Category Archives: Writing Links

Valkyrie Project Episode 3: A Slippery Slope

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Download “Valkyrie Project Episode 3: A Slippery Slope” Now!

Published to Smashwords 5 days ago and up to 74 downloads. Not as big a spike on the first day as the first two episodes… I’m thinking that might be because I put it up on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I think I’ll go back to Friday night next time to see what happens. I’m sure there’s also the series factor playing in… i.e., since this says Episode 3 on it, people are less likely to download knowing that they’re not starting at the beginning.

Probably due to the previous reason, I didn’t get as many “trickle downloads” either as I did for Episode 1 when I uploaded Episode 2. But I’m hoping just hoping that some people stick with it…

Episode Notes

This episode includes the first (yes, only the first) changes in POV. Don’t worry, it won’t happen often. It’s also the longest episode to date, bringing the total story word count to just over 33,000. Yes, that means by the time we get to the end of Season 1, it’ll clock in around 130,000. Not sure if I could make it if I wasn’t doing it piece by piece. (More on that is coming in a separate post) And don’t worry, I’m not going to keep making them longer and longer (at least I don’t plan to). So, go download Episode 3 right now!

Articles On and Arguments For: Self-Publishing

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From the perspective of an author with a huge fan base, Alisa Valdes writes:

The first book, The Dirty Girls Social Club was published through St. Martin’s Press and sold more than half a million copies. The second Dirty Girls book, Dirty Girls on Top, also with St. Martin’s, came in just under that. When I did the math, I realized I’d only have to sell 100,000 copies on my own to earn what I’d made for six times the sales with a major publishing house. If I sold the same number of Dirty Girls books as I’d sold in the past, meanwhile, I’d be…a goddamned millionaire. A goddamned millionaire in control of her own career and destiny.

JA Konrath posts numbers like these all the times. The impressive part, though, is that the math works. These are realistic numbers (given the circumstances of the author providing the numbers), and the math just works. Most people underestimate the long tail of any market, but companies and people that capitalize on the long tail can still make some big money.

More from Alisa:

Back in 2004, my first suggestion for a second book for me with St. Martin’s was a Dirty Girls sequel. My editor condescendingly said no and told me I had to build a “body of other books” before doing a sequel. Why? Because that’s how it had always been done. Fatal mistake on her part. Fatal mistake on mine for trusting her. My readers were not the typical readers. They were new to commercial fiction, many of them, and they saw themselves in the Dirty Girls. My fans wanted Dirty Girls, period. They still do. First rule of business? Give the customer what she wants. Big publishing did not trust me to know what my own readers wanted, and we all suffered in the end. And here I am, mid-listed and falling.

Lesson effin’ learned. I would not give big publishing a second chance to screw up my career.

The next step in my evolution was to figure out what, exactly, St. Martin’s Press had been doing for me to merit taking more than 90 percent of the profits from my work. Best I figured it boiled down to six things. Editing. Copy editing. Cover design. Marketing. Publicity. Distribution.

The first paragraph here is something that I just don’t know why authors continue to put up with. I mean, obviously most authors have yet to realize that they can publish whatever they want and if it’s good, it will find a market. That used to not be the case, but when the world is connected like it is now and you can get your product into the hands of anyone anywhere on the face of the Earth, you can find an audience if you have a product that people will want. Even if it’s only 1,000 people around the whole world. You used to maybe only be able to find 1 or 2 of those people based on geography. But now, if they want to find a hard SF military gay romance book, or a a historical friends to lovers story containing a marriage of convenience plot, they can. They just have to look for it on the internet and if it exists, they’ll find it. All you have to do is provide the product to the market and make sure they can find it when they look.

The latter half of this is something I keep coming back to in my decision to self-publish (well, besides the fact that I’m not actually needing to make a living off of writing): Writers generally say that when it comes to getting published, they do most of the marketing themselves. And when you’re looking at eBooks as a major market, distribution is as easy for me (or any other author) as it is for big publishing houses. So, really, what you get is Editing, Copy editing, and Cover Design. From reading other indie author blogs, I know that you can find editors to pay on an hourly basis (much like you should do with financial advisors) who will cost less than the share that a major publishing house takes. As for copy editing? I was just reading a reprint of Snow Crash released after Neal Stephenson released his Baroque Cycle and I found two pretty obvious typos. So, yeah.

Then there’s cover design. This is another one that a lot of authors complain about. They may say they love the cover when it comes out because they kind of have to because what choice do they have? But after the fact, I read that they had no input into the design decisions and that’s the one part of the process that they would really want to go back and do over. Now, I’ll give you that I suck at fond selection and design, but I feel like the rest of my covers so far (all 2 of them) have been pretty decent, or at least somewhat interesting.

