Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
Yammerings and Babblings
That is a dead damselfly (view larger here). An ebony jewelwing, to be specific.
It was quite pretty, and I tried to take a number of shots of it in repose, but this one — this utterly broken, mutilated shot — is my favorite of that day’s bunch.
It looks like a creature in some kind of benediction or prayer. Or perhaps in mourning.
Either way: please to enjoy.
SEE WHAT I DID THERE?
PROS CONS OF PRO CONS.
I tickle myself inappropriately.
Anyway, so, last week Authorbeing Marko Kloos wrote a post about the cost of his trip to Confusion, an SFF con in Michigan. His estimation of cost: $1880, though he notes with more frugal spending that cost could’ve easily been knocked down to under a thousand bucks.
Still, a thousand bucks is no small amount of cash. With that you could pay rent, make a car payment, buy a month’s worth of groceries, or finally afford a long relaxing weekend with your own personal SEX PONY. Is that an actual pony with whom you make love? Or a person dressed like a pony who just hangs around being sexy? I have no idea! I don’t want to know your peccadillos! I’m not here to judge!
The question, particularly for genre writers, becomes:
Is it worth it?
Is it worth going to a convention or festival not just as a fan but as a professional writer or a writer seeking professional connections? Are some conventions better than others? After all, a genre convention (SFF or mystery or YA) will be different from a more general writer convention (conference) and those will be different yet from a comic-con or book festival.
Do you need to go to one?
Let’s just get the tl;dr out of the way right now:
Nope, you don’t.
THERE I DID YOUR WORK FOR YOU NOW GO HOME.
Wait! I was kidding, don’t go away. Unless you’re going away to get me some French fries. You’re not? Then fine, plunk your BOTTOM REGION down on that CHAIR-SHAPED ENTITY and listen because I’m not done talking, goddamnit. No, you don’t need to go to any convention…
But you may still find value there. You are not required to go — meaning, at no point is your professional career hinging entirely on WHO YOU SCHMOOZED AT THE BAR THAT NIGHT AT WANGLE-DANGLECON. Your writing career hinges on writing good books that an editor likes and a publisher thinks they can sell and that readers want to read and also, there’s a hefty dumpster-load of luck at play, too.
Though, let’s talk a little bit about that luck factor, shall we? If we view luck through the lens of an RPG, your Luck Stat can (by most rules) be used to boost your chances at, say, finding more treasure or managing a critical hit while attacking a VILE DISPLACER GIRAFFE. If we view life as one big ongoing RPG, then your Luck Stat is there to boost your chances in various life arenas from the romantic to the financial to the professional. Very few things rely entirely on luck — but many things can be influenced by luck. Writing and publishing included.
You can not create luck, really. But you can maximize it.
Bringing this full circle, going to a convention or conference or festival can help maximize your luck in this space. Meaning, maybe you cross paths with an agent or editor who will remember you later when your book crosses their desk. Or maybe you’ll meet another author who is likelier to take a look at your book to blurb it when the time comes because they actually remember your face. Or maybe you attend a panel where four authors say a bunch of smart and dumb stuff that combines like IDEA VOLTRON in your head to form your next book. Again, none of this is essential, but a lot of it has the chance to give you a boost in a variety of ways.
That’s the upfront tl;dr —
No, conventions/conferences/festivals are explicitly not “required.”
But they can be worth it.
Let’s now hash out the actual pros and cons, yeah?
(Disclaimer: this post is just my opinion, and does not comprise anything resembling fact.)
+ You will meet people. These people can become your friends. Not just resources (as in, “HUMAN CHITS YOU WILL SPEND TO BUY UPGRADES TO YOUR CAREER”) but actual human beings inside writing or publishing that you think are rad. And they think you’re rad. Friendship is good. Friendship can be a life preserver flung to you in the tumult of the storm-tossed publishing sea. The friendship can begin at a con and can continue for literally your whole life after. That’s a pretty special thing.
+ You will meet other people. They will not become friends, but they are part of the community at large, and it’s good to be aware of the community at large. Just being connected to something has value — it sounds stupid, but if you’re going to live in the woods you should probably take some time to walk in the woods. Take a look around. Learn the smells. Get a vibe, take a pulse, whatever. Most genre communities are far smaller than you think. And those various communities overlap, too. It’s good to be there. It’s good to make yourself present and mindful. Later on, your connection may have echoes. It may yield fruit.
+ You might learn really good things. A lot of panels can be amazing. Creativity is strengthened through agitation — meaning, we grab a bunch of polarizing ideas from outside sources and jam them into our head and shake our skull around like it’s a rock tumbler. It polishes what’s already in there and breaks apart other, lesser ideas. Agitation leads to revelation. The old chestnut is always write what you know, but the unspoken follow-up to that is you can always learn more stuff. Cons are a good place to learn more stuff.
+ Cons are also great teaching opportunities. Share what you know! CONTRIBUTE IDEA GOOP TO THE GIANT GLOB OF IDEA GOOP AND INCREASE CREATIVE SYMBIOSIS.
