keep going in the face of a lot of setbacks, is the thing that I see more often than not how people get to where they want to be. Right? I've been in publishing now for 15 years, and over that time, I've seen people over and over again who I looked at them, I looked at their sales numbers, I looked at where they're at in sort of the market, and I was like, "Ah. They're such a nice person, it's too bad their career's over." Then 10 years later, they're New York Times bestsellers. Right? I can think of half a dozen people off the top of my head of been in similar situations. Right? So many people we talk about as overnight successes really spent years and years writing books until something hit it. George Martin's a famous example. But I think the guest host for this year, Victoria Schwab's another great example of somebody who was writing for a long time before she really blew up in the way she has. It takes dedication and hard work, and the ability to keep pivoting and keep working with it. It's one of my favorite things is to take a writer who is in a position where… Not necessarily a bad position, but one where you could be doing more, and help them figure out, "Okay, what's next, how do we reposition this to grow from here?" So, I think there's a lot of different strategies. I think the thing that's really important is considering what's your brand right now, and how do you build on that for the thing that you want to do next. Right? So I think Daniel Abraham is a really great example to look at. He had a series with Tor, that was The Long Price Quartet, which was an absolute brilliant fantasy series. Sales were probably not where everyone wanted them to be, because it's a very worthy series, but not necessarily like the most commercial, like, it's not a lot of like big action romps there, right? The thing about Daniel is he had multiple brands going at once. He was also writing as M. L. N. Hanover, an urban fantasy series. Then, when urban fantasy started falling off a little bit, he was looking to pivot again. So at that point, he came to me, when I was an editor at Orbit, and pitched two different projects at once. The Dragon's Path, which is an epic fantasy sort of following in the vein of what he was doing at Tor. But then he also was like, "Hey, we also have this co-written science fiction project with this guy Ty Franck." That was what is now The Expanse. Again, that was under yet another pen name. Right? So the thing that Daniel kept doing is he kept writing new things and different things. He was doing it under different names with different brands. Until one of them just really clicked in and took off. I mean, The Expanse is really one of the big successes in science fiction over the past 10 years. Has the big TV show and all these things. Again, that's somebody who didn't have the kind of commercial success and attention that I think he deserved early in his career. But, just kept going and just kept pivoting and kept trying new things until finally something really clicked in, in the way that it did, with The Expanse.

 

[Howard] In 1998, I was working in tech support at Novell. I looked at some of the things I'd been doing and realized that within the company, within the industry, my brand was talking to people about the way the software works. Kind of being an advocate for the product and being educational about it and being entertaining. I wanted a position in the company where I could keep doing that. I got one. I like the sound of my own voice, and did a lot of presentations and a lot of traveling as a result of those presentations. Until I left the company in 2004. In 2008, I started doing Writing Excuses. Writing excuses has now been running for longer than my entire career at Novell.

[Dan] Wow.

[Howard] Okay. I was just doing the math as I was looking at the spreadsheet.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sorry, this totally came out of left field. The idea that the career that nobody… I say nobody. I don't think many people are going to look at me and think, "Oh, yeah. That guy who was a software communications person back in the 90s and just vanished. Wow. Such a shame his software support career tanked."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] No. They're going to remember me for whatever's most recent. There was a huge pivot in there, from doing software to doing comics. But the skill set of I know how to stand up in front of people and advocate a thing and be educational about it and occasionally be funny, and leverage the comic drop of self-deprecating humor from time to time, that piece of my brand, that piece of my skill set has stayed with me and continues to serve me well. As we are having this conversation, it is September 2019. This is airing in November of 2020. Schlock Mercenary, the mega-arc, ended about five months ago, if everything went according to plan. From where I'm sitting right now, I do not know what my career reboot looks like from 2020. I'm coming up on that, and I'm terrified. But I know that the guy who is terrified is also the guy who has rebooted his career before and made good on it.

[Dongwon] There's always more opportunities, any time you find yourself in that spot.

 

[Dan] Okay. So. Our book of the week is one you've already talked about, Dongwon. This is Leviathan Wakes, the first one from The Expanse. What can you tell us about that book?

