Author: terribleminds (page 221 of 465)

I was asked to join the official Twitter Fiction Fest, and last night was my slot, so I took two hours to write something that is equal parts warning and invitation from a mysterious figure known as @TheCompiler01 (who is further bound to a mysterious entity known as Typhon).

The Compiler would like very much to talk to you.

I’ve storified the tale at:

You Have Been Deemed Potentially Useful.

(The story connects to my upcoming novel, ZER0ES, about hackers who tangle with a sinister new government surveillance program. You can pre-order the book presently: Amazon, B&N, Harper, or from your favorite local bookstore using Indiebound.)

I may do more at that account leading up to Zer0es…

Storybundle Is Back!

If you don’t know Storybundle, it’s a package of DRM-free e-books centered around a single theme and you can choose your own price and how much goes to charity, how much goes to authors, how much goes to Storybundle. It’s really very cool. I’ve done it before and think it’s a great service and it nets you a bucketload of cool books in one fell swoop.

It’s back, this time with a writing-and-publishing advisory collection curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. And I’ve got a book in there —  30 Days In The Word Mines — which serves as a day-by-day writing guide over the course of 30 days. It’s advice that’s equal parts practical and philosophical. Part motivational, part reality check. It’s meant to help you get moving and then give you things to consider once you’re motoring along on the story. It’s there in the bundle with other books by Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Vonda McIntyre, Judith Tarr, and others.

Check it out now: Storybundle Writing Bundle.

Appearances

Hey! I updated my upcoming appearances.

I’ll now be heading out to both DragonCon and the Decatur Book Fest in Georgia, and will split my time between the two of them.

Also, my Phoenix ComicCon panels are now live! I have a metric bootyload of panels, which is awesome. And I get to sit on panels with some of my favoritest people in the whole wide world. (I mean, holy crap, y’all. Delilah Dawson, Kevin Hearne, Sam Sykes, Myke Cole, Max Gladstone, Greg Van Eekhout, Andrea Phillips, Jason Hough, Jay Posey, and more. Plus I get to finally meet Richard Kadrey and Cherie Priest? It’s true that my life is amazing. I’m just stunned I’m not on any panels with Stephen Blackmoore. I guess the con realizes that the two of us on a panel together basically opens yet another of the Seven Seals? WHATEVER.)

(Also looks like GenCon panels are up — though I have not perused them. More on that later.)

I’ve also got some bookstore visits and other trips around worth looking at.

And that’s all she wrote, folks.

WENDIG OUT.

*jetpacks away*

I received a very nice email from a very nice reader that said (and here I’m paraphrasing) that her problem isn’t writer’s block, but something bigger and yet, at the same time, less tangible. She said she’s a young writer, and then she went to say:

The cement wall in the subject line could be named lack of confidence, or even lack of vision if you like. Being where I am in life makes it hard to picture myself as the respected, published author I’d like to be one day. In theory, I know what it takes.But is it really as simple as, “just do the work and you’ll get there?” Or is there something I’m missing? Because there’s a part of me that feels like I might not have what it takes even if I work hard, my ideas are good, and trusted friends tell me I’ve got a gift.

I’ve been searching the net, but it doesn’t feel like a lot of people get the sentiment. So, I figured that the perspective a more experienced person could help me out. What were the biggest concerns/issues/toxic leeches attached to your back you had when you started out? Were they in any way similar to mine? How did you get around them?

My initial response on this was just going to be, “I’ll send her my advice on caring less, as maybe that’s the problem.” Everybody — not just writers — is afforded a Basket of Only So Many Fucks at the start of each day. And we spend those Fucks on whatever we can or must. It’s comforting and occasionally badassedly energizing to say, I’m all out of fucks to give, but for writers, that’s not really an option. You gotta give a fuck about this whole thing. You can’t just hit the bottom of the basket. But at the same time, some writers give too many fucks. They blow them all like a cokehead gambler at the Vegas roulette table: “PUT IT ALL ON RED 42,” and the lady is like, “The table only goes up to 38,” and the gambler’s like “SHUT UP AND TAKE ALL OF MY FUCKS.” A writer who spends it all like that puts too much pressure on herself, makes it too important, too heavy a burden, and then the risk can be paralyzing.