+ I have routinely left most cons feeling professionally and creatively energized. I love this.
+ Commiseration! Writing is hard! Publishing is harder! It’s good to get together with people who GROK YOUR MOJO and with whom you can speak at length about stuff you could (and should) never put on social media. This isn’t just about letting off steam, but rather, about helping to talk-through solutions and to hear about the experiences of others.
+ You will meet industry people. Said it before but it bears repeating: sometimes meeting an agent or editor or publicist or whomever can have unseen value in this gig. Just the simple fact that they might remember you later (ideally as the nice person who said something funny rather than the fucking dong-hole who said something incomprehensible while slobbery drunk) can be a really good thing. Plus, these people might share straight dope about the industry. Never underestimate the value of scuttlebutt.
+ You will meet fans. Maybe you have a new book out. Maybe you published one short story. Maybe you’re a writer with a dozen books on shelves. You probably have fans. No, really! In genre in particular, the audience is smaller than you think and better connected than you expect. Someone there may have read what you wrote. And they loved it. Go meet them!
+ You will make fans. Being on a panel or just talking to people can endear you to them. You get up there and say something smart or crack wise in the right way and someone in that audience may convert — the ideal moment is the one where they think, I need to read what this person has written. Every moment at a con is an opportunity to make new friends and new fans.
+ You can be a fan! Never fail to be a fan inside the industry. I am a fan of other writers — both writers whose work inspired me to be a writer and present peers whose work inspires me alongside my own work. It’s really good to go and just be amazed by the really rad people doing this thing that you love to do. I am incredibly happy when surrounded by talented writer-folk. I think that’s true for most of us. I mean, sure, some of them are fucking dong-holes, but if I’m being honest? They’re few and far between. Most people in this business are pretty cool and I feel lucky to be a part of it.
+ You might actually sell some books.
+ It’s tax-deductible as a professional expense!
– You might not actually sell some books. Every con is different — the best thing is when a con has a dedicated bookstore associated with it (like Mysterious Galaxy, for example) running the book sales. But a lot of cons (even some big ones, like Gen Con or DragonCon) do not have an easy flow between panels and book sales. See, here’s the thing: when you get on a panel and you do your sexy panel dance and then the audience is like SWEET SLIPPERY JESUS I NEED THIS AUTHOR’S BOOKS, that is a window of opportunity. But that window closes. As most people are traditionally like goldfish, they will remember your name and your book for a short time and then, after an hour unreminded will go off to get tacos or see another panel. In a perfect world there is a flow between panel and bookseller that is easy and unobstructed. (Festivals tend to be very good at this in my experience. Conventions and conferences, less so.)
– The ROI on selling books will almost never make up the expense for going. To cover $1000 cost, you would need to sell — *does quick math* — A SHITLOAD, SQUARED. And given that most bookstores will show up carrying fewer copies than that squared shitload, well. You do the math. I mean it. You do it because I don’t want to. Hey, I didn’t get into writing books for the math. THE GREATEST TRICK THE DEVIL EVER PULLED WAS MATH CLASS.
– Some cons will allow you to bring your own books and sell them on consignment. This is a good way to make money. It’s also a good way to do backbreaking labor because books are the heaviest substance known to man and if the con isn’t in driving distance now you’re hauling ten boxes of your dumb books through an airport or sending them with UPS and the cost of that probably obviates any money you’d make anyway.
– It’s weird going to cons where you don’t know people. It’s hard to connect to a community when you don’t know that community. And you run the risk of feeling weird when you just walk up to a pack of pro writers and stand there, staring at them. Never mind the fact writers can be socially awkward, anyway? I know I can be. (Here the best solution is to go to their events throughout and introduce yourself after a panel or in a signing line and then later you can pop by again and say hi.) Just know that it can be tricky!
– Cons can be stressful and may cause you to spend more spoons than you possess. Meaning, if you are a person with anxiety or depression or other social stressors, then a con can amplify them. I generally believe most cons to contain welcoming, awesome people. But that is not universal, nor is it always easy to access the welcome, awesome people.
– Mentioned already, but cons can cost real money. Hotels, travel, con fee. Not as hard if you’re in driving distance, and easier if you can bunk up with people. Still: money is money, and conferences can be seen as a luxury rather than an essential. Cons thus favor those privileged enough to afford them. (Note: many festivals are free. And free is good.)
– Not all the information at cons is good. I’ve gone to panels and heard writers talk about marketing and promotion or other topics and have literally felt like launching up with my arms flapping about to warn everyone away like I’m Charlton Heston in Soylent Green. THEIR ADVICE IS MADE OF STUPID PEOPLE, I would cry, and then in a crossover would point to the unburied beach head of the Statue of Liberty and something something damn dirty apes. Generally, I love panels at cons. Sometimes, though, you get a real weird mix, and it’s vital to take all the advice with not just a grain of salt but an entire subterranean salt mine.