[Dongwon] Leviathan Wakes is a really wonderful space opera, that is examining, not necessarily galactic exploration, but the exploration and colonization of our own solar system. So the whole set up is, they don't have interstellar travel yet, but they can travel between the planets somewhat easily. So, the political situation is there's the Earth and then there is Mars, and they're in conflict and in tension over resources. Those resources are specifically being the asteroid belt, which is being mined by both of those great powers. Into the middle of this, a new artifact, biological weapon, has been discovered which kind of sets the whole system to the brink of war. This is a nine book series that is on the cusp of wrapping up right now. It's really, to my mind… And I am biased because I was the editor on the first couple books…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But, to my mind, it's really one of the most exciting, wonderful, rich character work in a space opera series that I've really ever seen. I could not love this more. The show was also great, but read the books first…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Because they're even better.

[Dan] We did have Daniel and Ty on the show at some point a year or two ago. So if you want to hear them talk about it, you can find that in our archives.

[Mary Robinette] We'll include that in our liner notes.

[Dan] Yes, we totally will.

 

[Dan] Okay. So, I like what Dongwon was saying about trying new things while still staying true to what you've already been successful with. This is something that I have done. So, just very quickly, I hit the New York Times bestseller list with the Partials series, which is science fiction. Then, my next science fiction series, Mirador, really tanked. Like, I cannot overstate how little it sold.

[Mary Robinette] Which is a shame, because I love that series.

[Dan] Well, thank you. So do I. It did not click with the audience in the way everyone expected it to. It didn't click for the publisher the way we had hoped it would, to the point that they didn't even bother doing the third book in audio. I had to buy the rights back from them. So, as I set out what am I going to do next, I said, "Well, I'm going to continue with science fiction, but I'm going to twist it in a new direction." So I started doing middle grade science fiction. That's where Zero G and Dragon Planet and things like that came from. At the same time, because a far bigger success for me has been my thrillers, like I Am Not a Serial Killer, I didn't want to neglect that audience either. So I'm trying… This is a much more risky experiment. But I wrote a new… I started a new thriller career, essentially, by doing historical thrillers. That's where Ghost Station came from. So I'm trying these two different paths at the same time and just waiting to see, like you were saying, which one clicks in which one takes off. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of faith, and you just kind of gotta hope that… And maybe neither of those does, and I'll… I don't know, come crawling to you at some point and say, "Dongwon, help me figure out what to do?"

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is that… I also got the whole orphaned thing, right after Ghost Talkers. When I was working on Calculating Stars, my editor left, and I got transferred to another editor, who's been wonderful, but it was… The process of learning to work with her. But the reason that we decided to switch me from doing fantasy to doing science fiction was that we looked at what I had been doing in short fiction, and I write all over the map in short fiction. My science fiction that's short fiction kind of consistently gets noticed for awards. The general thing was maybe you should be writing to your strengths, which appear to be science fiction.

[Howard] Kind of consistently, that was… Oops, two Hugos?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, anyway…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, friends, we have to brag about Mary Robinette, because she's too modest to do it herself.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I only have four Hugos. One of them I got with you guys, so it really doesn't count.

[Dan] Barely anything.

[Howard] Thanks.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's actually the only one I've got.

[Dongwon] The one that doesn't count.

[Mary Robinette] No. I'm kidding. I am… I… Obviously kidding, or I would not…

[Dongwon] Of course.

[Mary Robinette] Have made that joke. But my point being that when people wonder when they're novelists, natural novelists, and they wonder why to do short fiction, one of the things that it does allow is a faster, easier way to see which of your stories are hitting with audience. Like, just, if you are getting more acceptances from your science fiction, that's a thing that's worth noting. So I didn't actually have to go through as many iterations as Dan did to figure out, oh, maybe I should be writing some science fiction novels. And, Calculating Stars have done significantly better than my fantasy.

[Dan] Or, phrased another way, you did do arguably more iterations than I did, but they were in short fiction, so you were able to do them more quickly and see results more easily.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. That is arguably accurate.