And then my next response is basically:

“Well, yeah, writers write, so go write.”

Then I drop the mic. But remain on stage to eat a pie rather noisily.

But I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here.

Here’s what I remember about being a young, untested writer:

I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

Like, I understood the principle. You sit down, you tippy-tappy out the word jabber on your typey machine, you arrange all the word jabber into the approximate shape of a “story,” and then ???? and then step three: cry under your desk. And maybe at some point in the future, Big Publishing knocks on your door, chomping a cigar made of old parchment and he’s all like, “HERE’S YOUR TICKET, KID, YOUR TICKET TO THE BIG TIME. YOU’RE A BESTSELLER NOW, PAL — A BONA FIDE AUTHOR-TYPE! HERE’S YOUR KEYS TO NEW YORK CITY AND NEIL GAIMAN’S PHONE NUMBER. NOW GET ON THE UNICORN AND LET’S RIDE, CHAMP.”

But really, what it feels like is that you’re the guest at a party. And you don’t know anybody. You don’t know the rules — are you allowed to double-dip a chip? Where is the guest bathroom and are you allowed to use the hand towels? Is that an orgy upstairs? What’s the orgy etiquette, exactly? Was I supposed to bring my own lube? Silicone or water-based?

Worse, it’s like everyone at this party is speaking a sorta different language. It’s still English, but there exists a lingo, a jargon, a sense that you stepped into a subculture that isn’t your own. Everybody and everything feels and sounds off-kilter, like you’re listening to a bunch of software programmers or Wall Street execs make up buzzwords while really, really high.

It’s not just about the writing — writing is, itself, not a difficult task. Like I said: tippy-tappy typey-typey and ta-da, you wrote something. But the problem lies in the hurricane winds of bewilderment that roar and whirl around that central act. What’s good writing? What are the rules? What is your voice? What’s everyone else doing? Will you get published? Agent? Editor? Self-published? What’s good storytelling? What the hell is a genre and why does it matter? Whoza? Wuzza? Why am I doing this? Why does my soul feel this way? Do I want to cry? Am I crying? I’m crying. I’m eating Cheezits at 3AM and I don’t have a shirt on and I wrote another short story and it’s probably not any good or maybe it’s really good I don’t know AHHHH I don’t have any context at all for anything that I’m doing.

And that’s the trick. We lack context. We lack experience and awareness and instinct.

So, we seek that out.

We look to other writers — and to the industry at large — for context.

We get advice. We load ourselves up with information. We crave context and so we gobble it down like that box of 3AM Cheezits and soon our fingers are dusted with Cheezit pollen and shame but we feel emboldened with new information.

And often, it’s shitty information.

It’s shitty because everyone is faking confidence.

They’re creating context by mostly making it up.

I do it, too. We all do. We all have our little rules of writing, our ways that things are done, and they’re nearly all smeared with at least a little bit — a dollop! a thumbprint! — of horseshit. “Don’t use adverbs,” someone says, except whoa, hey, lots of words are adverbs: then, still, never, anywhere, downstairs, seldom, soon, after, since, and the list goes on and on. “Never use a verb other than ‘said’,” except then you see how nearly every book uses dialogue tags other than said. He shouted! She asked! He growled. “Never open a book with” and here the list goes on and on — weather, a character regarding themselves, a line of dialogue, a prologue, a penguin on a jet ski, two vampires blowing each other, a math problem, a heretical screed, a Roomba endlessly tracking cat shit around a living room while pondering its own existential dread. And then, ta-da, you read like, ten books that break these rules. And sometimes the books that break these rules are bestsellers. Or are literary books that are well-regarded critically. Or is just a book that made it to someone’s book shelf at all. “But they did it!” you stammer frustratedly as the Roomba bumps fruitlessly into your boot, getting poop on your foot.