– Also some cons have really weird niche panels like FURRIES VERSUS STARSHIP CAPTAINS and HOW TO SELL YOUR OCTOGENARIAN EPIC SEX FANTASY and you might start to feel like, wait, why did I pay to come here, this isn’t helping me at all.
– Some cons make it hard to get on programming. You go and you pay and then you get one panel on a subject to which you are only barely connected. (“Why am I on a panel called WRITING ABOUT SUPERNATURAL HYPERSPACE NINJA TRAINS? Because I once mentioned a train and a ninja in the same chapter? Uh, okay?”)
– Also some cons make it hard to get hotels. The name of one of the Circles of Hell is “hotel lottery.” Some cons are in cities where you can comfortably stay outside of town for less money.
* Social media is a semi-meaningful replacement for cons and festivals. Wildly imperfect but a partly-functional facsimile thereof. Even still, sometimes the relationships you form online are really only cemented when you meet in person. (Though the reverse can be true, too.)
* Going to cons is not essential but it is useful — that said, its usefulness is of diminishing value. Some writers go to a whole lot of cons and that’s fine if it’s not on their dime. If it’s on their dime, I’d argue they’re putting in more than they’re getting out — meaning, the ROI is borked. Choose one or two cons that really represent what you care about and about which you have heard good things. Then go.
* If you cannot afford the total package, BARCON is a possibility — meaning, you can not pay to go to the con but you can hang out in the bar where the writers and publishing people will almost certainly be. Even when we don’t drink we’re like animals at a watering hole, man. And really, don’t worry if you don’t drink. One writer (cough cough Brian McClellan) goes and brings a whole fucking cake and just sits there and eats it and shares it. Which is bad-ass. I actually demand that cake be a vital part of all my con-going from here on out. Brian knows what the fuck is up. I bet Brian has ‘cake’ in his publishing contracts.
* At a certain level, publishers may offer to send you to these events. SAY YES. This is what you want: a publisher spending money on you, your career, and the promotion of your work.
* Going to cons is more about networking than about selling books. Networking may feel like a crass unpleasant affair, because mostly, it is. So don’t really do that. Go and just be with people. Be a sponge. Absorb. Contribute your own thought matter where appropriate. Go not to MAKE CONNECTIONS but go to HANG OUT WITH AWESOME WRITER-PUBLISHER PEOPLE. Again, don’t view people as what they can do for you. People are not outlets for your plug. Real connections are about something deeper than professional exploitation, mutual or otherwise. Being with other humans is a life skill. Cons are good practice for it.
* (I am just now reading a good post by Sunny Moraine about how writing is a solitary activity but also cons are useful and essential and hey go read it when you have a chance.)
(Time to talk a little to the cons, now!)
• Get yourself a nice, easy-to-find, easy-to-understand, and most of all easy-to-enforce anti-harassment policy. Writers like safe spaces for ourselves and more importantly, for our fans.
• Be disability accessible. This is 2016. Acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege of being in perfect mental or physical health. I know this isn’t easy and it may cost you money but others have done it and and you need to do it, too. Get on the ball.
• If we are invited as more than just a “person attending,” and we’re anticipating being on panels or doing workshops or whatever, then bare minimum, comp us the cost of the conference. If it’s a conference we wanted to go to in the first place, that’s good. If not, then it won’t be enough. (Consider that it’d be like your workplace saying, “You can come to work today for free — we won’t even charge you for the elevator ride.”)
• Echoing what I said above, but I feel it’s important — published authors come to cons and they would really like to PUSH THEIR WORD-DRUGS ON THE UNSUSPECTING MASSES — uh, I mean, we want to sell our books. Help us do that. Book sales, ideally, will be near to where we are speaking or doing panels. There exists that aforementioned precious moment during and just after a panel where people who are unfamiliar with us may be convinced to try a book by us . That moment is not permanent. They leave the waters of Mnemosyne and we are lost to the river of Lethe. While cons are not all about selling books, we still wanna do it. And our publishers really want us to do it. (It’s kinda why they like us.)
• Don’t make us sell our own books. Some authors want to do this, and them having the option is great. I like to sell my books through bookstores because I want bookstores to be rewarded.
• COOL CENTRAL BAR OR GTFO
• I like when cons offer a green room or separate space for the attending creative people. It’s nice to get to meet a cross-section of other folks speaking and such.
• At panels, I like having water. This is usually a problem but once in a while it isn’t and it needs to be. Though I loathe the waste, bottled water is nice because I can take it with me, and sometimes the pitcher of water on the table has been sitting there since the Mesozoic Era and if you look close enough you can see skin cells and mosquito eggs just floating around in there and ew. What I’m trying to say is, clean hydration is key, goddamnit.
• Also, moderators for panels are an important consideration. Erm, not that you have them (you should, but you already know that), but that they don’t suck. Most moderators are awesome. Some moderators think they’re part of the panel rather than shepherds of the panelists, and then speak at length instead of letting the panelists have a say. YER NOT A WIZARD, ‘ARRY.