[Laughter]

 

[Dongwon] The thing that I just want to point out is, following again on what Dan was saying, is the key to so much of this is diversification, right? Not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Sometimes that is a genre thing, sometimes it's a category thing in terms of adult or YA, and sometimes… That's even an industry thing, like writing for games and writing for comics and writing for film and TV if you can get that work. But often times it's also just not writing for one publisher, right? Having multiple publishers in place, so if you get orphaned at one, even if that's the thing that goes very badly, which it sometimes does, you still have other things in your pocket that you can turn to and emphasize. If that's not working there. Then, sometimes it takes a couple of years to cycle out, and then you can pick up with a new contract or with a different publisher or with a different editor at that publisher. But having lots of different things moving out once is often the way to sort of stabilize your career overall.

[Howard] In 2006, at Emerald City Comic Con, Robert Khoo, K-H-O-O, talked about the business of web comics. This is the guy who went to the penny arcade guys before they were big and said, "You're leaving a whole bunch of money on the table." They said, "We don't know what money is." He said, "I tell you what. I will work for you for free on the understanding that if at the end of the year, I haven't earned for you a marketing guy's salary of $80,000 a year, which you can very comfortably pay me, then I will quit and you don't owe me anything." They were like, "This sounds too good to be true, but it's probably not a trap. So, join us." Robert Khoo totally reinvented them. Out of his work grew the penny arcade Expo, which was the thing that replaced E3 as the big consumer thing of displaying… It was huge. Robert Khoo… So I've established his bona fides. He said, "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place."

[Mary Robinette] This is a…

[Howard] That stuck with me. I'm not very good at it yet. But we go over our books, Sandra and I go over our books every year and ask ourselves, "What is the thing that will hurt the most if we lose it? How do we build something that will cushion that, in case it goes away?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is absolutely a thing that they teach you in puppet theater, as well. I mean, just in general as a freelancer, this is a really important thing to understand. If you quit your day job and decide to be a writer full-time, you are a freelancer. Your publisher is your only client, unless you're at multiple publishing houses, unless you're doing hybrid stuff which, in this day and age, is a sensible thing. It's a good thing that you can do if you get your backlist back is bring it out yourself. So, remembering that you are a freelancer and trying to diversify. Like, I diversify my income stream also by teaching. That's one of the ways that I diversify. It doesn't have to be writing. The other thing that I kind of wanted to say about what happens when this moment… Like, I was orphaned by an editor, and that handoff was actually very, very smooth. But it was also because the previous two books had done so poorly, and not through fault of my own. I think. Obviously, other people have different opinions. But I had… The first of those last two books had been Of Noble Family, which was the last book in a five book series. We… There is a thing that happens in a series, where you have a slow decline in numbers. Then, the next book, Ghost Talkers, which is actually one of my favorite things that I've written, came out, and they sent me on tour. My first day of tour was election day of 2016. Everybody's sales tanked. Actually. But mine… Just like, there was… When I was on tour, the audiences were half the size that they normally were. Everyone looked shellshocked. It didn't matter, actually, which side of the political spectrum you were on, that period of time was really fraught. So, yes, obviously, my numbers were lower. But what that meant was, when we were doing… With my new editor, who was working with me on the two new books, when she was looking at acquiring another book after that, there was no incentive to do it until Calculating Stars and Fated Sky came out and did very well. At that point, I realized that my agent was part of my problem because my agent was not advocating for me and was not explaining… Like, the narrative of what was going on. So sometimes when you're midcareer and things are not going well, if you're starting to think, "Well, I wonder if I should go with a new agent?" The advice that I got from a very good friend who is sitting on the couch with me…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Was that when you begin asking yourself that question, you should probably change agents.