It only gets worse when you start taking publishing advice. I hear bad publishing advice all the goddamn time. “Nobody gets an agent from the query process,” I heard recently. Yeah, except me. And a whole dumpster full of writers I know that got agents from the query process. “Nobody survives the slush pile.” Totally true, except when it’s often not. “Urban fantasy isn’t selling,” and then you read about two more urban fantasy series coming to print, and you look at the bestseller lists and it features Butcher, Hearne, McGuire, Harris (and then you realize what they really mean is, “Nobody’s buying shitty urban fantasy right now”). Hell, even publishers don’t know things. You want them to. You think they should. But when a hot new trend kicks off through book culture like some kind of super-crazy-contagious syphilis, the best they can do is capitalize on the trend they failed to predict.

What I’m trying to say is:

None of us know what the fuck we’re doing.

I know we don’t because the deeper we go down this career, the less we seem to know. Oh, we have ideas. We’ll literally explode your ears with our self-important author talk, but at the end of the day, all the shit we say can probably be disproven by talking to five other writers, and mostly that look in the black of our eyes is one of utter bewilderment. Our greatest and most honest answer to you regarding all the questions you want to ask us would be a vigorous, exasperated shrug.

That’s not to say we’re entirely clueless, mind you. It’s like this — you’re at the bottom of the mountain looking up. We’re on the side of the mountain or even at its peak looking down. You have the climb ahead of you. We have the climb — or some of it, at least — behind us. We have a view of the valley. You have a view of only the mountain. We know a little bit about climbing. We know some of the gear. We have our limited perspective on getting up to where we are, at present. We can only tell you what we know and what we did — and that’s not entirely helpful.

See, up at the peak, we’ve just achieved a new level of cluelessness.

“What’s that body of water over there?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“How’d we survive crossing that SNOWY CREVASSE where the ICE WEASELS were nesting?”

“Luck, I guess.”

“How do we get back down?”

“I think we die up here.”

“Oh.”

There exists no well-marked, well-lit path up the mountain. You will find no handy map. No crafty app for your smartphone. The terrain shifts after everyone walks upon it. New chasms. Different caves. The ice weasels become hell-bears. The sacred texts we find in the grottos along our journey are sacred to us but heresy to someone else.

The person who wrote me the email, she’s probably saying:

“None of this is helpful.”

Which is likely true.

Though, hopefully, the lack of cluelessness that abounds through all the strata of This Thing We Do is comforting? It’s not like young writers are the only ones who don’t know what the fuck is going on or how things work. We’re all just making this shit up as we go. Some of us have a little more context for it — we’re the guests at the party, the ones babbling the jargon and the ones who know some of the orgy etiquette rules. But take heart: we’re just making the jargon up as we go. We’re inventing the orgy etiquette as the orgy unfolds because hey man, orgies aren’t math problems. ORGIES ARE ART. And writing is like that, too — it’s not a repeatable science experiment. It’s not, “Take this pill to relieve your headache.” It’s not X = Y. Instead it’s a lot of random: “Should I stick this in there?” “Yes?” “Bend over, I’m going to try this.” “I tried this in New Mexico and it didn’t work.” “Good to know.”

We share information, we do our best, and for the most part? We wing it.

I feel like I’m not helping.

So, let’s try this.

Out of all the bullshit about writing and publishing, I think you’ll find a series of constants.

These constants remain necessary to do the thing that you want to do.

And doing these things again and again will grant the confidence to continue. (And by the way? Don’t worry about whether or not you’re ‘good enough.’ Nobody even knows what ‘good enough’ means. That’s for someone else to worry about. You worry about whether or not you want to be a writer. And if you do, then be a writer and do your best to cleave to these constants.)

The Five Constants

1. Write A Lot (And To Completion)

2. Read A Lot (And Read Critically When You Do)

3. Think About Writing And Storytelling

4. Talk To Writers

5. Go Live A Life

That’s it.