• Too many people on a panel is not so good. You get more than five people, it’s like — nobody can really say boo about shit or shit about boo. You get one answer to a question and that’s your time. You hold the mic to your mouth, and breathily answer “yes” to the one question and then it’s over. This is less of an issue if the panels are longer than 50 minutes. But many are understandably not!
• Panels at writing events only about writing drive me nuts. Like, here’s the thing: yes, we need those, and yes, the audience wants those, so yay. But I’m also a huge fan when you have panels on like, random shit that writers can use. A forensics panel at a mystery con. A panel on space travel at a SFF con. Random panels on smart stuff. And, here is the key, not all panels need to be staffed by writers. Staff them with specialists with regards to the specialty. (Admittedly, some authors are specialists, so, fine.) I mean, don’t put me on a panel where I have to be smart about stuff. I AM IDIOT DO NOT TRUST ME. The other thing about a lot of writing panels is that they’re very 101-level stuff. It’s good to offer a variety! Variety is the spice of life. Paprika is also the spice of life. And we all know that the spice must flow.
I have thoughts about specific conventions, conferences and festivals — though that will have to wait for another post, I think, as this one has already gone on way too damn long. Just the same, your time to chime in is now — what, if I can ask, are your favorite conventions, conferences and festivals? Anything counts, whether explicitly genre-based SFF or mystery cons, or comic-cons or writing conferences or book festivals or that time I invited you into my basement and I tricked you into talking with me about my extensive Garbage Pail Kids card collection.
SOUND OFF IN THE COMMENTS, WORD-NERDS.
* * *
ZER0ES.
An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.
But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.
Out now from Harper Voyager.
Doylestown Bookshop| WORD| Joseph-Beth Booksellers| Murder by the Book
Powells | Indiebound | Amazon| B&N| iBooks| Google Play| Books-a-Million
(Also now out in audio! Narrated by Ray Chase.)
(Sorry folks — was without Internet for a couple-few days. We’re back on now, though.)
I’ll make this challenge easy, by which I mean, easy for me. Difficult for you.
I want you to write a story in the form of social media.
Meaning, I want your 1000 words to take the form of:
Twitter, Facebook, a blog post, Instagram, something, anything online.
Meaning, you will tell a fictional story using social media as the framing. You will post this at your blog or other online space, formatted accordingly — it’ll be due by next Friday, 2/5 at noon EST. Any genre will do. Be sure to link back here so we can all see what you wrote.
Now go do.
[EDIT: due to some confusion over the challenge, let me add a bit to clarify — what I mean is, you know how an epistolary work is fiction in the form of a letter to someone or some other document? Assume this to be a digital social media epistolary form. Your story should be written as if it takes place on social media — though, even e-mail could work. It is a fictional construct, a narrative that assumes the form of something other than straight prose. ]
HEY LOOK A BOOK COVER.
That’s right, it’s the cover for my next thriller, INVASIVE.
The synopsis:
Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI—a futurist who helps the Agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland.
Hannah is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to see her family, when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. “I’ve got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies,” he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn’t say.
What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible—someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way. Discovering who—and why—will take her on a terrifying chase from the Arizona deserts to the secret island laboratory of a billionaire inventor/philanthropist. Hannah knows there are a million ways the world can end, but she just might be facing one she could never have predicted—a new threat both ancient and cutting-edge that could wipe humanity off the earth.
I so dig Hannah as a character. She’s the daughter of doomsday preppers who now consults for the FBI as someone who predicts threats that are outside the scope of FBI’s own sphere. As a character she kind of pinballs wildly between optimism for the world we’re making and grave pessimism for the one we’re so close to destroying, she’s fun to write. And hopefully to read.
Oh, and spoiler warning, there might be ants.
I MEAN I DON’T SEE ANY ON THE COVER OR ANYTHING DO YOU.
*coughs into hand*
*coughs up ants*
*hurriedly shakes ants off hand as if you saw nothing*
Also, the interesting thing is, INVASIVE is set in the same universe as ZER0ES — and yet, it’s not a sequel, really. It assumes those events have happened, and references them loosely, and features a few crossover characters (Hollis Copper, for instance). IT IS ALL PART OF A GRANDER PLAN. Moo hoo ha ha. Ha ha. Ha. Ahem.
This used to be the book called MYRMIDON, by the way — and here I’ll tell one of those inside baseball publishing stories because this time I had my heels dug in with the title because I just loved the hell out of it. Had a mythological connection but also meant something inside the book and — it’s also just a cool fucking word. But marketing wasn’t sure about it, wasn’t sure it was a word people would get behind. When I talked about it on Facebook and asked who liked the title and who didn’t, enough people flinched at it and thought it sounded a bit weird that it gave me pause. The trick here was then to figure a title that covered all the bases: it worked for the book’s story, it it wasn’t a title used by other books, it sounded cool, and above all else, I just plain liked it. We literally bounced back dozens and dozens of titles until finally I came up with this one. I love it. The publisher loved it. It works. Hopefully you’ll dig it, too.