[Dan] I had my book, Extreme Makeover, came out the same day. Mary Robinette and I did a signing together…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] In Chicago. Actually, the two of us and Wes Chu. So there were three authors, and I think maybe five people there…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] If you count the bookseller. I actually, like, I love Calculating Stars, but I still consider Ghost Talkers my favorite of your books. I think Extreme Makeover is the best written thing I've ever done. No one's ever heard of either of those books. Because they got completely lost. Anyway, I assume that there are a few people who are listening to this episode who are in this situation who need to reboot their career. But I… And I hope that they do. But I suspect that most of our listeners are still looking at this from the upcoming side. Right? That's why I really want to tell you what I did not know is that you need to be planning for this already. You need to have all these income streams in place before one of them fails. Which is the lesson that I have very painfully learned. And five years later have managed to build myself back up to the point where I more or less okay.

[Howard] Or back even further up from that, we've said… I quoted Robert Khoo. 40%. Don't let any more than 40% come from any one place. Do you know how to do the math to know where your money is coming from? If you don't know how to do that yet, learn to do that. Because if you can get ahead of that, for you start receiving royalties, before you start getting advances, then you are in a position to career plan and to build your bugout bag for…

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to do a plug for something called you need a budget dot com. Which, if you are like me, and not terribly good with numbers, is a very useful way as a freelancer… It's a bud… It's a financial planning kind of tracking thing. But it's very, very useful to get a handle on exactly how much you need to make, and to figure out how to have enough of a nest egg so that if you have a. Where you have to reboot, that you have some money set aside.

[Dan] Which is a great resource. Go for it.

[Dongwon] One thing I just want to point out is as were talking about 40% of your income coming from different places and all that, remember, your day job can be one of your sources of income. Right? So the people, the clients that I work with who have widely diversified careers in terms of doing adult, middle grade, and graphic novels, and tie-in work and film and TV, those generally are the full-time writers. Right? Those are the ones who are only writing as their day-to-day job. If people… If you have a day job, it's much more feasible to focus on one thing at a time and really focus on just having your one main series because you have the financial security of that day job. Which is why my general advice is hang onto that job as long as you can stand it. Or until your… The authoring that you have to do in terms of emails and touring and things like that make having it no longer feasible to do so, right? But then you need to be planning and preparing for that transition by starting that diversification work as early as you can.

[Dan] Absolutely. Now, we are out of time. Though obviously we could talk about this for a long time.

 

[Dan] But we do have some homework for you, which is coming from Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will happen to you when this happens, or in the early part of your career, is that the imposter syndrome is going to kick up. It's like you feel… You can feel a sense of despair, you can feel like blah. So here's a weird bit of advice, which is that I want you to write a letter to a role model. This role model does not have to be a living person. Explain to them all of the things that you're afraid of, and all of the problems that you're struggling with. Then, I want you to write a letter from them back to you with the advice that you think that they might give you. The reason I'm suggesting this is that a lot of times you, in fact, know the answer to the problem. But we are often kinder to someone else then we are to ourselves. So, by putting yourself in the shoes of someone else who has been through this, I think that it might be a way for you to access the part of your brain that knows how to handle this. You do. It's just terrifying.

[Dan] Sounds awesome. So. That's been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.

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

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

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

[Laughter]

 

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

[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?

[Chuckles]

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

[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.

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

[Dan] Hufflepuff.

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

[Dan] So, give us some examples.

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

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Don't we all?

[Dan] We've been friends for decades.

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

 

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

[Victoria] Mortality.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Brandon] Excellent.

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

 

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Brandon] We are a little overtime…

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/25/wx-14-34-author-branding/ 

 

Key Points: Branding, or making you and your product identifiable. How do you define your brand, how do you control it? Think about Hamburger Helper! What are the expectations, what kind of relationship do you have? What is the public persona you want to have? Separate your private person from your public persona. It's a version of you, but selected. Think about what happens if you become famous. Be careful to build a brand that is big enough for the range that you want to work on. Think about a career brand, with series and book brands. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 34.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Author Branding.

[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] I'm Dongwon.

 

[Howard] We are talking about branding.

[Mary Robinette] Not Brandon.

[Howard] Not Brandon.

[Dan] Not Brandon.