Sure, but what if you (or, perhaps a better example: me) don’t have a huge fan base of millions of loyal readers already?

Well, that’s where this interview with Zoe Winters comes in…

at first I was still thinking that “maybe” I wanted a trad pub but that I could start building a platform this way, cause publishers like platforms. But the more I got into it, the more I knew it really WAS for me, and I was like “oh screw that. I’m doing this myself!” For me indie isn’t a stepping stone to anything. I want to be the best indie I can be and it’s not about someone else later validating me.

Any success that comes later aside, this is how I feel. I just feel like there’s too many negatives that come with getting published by a traditional publisher. Unless you’re one of the million-copy selling authors, it seems like you’re not going to get the respect of a traditional publisher. I read the same kind of advice about the music industry (longer ago than I’d like to admit), which went something like “If you sell enough records to get the attention of a major label, then you’re already better off on your own.”

Valkyrie Project Episode 2 Live Now!

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Actually, live about a week ago, but I wanted to see what kind of traffic having 2 episodes up would generate before I put a link to it up here. So, now that things have reached more of a steady state, let’s see if I can generate another traffic spike by telling everyone to go download Episode 2 now!

This one involved some of what I consider to be clever writing. It also includes a flashback. Sue me.

Notice the subtle variations of the cover art… I’m so awesome at graphic design.

Excellent Reasons For Self-Publishing

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Now of course, the numbers posted by Joe Konrath are from someone who has a fairly sizable backlist, but just the fact that he can back up his lengthy list of reasons for self-publishing and be very open with facts makes for very convincing reading. But one of the more interesting statements in his self-hosted Q&A was this:

Q: But I need the traditional publishing gatekeepers in order to know my book is good enough. Aren’t you concerned a whole bunch of wannabes will flood the Kindle with self-pubbed crapola?

A: Decades ago, pulp writers learned to write while on the job. Early books by many of the greatest mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, and romance writers, weren’t very good. But getting paid allow those writers to improve, and become the masters we now revere.

If you write crap, it probably won’t sell very well. But you can learn from it and get better. You can rewrite and revise your early work to improve it. With self-publishing, readers become the gatekeepers, and if you work hard, keep an open mind, and learn from your mistakes, you’ll improve as a writer.

This is basically what I’m hoping to work on by self-publishing The Valkyrie Project in episodic format. I mean I constructed it to be episodic in the first place, to give me a bit of an easier learning curve as far as getting something actually finished goes. But, that’s the great thing about self-publishing: I can do that. I can write whatever I want, and get the kind of practice writing that Konrath talks about above, and build up a back catalog while I’m at it.

In the same spirit of full disclosure, Episode 1 of the Valkyrie Project has already been downloaded 51 times in 30 days (and only 1 of those was me!). Of course, I had no way of knowing if those other 50 people actually read it (let alone liked it), but since it’s under 8,000 words, I like to think there’s a good chance that people will get through it. I guess maybe I’ll find out when I get Episode 2 up (hopefully this week or the next).

Two New Improvements for Mobile Authors

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Mobile Authors being defined as those who compose some or all of their work on mobile devices. I created this category for myself and others because I can (when properly motivated) crank out 300-500 words on the train to and from work. It’s not much, but I’ve been doing it somewhat consistently, and it’s enough to at least keep things moving forward…

And tech companies continue to make it easier to work on the go…

Apple made a minor improvement in iOS 4.2 by adding the ability to use ‘Helvetica’ in the built-in Notes app instead of the silly ‘Marker Felt’. This is good because I have found that the basic functionality of Notes is sometimes all you need to just get the words written down.

Google Docs has a made a more significant improvement, allowing editing of docs on mobile devices. I’ve edited Google spreadsheets before, but I guess editing “Documents” is a new thing. I tried it and it works pretty well. It’s nice that it’s saved automatically to your Google Docs account, so you don’t have to worry about dropping your phone and losing a bunch of work if you haven’t emailed your latest writings to yourself.

The drawback here may be that same advantage, though. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m not sure how (or if) it will work when the train goes through the areas that don’t have an internet connection. And that’s minor compared to the more interesting question: How do you open a doc to edit it if you don’t have an internet connection at all? Perhaps on Android devices there’s a way to store docs locally and sync up when you have an internet connection, but unless there’s some HTML5 magic going on in the Safari version, it’s not going to work so well on the iPhone.