Let’s see, anything else going on?
OOH, yeah, I’m over at StoryForward talking to Steve Peters about everything Star Wars — I met Steve some years ago at a tiki bar just outside of LA, and back then I was just a ruddy-cheeked neophyte trying to break into TV, and it’s cool to reconnect with him on this podcast and actually get to talk about some awesome stuff.
At io9 you’ll find a post about 22 fantastic new Star Wars characters you don’t find in the movies — and AFTERMATH gets a considerable chunk of characters discussed.
And I think that’s all she wrote.
*ninja smoke bomb*
*smoke clears*
*I’m still standing there, awkwardly eating a taco*
Rogue hackers versus a self-aware NSA surveillance program!
For fans of: Mr. Robot, Leverage, Sneakers
Folks have been asking where the audio version is — took a while to zero in on a narrator and to ramp up production, so we missed getting it day-and-date with the print version and instead focused on getting out the right version. But here it is! Narrated by Ray Chase.
PLEASE TO ENJOY.
BoingBoing says: “Chuck Wendig’s new technothriller Zeroes is a hacker misfit tale in the lineage of War Games and Sneakers, true to the spirit (and often, the minutae) of security work, and exciting as hell to boot.”
NPR says: “Wendig is an ace at pacing, and he hurtles the reader through hacking sequences and action scenes with equal bang. It’s not an easy task to make a sitting-and-typing session feel nail-bitingly tense, but Zer0es‘ high-octane blend of nervy characters, dark humor and bristling dialogue carry the day.”
Nerdist says: “Wendig writes a story that plays hide and seek with a coming apocalypse, a dangerous technology, a growing cult, and international politics. At its center are people who can hack – hack computers, communities, people, and more – and the government agencies that are trying to maintain their grip on reality, virtual and not. If you’re in the mood to be scared silly by the possibilities we create when we mesh our lives with technology, definitely give this a read.”
You can nab it from:
Amazon Audible | iTunes | HarperCollins
If you want hardcover or e-book:
Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | iTunes
(Also, the mass market paperback version comes out in May.)
I would also like to turn your attention to some other awesome books out this week:
Kevin Hearne’s STAKED!
Robert Jackson Bennett’s CITY OF BLADES!
Charlie Jane Anders’ ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY!
Matt Wallace’s LUSTLOCKED!
Also there is a new Tim Powers novel out why the fuck didn’t you people tell me.
And finally, Scott Frank, one of my mentors at the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, is a man responsible for a world of amazing films — Out of Sight, A Walk Among the Tombstones, The Lookout among them. And now he wrote a book called SHAKER, which I will definitely be picking up because I’m no dummy.
I talked about this in one of my more recent posts (advice for the mid-career writer) — but looking ahead a year or two down the line, most writers will see a cliff. This cliff represents the end of your current contracts, maybe the end of a series, and at that point you should expect your career to become a giant blinky spinny question mark. A cartoon question mark that laughs (“hyuck hyuck hyuck!”) and just shrugs whenever you ask it a question. It’s like a Magic 8-Ball except it only has one answer in its cabinet and that answer is, “Gosh golly who the fuck knows, maybe you’ll be eaten by a bear, hyuck hyuck.” In fact, one wonders if a cliff is the wrong metaphor: perhaps it’s a cave. A dark cave whose dark depths may present treasure (your book sold well and the publisher wants more!) or tribulation (the publisher said you sold four copies and will now exercise a rare contract clause where they get to force you to battle other authors in a subterranean Manhattan fight club for the pleasure of the literary elite).
Said it before, will scream it again and again at the asylum walls until my spit-forth soaks the padding — social media will sell tens or hundreds of books, but not thousands. Social media is good for getting the word out! Social media is good for earnestly talking about your book. Social media is not a good long-term sales channel. Like, that thing where you hop on there and constantly run through a reiterative a sales pitch? Day after day? It feels gross because it doesn’t really work. If it did work, you’d be selling many copies of your book to a considerable portion of your social media audience. And you’re probably not.
CONGRATULATIONS YOUR BOOK IS PUBLISHED. *trumpets and fanfare and ice cream firehoses and literary fight clubs for your delight* OH SHIT SORRY YOUR BOOK SOLD FOUR COPIES. And you’re like, wait, why? Why did it only sell four copies? Could be that your book sucks. Or your publisher didn’t care about your book. Or the one person your publisher picked to market your book is the janitor. Maybe the bookstores didn’t carry it. Maybe the print run was too short. Maybe someone forgot to send it out to trade journals. Maybe the trade journals had a backlog because it’s a busy month with a lot of books landing and sorry, yours just wasn’t the priority. Maybe your genre has been oversaturated. Maybe somebody in the CHAIN OF POWER just fucking hates you and your hair and your clothes. Maybe you’re secretly a ghost and don’t realize it and nobody can see your book. Who knows? Ha ha ha, it’s a spinning carousel of constantly defecating horses! You don’t know which one shit on you! They just did! And maybe at the end of the day it is your fault and you wrote a less-than-great book or the wrong book or…? So, control what you can control and write the next one as best as you can, and the next one even better.