[Howard] He's not even in the room, because that would make it too hard to keep the words straight, because I always swallow the ing.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Branding. I came from a marketing background. When we talked about branding, it was always huge, and we always tried to break it down into pieces that were easy to assimilate. I can't imagine it being any different in the publishing world.

[Dongwon] One of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is when I talk to writers, they treat branding as this taboo word. Right? If you say branding, then suddenly you've violated some sacred trust.

[Mary Robinette] It's supposed to be about the art!

[Dongwon] The Muses have now abandoned you and you'll never write again.

[Mary Robinette] The Muses are fictional.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] They have excellent branding. The reason I want to talk about it is because it's unavoidable. If you are publishing books, if you are asking people to go to the bookstore or go to the Internet and pay money for your words, you are already a brand. There's no way to escape it. Whether you find that to be a dark apocalypse or a blissful mercantile utopia is irrelevant, because you have to live in it. So the more you can understand how branding works and what your role is in defining your brand and controlling your brand, the more you're going to be able to build a brand that you're happy with, you're comfortable with, and that is sustainable for you over the course of your career.

 

[Howard] A good way to examine this for those who just don't like the idea of a brand is to consider the grocery store. There are many people who have a favorite box dinner, like Hamburger Helper or Zatarain's or something. And there are folks who say, "Oh, that's terrible for you. You shouldn't buy those branded goods. You should go get fresh fruits and vegetables." Okay. When I walk into the grocery store, and I look at the fresh fruits and vegetables, that is the brand that I am looking for. It doesn't come in a box. It was fresh. Doesn't have to have a sticker on it that says what the brand is. But there is a judgment that I have premade for this thing that I am looking for. As an author, yeah, you can tell yourself you don't want to be a box dinner, you want to be more like a fresh fruit and vegetable. That's still a brand.

[Dongwon] To put it in publishing terms, you'll often have people who will say, "Oh, I don't want to be a brand, I want to be like this authentic author." The David Foster Wallace's of the world. Right? Somebody who's a curmudgeon, somebody who doesn't participate in the system. I hate to break it to you, but that is their brand. It's extraordinarily well defined and extraordinarily effective. You will find someone who… You won't find a writer who is better branded than David Foster Wallace was.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you guys are kind of hitting on that I just want to break out a little bit is that what we're talking about here is expectations and relationship. These are the two things that you are manipulating when you're manipulating a brand. So when we talk about going to your favorite coffee shop, you don't go there because they have the best coffee in the city. Like, the one you go to over and over again. Every now and then, depending on who you are… And those of you who I know are serious coffee drinkers, I apologize. But… 

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The point being that frequently the reason you go to this coffee shop is because of a barista. Or because of the staff, and they recognize you, and that it feels like there's a relationship. This is one of the things that encourages brand loyalty, why you keep going back. Why, often, you will go to someplace where it's not the best coffee in the city. That it's because of that relationship. So, as an author brand, a lot of what you're doing is building the relationship with your reader. Then, the other aspect of it is their expectations. Giving them a sense of what that relationship is going to be like, what sort of experience they're going to have. So, like the fresh fruit experience is very different from the boxed dinner experience. Both of which are valid, and both of which have audiences that appeal to them. But you want to know which one… Where you're landing. So, like, I have the puppeteer brand. That tells people a little bit about the kind of expect… You can reliably expect that at least once an episode, I am going to talk about puppetry at some point. But the other thing that I have is that I'm open about aspects of my personality. Like, I'm open about the fact that I have depression. These are… This is part of the relationship. But I'm also… There are things about my life that I don't talk about. So you can have an authentic open honest relationship with your… As part of your brand, and not have to word vomit your entire emotional experience.

[Dongwon] One important thing to think about, and this is one of the differences between having a personal brand versus a corporation having a brand. Right? Those do operate slightly differently. Is, as a person, really what you're branding is having a good set of boundaries. What you're going to start doing is drawing lines around certain things that you're comfortable talking about in public with your fans and certain things that are only for you and your close personal friends. Once you are a published author, you are no longer just a person. You are now a person and a public persona at the same time. Knowing when you're talking to a person, if they have expectations of the public persona version of you or the actual you is really important. When I see this relationship go awry, when I see fans get their feelings hurt, or when I see other writers interacting in a way that ends up causing drama, it is often around this disconnect. So having a crystal clear idea of what is you, what do you keep for yourself versus what do you put out into the world is going to help you manage that and make being a public persona much more sustainable for you, and much less taxing when you're at a con or online or whatever it is.