I don’t even know if I need to explain those, really — they’re all pretty obvious, I like to hope. If you want to write, you need to write. No matter who you are or what problems you suffer: writers write. And writers write to the end. They finish their shit. And they read a lot, too. I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t read, same as you’ve probably never met a chef who doesn’t like food. You gotta give this thing we do time and thought and energy. And despite all of us not really knowing what the fuck is going on, it helps to talk to other writers. If only for solidarity. If only so we can all shrug together. If only so we can drive the car over the edge of the cliff as one, Thelma and Louise-style. And beyond that is life itself. A life that demands living. Life that will fuel the words, that will form the warts and blemishes and little bones of the stories you want to tell.

None of us know what the fribbly fuck we’re doing.

But to gain the confidence you need, you sometimes gotta pretend like you do.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

Writers can’t just read books. Or watch shows. It’s no longer reasonable to expect that we can just turn our brains off like a bedside lamp — click — and force our storyteller brains to go dark. (Some stories let us do this, still, and those are frequently the sign of a truly powerful tale.) But it’s our job to read and watch stories with a critical eye. Not just critical of the tale being told but just to pick it apart — to see how the bones fit together on each mad animal. So, that’s what this post is about. The tl;dr is that I want you to jump into the comments and talk about a lesson you learned form some story you read or watched recently. But first, lemme tell you a lesson I learned.

So.

I just finished the first season of the Netflix show, Bloodline.

It’s an amazing show. It’s a nicely textured crimey story wrapped up in the sweaty sheen of a family drama. The bad sheep brother comes back to town — played by the inimitable Ben Mendelsohn (go watch Animal Kingdom right fucking now) — and throws a seemingly good family way the hell out of whack.

It’s powerful from the first shot. It’s often tense not in a gun to your head way, but in a slow, creeping dread way — like a septic infection settling into your blood.

But.

But.

We just finished the show the other night —

And here I’ll try very very hard not to spoil the show in any big way, because I want you to watch it.

Just the same, here’s a little spoiler space.

Spoiler space.

Spoiler space.

Sometimes spoilers punch your face.

Spoilers leak

Plotty bits

They make some people

Have ragey fits

LOOK OUT

Here goes the spoiler space.

Ahem.

The end to the season (apparently leading into a season 2?) felt alarmingly rote to me. Rote as in, it telegraphed the ending and that’s how it went down — no surprise, no Usual Suspects moment, no twist of the knife. Further, they took one particular character off the table, one really great character, and sometimes taking characters off the table permanently is tricky — it can be like kicking the leg out from under a chair as someone is sitting on it. If your show relies on something, then removing that thing is a risky proposition.

Here’s the thing, right? A story is, in a way, a magic trick. The author is a stage magician. You are showing off the trick at the fore — “Look, here’s a goddamn bunny, and here’s a fucking hat, and now I’m going to stick the goddamn bunny right in this fucking hat and — oh, holy shitkittens, voila, the bunny has turned into a Taco Bell chalupa.” And the way you make that trick work is you do a lot of setup and misdirection, so that way people don’t see you perform the switch — but when they see the result, they’re all ooh and ahhh.

But this show felt more like, “Look, goddamn bunny, fucking hat, and now I’m going to stick the bunny into the hat and –” *flips hat back around* — “Look, the bunny in the hat has become, drum roll please, a bunny. The same bunny. The one I showed you. I told you it was a bunny and now look: BUNNY.” It’s not even like, “Look, one bunny became ten,” or “the white bunny is now black,” because that’s still magic. That still works. This is like a very literal version of Chekhov’s Gun — “This is a gun and I’m going to shoot that guy over there BOOM look I told you I was going to do it. I told you the ending and that ending happened.” The trick is that there’s no trick.