Wait, did I say that you should write the best book? You should. You totally should. And it proooooobably doesn’t matter. Let’s face this train head on: a book that super-sucks might do really well, and a book that is legitimately fucking amazing and everyone knows it and it wins awards and is precious to many might sell like a rock dropped into a toilet. This is far from universally true! Sometimes great books sell equal to its perceived quality. Sometimes bad books huff glue and die in a gutter. And nearly always, good and bad are totally subjective declarations because outside of core writing competency, stories are not plug-and-play dongles.
I have asked a question of authors whose books hit big, and that question is: “How did you do it?” And more often than not, the answer is an empty smile and a slow shrug. Books are not widgets. They are not generally the result of a creator looking at the market and saying, “You know what the Butt Plug industry is missing? A Butt Plug that looks like David Bowie’s The Goblin King.” It’s not a greeting card where you suddenly identify a new holiday (“OMG it’s Dachsunds-In-Catapults Day!”) that needs a line of greeting cards, stat. Books arrive in a giant sweeping tide of releases — hundreds of books crashing every week upon a narrow audience. The ones that do well may do well because… god, who the fuck knows why? They pluck some precious chord in the audience and they buy in. Books that do really well tend to set trends rather than follow them. The good news here is, you can totally maximize your luck. Selling lots of copies of your book is like meeting Oscar Isaac. You might just randomly meet him in a CVS somewhere, sure, but you can increase your chances by going to a CVS in Los Angeles, or frequenting a dance club he likes, or by hiding in his medicine cabinet like a haunting spirit. In publishing, you can write the best book you can and publish with the best publisher you can and then they market it and give it a hopefully great cover and ideally nobody drops the ball or humps the ball before dropping it down a sewer grate, and all of these things increase the Luck Stat on your book’s character sheet.
You’re a writer. Congratulations. That means you write books and that’s really all it means. But for some reason, writers are assigned more power than this. Writing a book affords us an unexpected platform made from our own books and suddenly we’re up on top of it and people are listening. And most likely, we have not prepared jack shit to say, and so we just hilariously gabble through some swiftly-invented wiffle-waffle and next thing you know people are taking that to heart or they’re pissed off at you or they’re forming a cult to either venerate or destroy you — and yet, all the while, you’re just someone good at writing books. Recognize that being a writer affords you some small measure of power and privilege (which is on top of any you already possess) and it is a thing to protect, a thing that asks for caution, a thing that demands responsibility. (Though audience, please also realize: writers are full of shit. Brimming with it!)
Ha ha ha, don’t worry, your power is still unmercifully tiny in the grand scheme of things. Two entities have way more power than you: Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Sure, this is a duh thing, but it bears reminding that each of these entities is not your friend and also not your enemy. They’re just big companies full of individual people and their actions can conspire to save your book or slit the book’s throat. And sometimes these actions are accidental, sometimes these actions are willful against publishers or genres or even against you individually as an author. B&N, for example, accepts the industry chestnut that FIRST WEEK SALES REALLY MATTER, except sometimes B&N doesn’t put your book out on shelves during that first week for untold reasons and people go to that store looking for your book and it’s in a box in the back — and then, first week sales are lower than everyone would like and when it comes time for B&N to put in an order for book two, the buyers tut-tut and say, “Well, this book didn’t sell that well in its first week,” and they don’t order as many or they don’t order any at all. Amazon, on the other hand, has theoretically infinite shelf-space, but will gladly undercut the Kindle price of your book by slashing the physical price of the book lower than the digital version and then they’ll put this little passive-aggressive note under the account that says, Price set by that stupid publisher because we would never do that because we love you very much. B&N can demand a new cover or title for your book. Amazon can completely erase your publisher from their site during disputes, which mmm, probably sucks for you, author. Are either of these companies evil? Nope. They’re doing business. And business can sometimes be hard for the little guy. (AKA: you.)
Poor sell-through on a single book, as noted, can hurt you. It might mean smaller advances or less copies ordered for shelves or less bargaining power at the table for contracts. If your new book doesn’t sell well, an actual goblin manifests in your bedroom just as you’re falling asleep, and every Tuesday night the goblin punches you right in the crotch. That’s no lie. That’s one of many hard truths about publishing. Goblins. Fucking goblins. Dang.
Selling well is amazing! Go you! Now you can pay bills and buy cool stuff and fans carry you around on a motherfucking palanquin. It’s all cake from here. And what I mean is, it’s all one flavor of cake. I hope you like that flavor because now if you try to write something of a different flavor, nnnnyeah, it may not work. A big successful book is like a moon orbiting you — that bastard has gravity, and it will affect all your tides. It will be harder to pull away from the thing that made you successful and harder to do something more creatively satisfying. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it feels like an ART PRISON. But it’s something to note! A good problem to have, admittedly — but it can still be a problem.