 

[Dan] On that note, it's important, I think, especially for an author, when it's just one person instead of a corporation, you're not so much defining a brand-new identity for yourself as you are defining a version of the self that already exists. I… My brand is basically me, but slightly flavored for the Internet or whatever. It's not an entirely different person that I have to think of and then maintain constantly. That's more work than you need to put into this.

[Dongwon] You just find the murderer within and put it on stage.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Part of what you're describing here is a compartmentalization. In 2004… 2003, I think, I was still working at Novell, and I was briefing a bunch of salespeople. I was the hard-hitting, knows all the facts, project manager. I was managing an audience full of people who were really kind of hostile, because the salespeople don't always want to sell what it is that you've made. You need to convince them to do that. At the end of the presentation, one of the guys came up to me and said, "So. My son read stuff on the Internet." I said, "Oh. Okay. Yeah. I'm the same guy." "No. Hear me out. He reads this comic strip and he says it's by a guy who works at Novell." "Yeah, I'm the same guy." "No, hear me out. It's this guy, he's named Howard." I'm like, "Dude. It's me." He stopped for a moment and stared at me, like, it can't be you. That was where I realized that my brand as a cartoonist was incredibly different from my brand as a guy who is talking to the salespeople. To the point that this person couldn't even imagine that I was the same person. Do I feel two-faced for that? Not really. Because I had two different jobs. I'm the same guy doing both of them. That was one of the first points where I realized that I never wanted the brand of me as a project manager to be the person that people see as the cartoonist. Because the project manager was the designated jerk.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's not the guy I want to be.

[Dongwon] But one thing I want to point out there is that both were authentically you. Right?

[Howard] Yes.

[Dongwon] Therefore, both are sustainable almost indefinitely, right? You may not want to sustain the angry project manager guy because that sounds exhausting after a certain point in time, but it's really important that you aren't constructing a totally artificial brand. If your brand is the exact opposite of your personality, you might be able to sustain that for a few years, but at some point, it's going to start breaking down, and just the mental effort it's going to take to keep that up online every day or in newsletters or personal appearances, it's going to be very draining. It's very important to try and make sure that when you're choosing your brand and you're developing it, you're making choices that are really organic to you.

 

[Howard] I've got the book of the week. I got to read… About a year ago, I got to read Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone. I've been waiting for this thing to hit the streets ever since then, because I was so excited by it. It is like post-singularity space opera launched by a near future sci-fi thriller. That twist where we make the shift from the near future thriller to the post-singularity was beautiful. I mean, it wasn't seamless because I'm like, "Well, that was abrupt." But it is beautiful. I loved loved loved loved loved this book. It is… I don't need to say anything about it other than that. Max Gladstone and Empress of Forever. When I was tweeting with some of my author friends about it, I'm like, "Oh, I just got to read this thing by Max." The response was, "Uh. Oh, that thing with the Empress? Oh, that thing! Oh, that thing." Nothing but enthusiasm. My friends, you need to get this book. Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I'm just going to say as a counter to creating a brand is that it is actually possible to create a brand that is artificial. The person I'm thinking of is Gail Carriger, who's open about the fact that she has created a persona as her author persona. There are absolutely personality traits that are completely in line with the real person. But the physical nature of the brand, the choice in clothing, the set dressing, the costuming of the brand is different than the real person. That was a conscious choice, because she wanted to be able to go to conventions and go incognito. So while it would be lovely if this was a concern that all of us had that what happens if I become famous… It is actually a thing to think about. Like, what happens if you become famous? Because George R. R. Martin can no longer move through space without anyone saying, "[gasp] You're George R. R. Martin!"