Bloodline is this, in a way — it tells you ultimately what’s happening or going to happen, and then that thing sorta happens. It works as a tragic piece — and there are some nice emotional and intellectual twists and turns that happen. It’s still a helluva show. Lusciously shot and acted with menace and might by all the players on the scene. Amazing texture throughout. But at the same time, the show also sets itself up as something crime-flavored, something thrillery and mysterious. And so when the last couple of episodes roll around, you wait for the big twist. And it never really comes. Everything’s a bit too obvious.

A trick that’s not a trick can work.

But it can also leave the audience disappointed.

Were they expecting a trick?

Then, uh-oh.

And then removing that character from the story is like removing a step from the trick. It simplifies it. Maybe overmuch. It makes you wonder — would you come back to the show without that character? Does the table still stand without that one leg? Does the trick still work? Is it still compelling? If Teller left Penn and Teller, would the stage act work? It’s a meaningful question.

So, that’s my story lesson for you:

Storytelling is like a magic trick. And managing audience expectations is part of that trick.

(And maybe a sub-lesson in there — be careful about setting up one type of story and then not playing by at least some of the rules and expectations. It’s one of the values of knowing your genre — because knowing genre offers a little value toward what people expect. You can subvert those expectations. You should subvert those expectations. But you shouldn’t ignore them entirely.)

Now, I turn the forum to you.

Think back recently to a story you have consumed with your STORY MAW. A book, movie, comic, whatever. And I want you to tell us all a lesson you intuited from that story.

Drop into the comments.

Get to work.

This week, again we will take 20 subgenres. You will pick two from the list either using a d20 or random number generator (or use tea leaves or falcon guts or something), then you will write a short story that mashes up those two subgenres.

This time, you’ll get 1500 words.

This is due by next Friday, noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link to it in the comments below. So we can all read it!

THE SUBGENRE LIST:

1. Haunted House
2. Dystopia
3. Revenge
4. Zombie
5. Weird West
6. Wuxia
7. Body Horror
8. Grimdark Fantasy
9. Whodunit?
10. Military Sci-Fi
11. Comic Fantasy
12. Technothriller
13. Superhero
14. Erotica
15. Heist / Caper
16. Alternate History
17. Parallel Universe
18. Noir
19. Time Travel
20. Demonic Possession

Lois Lane is starting a new life in Metropolis. An Army brat, Lois has lived all over—and seen all kinds of things. (Some of them defy explanation, like the near-disaster she witnessed in Kansas in the middle of one night.) But now her family is putting down roots in the big city, and Lois is determined to fit in. Stay quiet. Fly straight.

As soon as she steps into her new high school, though, she can see it won’t be that easy. A group known as the Warheads is making life miserable for another girl at school. They’re messing with her mind, somehow, via the high-tech immersive videogame they all play. Not cool. Armed with her wit and her new snazzy job as a reporter, Lois has her sights set on solving this mystery. But sometimes it’s all a bit much. Thank goodness for her maybe-more-than-a friend, a guy she knows only by his screenname, SmallvilleGuy…

How to channel my inner Lois Lane.

The first question everyone asks me about this book is how it came into being. Was it my idea or theirs? How did I score such a sweet gig? (I always want to say: Believe me, I don’t know what they were thinking either! I’m just grateful.) The answer is that I was approached via my agent about whether I was interested in writing Lois Lane as a teenage reporter. I asked if I’d have freedom to flesh out the concept, and the answer was yes. So my answer was YES PLEASE.

With a side helping of terror and secret worries that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Because, truth is, I adore Lois Lane (and Superman) and always have. This was a dream project, dropping from the sky into my lap at the exact perfect moment when I could say yes and get started right away. But . . . what if I screwed it up? Well, you can’t be so afraid to screw up that you aren’t willing to try.

I had to channel my inner Lois and be determined to do my best, while developing the superpower of shutting out the worries about being the person who screwed up a showcase for one of the greatest characters ever created, one known around the entire world. I think, though, that this lesson is applicable beyond this specific book—at least, I plan to treat it that way. If we’re not challenging ourselves to do something a little or a lot terrifying as writers, where failure is possible and has consequences, then we probably should be making bolder choices. That mix of terror and determination is where good writing lives.