This is obvious and probably doesn’t bear its own entry — but I am very, very happy that the discourse in writing and publishing has pulled away (presently and hopefully permanently) from all that talk of THE ONE PROPER PUBLISHING PATH. No one method is a lottery ticket. Yes, luck matters. Yes, quality is of varying degrees of usefulness. Just the same: writing is not some ALL OR NOTHING charade — it’s not you shoving all your wishes and dreams into one bottle and then chucking it into the ocean with the hope it washes up on some precious beach. It can be a slow and steady career. Sometimes a writing career is less about the flash flood and more about the power of orchestrated erosion — wearing down stone one sluice of water at a time. No one publishing path is a lottery ticket, but every publishing path is a goblin who will crotch-punch you before bedtime. Or something? I think I lost the thread there.
The more money spent on your book means the more money gets spent on your book. This is both sensible and weird. Sensible because investments must be protected, and sometimes you protect an investment by adding money to it. Weird because, hey, why does Coca-Cola advertise? Do they need it? Is there anybody in the world who doesn’t know that Coke exists? But even Coca-Cola must remind the world of its presence (and if I recall, Coke’s sales are down, too). In terms of your advance, it probably means the contrary is true, too — if you got a smaller advance, well, expect that fewer dollars will be thrown toward your book doing well. Your book is possibly relegated to the THROW THAT POOP AT THE WALL AND SEE IF IT STICKS department.
Marketing a book is less like using antibiotics for an infection ten years ago, and more like using antibiotics for an infection today. What I mean is, ten years ago if you had a bacterial sickness the doctor would be like HERE TAKE THIS ZITHOMYCILLIN PILL AND TA-DA YOUR SICKNESS IS GONE, and now it’s like, TAKE THIS FLORKOMAX PILL AND IF THIS DOESN’T WORK WE’LL TRY LIKE SIX OR SEVEN MORE AND HOPE LIKE HELL THAT YOU DON’T GET SOME SORT OF FACE-EATING UBER-MRSA BECAUSE AT THIS POINT WE KINDA FUCKED UP THE WHOLE ANTIBIOTIC THING SORRY. Making a book sell is not an act where as long as you make the proper sacrifices and insert TAB A into SLOT B you are guaranteed a bestseller. It’s important to realize that publishers don’t actually know what they’re doing. This sounds like a knock against them; it isn’t. It’s to make it clear that they are not perfect gatekeeper entities curating bestsellers while willfully relegating everything else to the sewer. The best publisher tries a lot of different things based on experience and data. Even still, the best publisher has to concede that what worked for Book #1 will not automatically work for Book #2.
You got a book published. Woo. Huzzah. Fuck yeah. That is awesome. You are awesome. Everything is amazing. Or, rather, everything is amazing until it’s not — the book comes out and now you’re in the fucking wilderness, you poor fucker. You’d gnaw your own arm off for some data. And the data that comes in is a crude porridge, not a fine consommé. BookScan is about as accurate as you throwing shoes at cars. You hit some, you miss some. Your digital sales numbers are not necessarily accessible (and not always right) — though they’re accessible if you self-publish, of course. Amazon ranking is less reliable than scrying your sales through bird entrails. Then reviews come in. Professional reviews hurt worse sometimes. Reader reviews can be wildly variant (LOVE THIS BOOK AND WILL KILL ANYBODY WHO SAYS DIFFERENT, 3 STARS; THE BOOK SMELLS WEIRD, 0 STARS; POOPY PANTS, 5 STARS). You expect that the book will come out and now it’s all huggable kittens and a fragrant odor that never leaves your nose, but mostly it’s a lot like wandering a shopping mall not sure what to buy or how you even got here or if you’ll ever be allowed to leave. You live here now. Oh well?
Every book is that way, not just your first. Sorry.
They just are. Not all of them, of course. Even the dog-shittiest crap-nastiest what-the-fuckiest book is going to have fans, but the reverse is also true: even the BEST BOOK EVAR OMG is going to have a percentage of people who hate it so bad they will film themselves force-feeding it to a weeping zoo animal. “I HATE HIPPOS AND I HATE THIS BOOK, EAT THE BOOK MISTER TUB-TUB, EAT THE GODDAMN BOOK.”
‘Twas a bit of a row last week when Neil Gaiman enthusiastically endorsed Clarion the way that I might enthusiastically endorse eating tacos — I might say, for instance, that if you want to know why life is worth living, you need to eat a taco or you are dead to me. I don’t mean that literally, of course (except I do), and so when Mister Gaiman said that real writers need Clarion, he surely didn’t mean it given that he himself did not attend Clarion and neither did Margaret Atwood and neither did I and c’mon. That said, he has the privilege of a huge audience and a big voice (see earlier comment: “You Have More Power Than You Deserve”) and many penmonkeys felt stung because of a long history of being told they’re not allowed to be quote-unquote real writers. So, let’s just get this out of the way: Clarion is an amazing program and it is also a non-essential program. So too with any other workshop or group or MFA program. Those entities are in no way bad (though MFAs in particular can be very expensive and offer too little bang for your considerable buck) and are useful to many authors. But you don’t need them. Some people might care, but most don’t. What they care about is that you wrote a book and it does not suck.