[Howard] He must traverse now with a bodyguard of sorts. A handler.

[Dan] That can be something as complicated as what Gail does, and you're absolutely right. I should have thought about her earlier. Or it can be something as simple as I wear my hat. In Latin America, which is the only market in which I get recognized on the street, I can take that hat off and turn invisible and nobody knows who I am. Then put it back on and be recognized. I did want to talk about a problem that you can have with branding. I'll use myself as an example. But first, I'm going to use… I'm going to go back to Hamburger Helper, which is where Howard started us off. So let's imagine the beginning of Hamburger Helper. I don't know what the first flavor they had was, but I'm going to pretend like it's stroganoff.

[Howard] I think it was helper flavor.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Let's say that some guy invented this cool stroganoff thing, and he's like, "Oh, I can sell this. People can make it in their homes for dinner, and it'll be great." He could have decided that he was just going to be the best stroganoff for dinner guy in the world. But what he… He took the time to look at it and say, "Actually, no. What I want to be is the person who helps you make your own dinner, regardless of the flavor." So he focused his brand in that direction instead, and Hamburger Helper now represents much more than that initial stroganoff idea.

[Howard] In terms of brand, it's not just that. It's that when you are buying hamburger, which is a thing that you might be buying anyway, and which comes in all kinds of grades, and maybe you're making burgers and maybe you're making tacos, and I don't know what you're making with it, you go out to buy hamburger. Hamburger Helper is a thing that you know will go with this thing you just bought, because it's right there in the name. They put that in the brand. It's are there ways for you as an author to create a brand that is similarly associative?

[Dan] When I started, I branded myself wholly around my first published novel. My first Twitter handle was John Cleaver who was the character in the book. I was that guy. I was the John Cleaver horror guy. And very quickly realized no. I want my career to be so much more than this one character and this one series, and had to rebuild my brand, let's say three years into my career, so that I could encompass the much wider range of stuff I wanted to work on.

[Howard] Can I… Oh, go ahead, Dongwon.

 

[Dongwon] Just to the point there. Branding is a very tricky thing. Because what you want to do is have your own career brand. Then, underneath that, you need to make a bunch of smaller brands for each book or each series that you're doing. At this point, Mary's maintaining four or five different brands, in addition to her career brands, which is actually two or three brands put together. Right? If you map it out that way, it can feel enormously complex. This is part of why I encourage make your brands as natural feeling as possible, because it's easier to maintain a bunch of them at once, because they're different parts of you and they're different parts of your work. Then, you'll have structured ways you can talk about each series, structured ways you can talk about each book. But when you're thinking about your personal brand, your author brand, Dan's absolutely right. If you tie it to one book or one series, then immediately when it comes to transition to the next thing, you're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble and having to rebuild more than you would want to at that point in your career.

[Mary Robinette] Let me use Calculating Stars actually as a quick example of what you're talking about with the managing of the brand. I am picking aspects of Calculating Stars to put forward that are the things I'm already interested in. So I have a character who's a mathematician. She's a woman in STEM and working in rocketry. Woman in STEM and rocketry, super excited about math… I really don't care. I'm terr… It's not… I think it's a wonderful thing, but it's not something that I have any personal enthusiasm or passion for. So when I am pushing my brand, my Calculating Stars brand, the stuff that I put out on social media, the stuff that I'm super interested in… Like, saying, "Look, I'm at NASA. I'm looking at rockets. Look at this really interesting woman in STEM." You will… If you look at my Twitter stream, I don't think I've ever tweeted anything about look at this cool math thing. Because I'm sure that they're out there. But I don't understand them. It's… So it is, again, you can make something of a brand that is still an authentic representation of you, while being part of that sub brand.

 

[Howard] I'd like to try something that might not work. But I want to try it anyway. The four of us sitting here. Do you have a short description of one of our brands? I'll go first. Mary Robinette. Didn't see it coming, historically accurate, makes me cry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Huh. Nice. I'll take that. Which is funny, because I would say happily married couple for myself is a core part of… Or happy relationship.