Exploit the strengths of your chosen form and genre.

Lois is obviously one of the best known characters in pop culture, period, the end—and for good reason. Since her first appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938 (also Superman’s first appearance), she has been an inspiration for so many of us. She’s a working woman, a truth-seeking journalist willing to do anything to get the story. And her boyfriend has traditionally been pretty interesting too. 😉 Lois Lane is probably one of the few characters in the world that we could all list off traits for and hit most of the same ones: stubborn, loyal, tough, witty, driven. She’s a hero. A superhero, even though her lone superpowers are her personality, her pen, and commitment to justice.

She’s had many, many incarnations. Some wonderful, some . . . er . . . less so. But one of the things that makes a character an icon is the ability to survive good and bad portrayals.

What I wanted was to truly use the thing that novels provide that other forms of storytelling can’t in quite the same way: a close-up of the character’s interior life. Getting the balance of Lois’s tough exterior and more vulnerable interior right was challenging, and my editor helped me with that lots, but it was key in hopefully making my teenage Lois feel not just like the versions who’ve come before (though I did want to reflect them), but like my Lois too. This is Lois becoming who she is and finding her place in the world, something young adult fiction is uniquely poised to portray.

My process is still changing.

Never in a million years would I have thought myself capable of writing as detailed an outline as I did up front for this book, and—largely—sticking to it. But it’s what was required to make sure everyone understood my concept of the book and its world and characters, as well as how the story would unfold, and so I did. And it came remarkably fast.

The lesson I learned here is that sometimes by deciding we know exactly what we’re capable of as writers and defining too strictly what our processes are we may box ourselves into the same old thing when a new approach is required. I’m much more open to considering different methods of preliminary work on a story now, or even if I hit a wall during the writing. Outlining in depth doesn’t require that I stick to it devotedly if a better idea comes up in the writing itself—but it did make me stop and question. Am I making a change that’s actually better or just different?

If I don’t enjoy living in the world of the story or the point-of-view character’s head, what are the odds the reader will?

This isn’t a likeability thing at all, but it is an experience of the story thing. I know for some writers, having their work described as fun makes them want to run screaming from the room. But I actually want my books to show the reader a good time, particularly this one. To me, fun isn’t antithetical to deeper layers of meaning or characterization. The two can go hand in hand.

Lois fans are the best.

This speaks for itself, but the dedication and smarts and support of the Lois Lane fans out there since the book was announced up through today (and I’m guessing tomorrow and the day after that!) is something—like this project—I could never have known to dream for. And something, like this project, for which I’m tremendously grateful.

And I hope if you aren’t a Lois Lane fan already, Fallout will make you one. Join us.

Bio: Gwenda Bond is the author of the young adult novels Lois Lane: Fallout and Girl on a Wire, among others. She has also written for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie.

Gwenda Bond: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

Lois Lane: Fallout: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Powells

Andrea Phillips is one of those writers I’ve known for a good while, now — we fought in the Transmedia Wars of 2018 together. We played live-action Ultima on the rings of Saturn. We ate fudge. Well, she made fudge? And I ate it? Because she really makes very good fudge. Whatever. Point is, I consider her a genuine friend. And now she has a book out — Revision, about a young woman who discovers that edits made to a Wikipedia-like site actually change reality — and it’s with Fireside, who I adore. Here, Andrea talks about working with Fireside and her experience with a small press. So listen up, word nerds. She has the floor.

* * *

Used to be, if you wanted to call yourself an author, the one true path was to persuade a publisher that your book was a great bet. Then the publisher would print up copies and persuade bookstores to stock them, who would in turn persuade readers to buy them. Nowadays, thanks to the same series of technological marvels that bring us never-ending fonts of porn and cat pictures, you have the option of going straight to persuading readers to buy your book your own bad self.