Whatever the case, though, it’s probably the most mainstream option available to Mobile Authors who want automatic syncing/backup. Other lesser known options include: SimpleNote (which I will review soon), which boasts the ability to compose offline and sync when the phone has a connection, and PlainText which uses DropBox to sync your notes (an extra step, perhaps, but really, shouldn’t you be backing all your work up with Dropbox in the first place?). All of these options (Notes and Google Docs included) require copying and pasting from the source into the Word doc (or sometimes Open Office) that I use to amass scenes into chapters and into larger “parts”. Guess if I really want maximum efficiency, I’d get a Windows 7 phone so I could edit Word docs on my phone and get them synced through to my computer automatically. But then I’d have to get a Windows 7 phone. Hrm.

In Which I Am Humbled

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According to the first 500 words of the Valkyrie Project…

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Having only read The Da Vinci Code, all I can say is: ouch. I certainly wouldn’t mind selling millions of copies of my books, but I’ve seen other authors names on those IWL badges and I’d much rather be like any of those.

Another 700 works from later in the Valkyrie Project bring me to the same result. I guess I shall have to resort to some sort of gimmickery now to get people to read my work. Oh well. I suppose it’s better than if I’d turned out to write like Stephanie Meyer.

Three Good Posts from KM Weiland

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4 Reasons I Quit Writing Exercises – I totally agree. When I’m not writing for a project, I write for my blog. I’ve done writing with prompts and journaling and other things like that, but to me, that ended up feeling like like training for a marathon by doing wind sprints.

Why Word Count Goals Can Be Destructive – Again, totally agree. I used to have word count goals, and I spent way too much time tracking my word count while writing and after my writing sessions. I now have what I think of as “soft” word count goals. They’re goals, yes, but my main goal is just to write something. I can track that easily with either a 1 for Yes, or a 0 for No. I track my words, but on a more meta-level now (at the scene/chapter level rather than on a daily output level).

Why You Should Stick With A Story – I have much less experience with actually finishing a story, but I certainly do agree with the idea that you should finish what you start. (Do as I say, not as I do!) That way, instead of practicing starting a new and exciting idea over and over, you practice toughing it out, and you practice writing a complete story. As they say, “No one wants to read just the beginning of a really cool story.”

What To Write on Your Way to A Million Bad Words

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Do I get to count blog posts?

An interesting question from a reader over at Barry Lyga’s blog (via Jo Treggiari):

I used to think keeping a journal was pretty good writing practice, and it is in a way, but I don’t think it’s all that helpful for my fiction. To get better at fiction, I have to write, well, fiction.

Okay, so not really a question. My apologies. And even more sorrowful, Barry says:

Your blog doesn’t help you all that much towards your million bad words!

I will give you that writing a blog is not writing fiction. (Unless you’re blogging about a fake life, perhaps, and making up stories – something which I’ve considered, but discarded because it seems like you’d either have to write a whole bunch of blog posts ahead of time, or be really good at making stuff up on a daily basis; anyway…) I would argue that my blog (at least, the one that I post to on a consistent basis; not so much this one) has helped me tremendously in getting through my million bad words. Or, perhaps, if you don’t buy that, then I’d contend that by practicing on my blog and developing a strong voice over there, I’ve cut down on the number of bad words I’ll have to pump into crappy drafts of fiction pieces before I write The Great American Novel. (And by TGAN, I mean Awesome Space Opera Pulp Adventure)

The funny thing is, though, that I agree with the reader in saying that a journal isn’t that helpful for fiction. My argument in that case is that a journal is personal and not intended for public consumption. A blog, on the other hand, is specifically intended to be read by other people – just like a novel or short story. A blog post has to be (or should be if it’s not) written and edited carefully before it’s posted on the World Wide Web where the entire web of the wide world can see it.

Also, since blog posts are shorter in length than novels or short stories, and authors usually try to write them in a correspondingly shorter time span (or perhaps with shorter deadlines), they force the writer to create a higher quality first draft so that further revisions are limited. Otherwise, the blog post may never get published (trust me on that one), and when it does, it might be woefully out of date. (Clearly this is more true of certain kinds of blogs, but I am certain it applies to all blogs as a meta rule) While the subject matter may not be directly transferable to the world of fiction writing, this ability to quickly turn out words and create higher quality rough drafts is as useful in both cases as, say, being able to run fast is to both bobsledding and football.

New Twitter Follows

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This is very good timing from Writer’s Digest, because I just started a Twitter Account for Fanatical Pupil yesterday: Writer’s Digest Blog: Best Tweets for Writers

Good timing because I followed a bunch of people that Twitter suggested as part of the writing community, but some of them kind of tweet like crazies. Good marketing for them, I suppose, but it was overwhelming me a bit considering I’d only started following 9 people. Seems to have calmed down a bit now, so we’ll see how it goes with the 4 new people suggested in the Writer’s Digest blog post.