[Howard] This is me speaking as a consumer of your books. Not necessarily is someone who knows you personally. Because the brand is expanded for me.

[Mary Robinette] Nonono. But that… For my books, that is the thing. Happily married couple. That is the thing that… I feel like that is one of the things that you're signing up for when you pick up one of my books is that there is a committed relationship someplace in there. Yeah, that's an interesting exercise. Like…

[Howard] Anybody else want to try it? I had more time to think about it.

[Mary Robinette] I would have if you had warned me.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah, I don't think I can do it off the top of my head.

[Mary Robinette] So, my brand for Howard. Jerkface McJerkface.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Mic drop. Comic drop. Excuse me, comic drop. Cartoons.

[Howard] You know, you said you didn't like math.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But that… The math checks out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] For Dan, I mostly have murder and hat.

[Mary Robinette] Not…

[Garbled]

[Dongwon] It's murder and hat. It's not a murder hat. It's not like the Dexter outfit.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's what you think.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] It's very hard to get blood out of leather.

[Dan] It does underline something I've talked about before, which is the trouble that I sometimes have trying to sell science fiction. Because I went in so solidly on that horror brand when I started. Like I said, about three years in, I had to rebuild it. I am still in the process of rebuilding it.

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things, having seen other people do that, with my first series, that was one of the reasons that I did a different elemental genre with each novel while I maintained the same set dressing. So that I could try to train people that look, I can write more than one thing.

[Dan] Well, Brandon's not here. But I'm going to confuse Howard by talking about Brandon's branding. We often, on the podcast, when we are behind the scenes planning out what guests we want to have, we'll talk about getting someone who's in YA. Mary Robinette and I will both say, "Oh, that's great, because we need more YA." Then Brandon will be like, "I've got three different best-selling YA series." But nobody thinks of him like that. He's the epic fantasy guy.

[Dongwon] Which is both the power and peril of a brand. A brand can be limiting in some ways. As Dan is pointing out with his work and with Brandon's, sometimes it can be hard to break out of that if your brand is very strong. That said, you have the upside of you have a strong brand, which is in the category of good problems to have. Doesn't make it not a problem, but it does mean that you have already taken up mind share among a group of readers, and that's a great place to be.

[Howard] Can I do Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Do it. I'm dying.

[Howard] Okay. Knows everybody I know.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Knows people I didn't know were even people. Can sell any of them anything.

[Mary Robinette] You left out fabulous dresser.

[Dan] That's true.

[Dongwon] I'll take it.

[Howard] That is… I was just picking three.

[Mary Robinette] I know, but…

[Dan] He's the only one of us… We wear these stupid headbands when we record. His actually matches his outfit. And it's not even fair.

[Mary Robinette] What's amazing…

[Dongwon] I would say Mary kindly gave me the one that matched my outfit. I could have ended up with that orange one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. No, you couldn't have, not while I was in the room.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] Okay. So you've just seen us struggle with this exercise. It is not easy. I believe Mary Robinette has some homework for us for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Time to do some soul-searching. You need to identify your brand. For this, what I want you to think about is the aspects, the core aspects, of your personality that you don't mind highlighting for the public. The things that… It doesn't have to be your entire personality. Like, focus on three things. If you look at my bio, I say puppeteer, author, and… Audiobook narrator. Like, what was my third thing?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Those are three jobs. Right? But I could… You could also define my brand as historical fantasy, mentor, and theater person. You can pick three things and figure out what you want to do. But pick at least three. Pick, like, your three major things. Make sure that they're things that you are… Topics that you're passionate about, that you will probably be passionate about for your entire life. Make sure they're not a transitory passion. Try to find something that is a passion that is not strictly tied to your books. You will notice that in the things that I listed, I did not list Regency although I love it. I did not list space, although I love it. I did not list World War I, although I love that too. It was a bad time, but still…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The point being, pick things… Pick three core aspects of your personality that you want to highlight, three core things that you're passionate about that you want to highlight that are not directly related to your work.

[Howard] Thank you very much. The bar has been set pretty high, and you watched us fail to clear it. This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.