War has ensued. Pointless but amazingly heated war. Because if someone makes different decisions than you, they’re bad and stupid and wrong and deserve to be murdered by having their lungs filled with chicken feed, amirite?

Wiser heads know it doesn’t have to be like that. There are many paths, and it all comes down to what’s right for you. Me, I’ve been on both sides of the field. I’ve been published by one of the big New York operations. I’ve been an author-publisher, as our dear host Mr. Wendig likes to call it. I’ve crowdfunded, I’ve done work-for-hire, I’ve even put stuff out there on the internet for free-as-in-beer for exposure and funsies.

Reader, let me tell you about a middle way you may not have considered: working with a small press.

My upcoming novel REVISION is published by Fireside Fiction Company. They don’t have the staff of a Penguin or Hachette. They don’t have distribution at Barnes & Noble. They don’t have a PR machine, or deep pockets for advance money and a whopping print run. Hell, mine is the very first book they’ve ever published, so they don’t even have experience!

Sounds like a pretty bad bet, doesn’t it? Why in the WORLD would I sign up to work with a sketchy shop like that, when I could go straight to KDP and keep 70% of the cover price? Have I gone off my rocker? Do I hate money? Am I just prone to making gut-wrenchingly terrible life decisions? In the future, will others look at the burning husk of my life and point it out to their children as an object lesson?

Hey, maybe so, I’ll let you be the judge of that. But working with a small press isn’t one of those terrible life decisions. In fact, I think it’s one of the most fantastic decisions I’ve made in my career (and I think I’ve had a pretty great career so far, too.) Here’s why.

Not Just a Cog in the Machine

When you work with a big publishing company, it’s a lot like dating someone when you’re wayyyyy more into them than they are into you. They’ve got other booties to call. A full calendar of authors to edit, ship, and promote. Some of their books will be great and some of them won’t be, but eh, no big for them if some of those books they’re juggling fall down and roll under the sofa.

This sucks for you-the-author, because you’ve only got the one book, and writing the next one is the work of weeks, months, years. If this one book fails, you just might be screwed and unable to sell the next book.

But a small press will have fewer books to juggle, so the success of any one given book is proportionately wayyyyy more significant. Maybe even as important to them as it is to you. It’s great to feel like your publisher actually, you know, cares a lot if your book does well.

Awwww Yeah Creative Control!

That sense of being important to your publisher changes the whole power dynamic of the author/publisher relationship. They need you the same as you need them. And that makes a difference in how everything else plays out.

When I was published by McGraw-Hill, as lovely as all of my editors and publicists and so on were, I definitely didn’t feel like I could rock the boat. Since I was the little fish and they are the grandmomma shark, they could change my title, give me any old cover they liked, push off the release date, and all I’d be able to do is smile and nod and be glad they didn’t change their minds about publishing me at all.

I mean I could complain, I guess, but so what if I do complain? That doesn’t mean they have to change anything.

But working with a small press tends to be a lot more collaborative. Your voice can be a little louder, and your opinions as the author have more weight. You’re not underneath fifty other people on the totem pole.

Not all small publishers will likely be quite as collaborative as Fireside — you guys, I got to weigh in on kerning for the print edition. You can be sure McGraw would’ve laughed in my face if I gave them my strong opinions on inside page design.

…TEMPERED Creative Control

But at the same time, the author isn’t always the best person to make great decisions about the book and how to sell it. Honestly it’s hard to know what your writing looks like from the outside, which makes it hard to choose the right approach for cover design, for marketing strategy, and on and on.

When you’re publishing your own work, you don’t have anyone to talk you down from your own bad creative decisions. Maybe that joke on page 233 comes off as a mean-spirited slur and not a cute play on words. Maybe your cover design idea is boring and makes it seem like you’re writing a nineteenth century French epistolary drama, not science fiction.

You can hire professionals, sure, but copy editors and cover artists are fundamentally there to do what you tell them to — and as professionals, they’ll do the best they can, but they don’t ultimately have a stake in your book’s sales, nor any leverage to save you from yourself. It’s all on you to direct their skills or professional feedback and wind up the best book possible. But a publisher has enough power to push back against your first instincts. And sometimes your first instincts are bad, you guys. So it helps a ton to get a reality check on your choices from another party who has just as much skin in the game as you do.

Less of That Pesky Admin Work

Now, I’m capable of self-pubbing. I’ve done it with ebooks and with print, I have the skills, I can do a pretty good job. But it kind of sucks?

The process of publishing a book involves a lot of busywork. Emailing, scheduling data entry, making spreadsheets. Not all of it is difficult (though some of it is!) but it sure is time-consuming. Formatting pages, entering copy edits, uploading files, going back and forth with printers or designers… gahhh, I’d rather be writing more work, you know?

So when you work with a small press, you have someone to offload all of that tedious scutwork to. Someone you can trust, because again, this is someone who cares about the success of the book just as much as you do. And meanwhile, you can keep on truckin’ with writing, the thing you’re in this game to do in the first place.

Capital Infusion

I’ve mentioned that my deal with Fireside is no-advance; that means I haven’t been paid a dime for REVISION yet. But I haven’t paid anything out of my pocket, either — as a self-pubber, by now I’d be out a good chunk of change for editing and cover design services, at the very least.

As the publisher, Fireside is handling all of that, and taking on all of the risk, too. So not only is it costing me less time to get the book out the door… it’s costing me less money, too.

Two Promoters Are Better Than One

So OK, a small press might not get you onto brick-and-mortar shelves, much less put you on endcaps and featured-author tables and all that other sweet, sweet in-store promotion. And yeah, that’s a disadvantage, I won’t lie. Point: traditional publishing.

But going with a small press instead of going it alone means I’m not relying on only my social network and resources to promote the book, either. It means I have an advocate who isn’t me going after guest posts and reviews. It means I’m not only selling to my friends and maybe their friends; it increases the scope of my potential audience.

There’s some overlap, of course, because SF/F publishing is a small community at the end of the day. But still — it never hurts to get your message out to a wider circle, right?

The L-Word

No, not THAT L-word, the other one: legitimacy.

The stigma of the author-publisher is fading. But it’s nonetheless true that a publisher, any publisher at all, opens doors that are otherwise padlocked tight. An example: my book got a glowing starred review in Publishers Weekly; but self-pub books go through a substantially different review process, and aren’t covered in Publishers Weekly at all. Other major reviewers have similar policies. When they review the works of author-publishers at all, it’s segregated, and sometimes breathtakingly expensive.

And that perception of legitimacy ripples out through the whole of the promotional process. I’m not acting as the primary contact for this book, which means the whole endeavor gets a credibility boost. There’s less chance of it being canned as spam, you know? Because some of us author-publishers sometimes go a little overboard on promotion, and it’s made the field a little twitchy on the rest of us.

More Money

In exchange for not getting an advance, I’m getting a whopping royalty — basically me and Fireside are splitting the revenue halfsies between us, after third-party distribution fees are said and done.

That means I’m getting half as much money as I’d get if I were to go to KDP myself, to be sure. But for that money, I’m getting all of the same services a major publisher offers — editing, design, production, distribution, marketing, publicity — and I’m getting two to three times as much money per every book sold than I would if the book had gone to one of the Big Four.

Should this book go Hugh Howey big, it might look like a bad bargain on the surface; are those services worth hundreds of thousands, even BAZILLIONS of dollars? My answer to that is: fuck yeah, because without them, the book would never have reached as many people in the first place, it wouldn’t have been as well designed, it wouldn’t have been as widely available, it wouldn’t have been as good.

Working with Fireside has made my book a better product, cover to cover. It’s been a tremendous and positive experience, and I have no regrets about the choices we’ve made together — even if it only sells a hundred copies. And even if it sells a hundred million.

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Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

Revision: Amazon | B&N