A good critique partner helps you understand your work better and will point you toward a better iteration of that story. A bad critique partner will tell you how they would write the book and how to send the book in an entirely different direction that is wholly not your own. Bad critique partners and groups outnumber the good ones, in my experience. Most critique partners possess no qualifications and them messing with your work can be like some rando off-the-street trying to fix your bathroom plumbing. A book is a little like pancake batter — it’s best with some lumps in it, and a lot of critique partners want to overmix the batter, which dorks up the pancakes. Don’t let some clumsy ass-hand dork up your metaphorical narrative pancakes. That may be the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written, so please update your records.
Film and television rights should get you good money. Key word: should. Some publishers will try to just take them from you (and note, that few publishers actually have the incentive or skill to peddle those rights to the proper channels in La-La-Land). Some people in Hollywood will also just try to take them in the hopes that you feel blessed just by having that rare chance of them making a film product from your book. You’ll get word from some screenwriter or production company that they want to license the work for a time for basically no money in the hopes of developing a script and shopping it around and… boy-howdy that sounds nice. They’re scrambling to sell it then, too, and you’re all in the same boat together and if they win, you win! Except, this is really common. Your work is going to go in a bin with dozens of other freely-given rights. And they have as much value as you assigned them, which is to say: mostly zero. Earlier I noted that publishers who spend money on a book will then spend more money and attention on that book, and the same thing goes here. If someone pays you for the film/TV rights, they are likelier to make it. In fact, the more money they give you, the better your chance — because this is an investment. Your book is not a fucking penny-stock. If someone wants to park their Hollywood car over your rights for a year, they should pay you for the privilege.
Publishing is tiny. The audience is small. Bestsellers hang around the list for a long time because most readers just read one or two books a year and the same books circulate in that audience — it’s a self-replicating machine that way. Most people in publishing know each other. Many writers know one another — especially in their particular genres. It’s all very niche. This is important to know because to many, it’s quite a surprise. It’s also a good reminder not to shit where you eat, because a whole lot of people are watching you pop that squat. (I must also note that publishing is also shockingly white. Or not shockingly, since most industries are? See the current row over the Oscars. Diversity on the page matters, yes, but inclusion has to be a column and not a floor — it has to go from ground to ceiling, and it has to cascade off the page to the writers writing the books, to the editors editing them, to agents and marketers and book buyers and so on. This is a bit of an adjacent point, admittedly, but I think it’s worth calling out.)
E-BOOKS ARE JESUS AND WILL SAVE PUBLISHING AND yeah but no. It’s untrue that e-books aren’t doing well. They are. They may have plateaued, and physical sales may have thankfully rebounded, but they’re doing fine. They also did not transform the industry or destroy print publishing as some predicted. They revolutionized some authorial paths, they created accessibility for some readers and they also created a great deal of noise. I say this as a hard truth just in case someone out there is still peddling this as a MAGIC UNGUENT that will heal PUBLISHING ILLS. It’s not. Digital is great. It also created the opportunity for infinite trash — which is fine, I like infinite trash because that’s basically what the whole Internet is, anyway. It’s just useful to keep expectations in check.
Most authors, even the best, will do book signings where nobody shows. And some folks’ll say that book signings are old hat and not worth doing but I call shenanigans. Bookstores are best when they are front-facing to the book-reading community, and they can only do that with the help of authors. Bookstores allow authors to connect with readers, and further, connect with the bookstores, too. Booksellers have the magic power of HANDSELLING, which is about as wizard as it gets inside publishing — the one tried-and-true way to sell a book is by word-of-mouth, except booksellers have a cheat code where they are forever accepted into a reader’s word-of-mouth trust-circle. Make friends with bookstores. Sign stock. Buy booksellers beer.
I love indie bookstores. Correction: I love good indie bookstores. Some of them stink. Some of are not very nice to authors. I’ve gone to bookstores and talked about setting up signings or signing stock and they look at me like I’m trying to talk to them with a mouth full of pudding. I try to explain to them that I am a “real writer” and my books are already on their shelves but they make a face at me like a wrung rag and nnyeah, no. Good writers appreciate friendly bookstores and good bookstores appreciate friendly writers. Everything else is not worth the time.
This might be very cynical of me, and it isn’t a true and proven thing but just a thing I’m feeling — if you cannot describe your book with merciless efficiency, then that book may not do well. Meaning, if the book isn’t an easy sell — something you can say fast, like, A GUN-TOTING PENGUIN AND A NOBEL-AWARD-WINNING PHYSICIST PROSTITUTE FIGHT NAZI SEX WORKERS ON THE MOON, then that’s a problem. I tell people about the Miriam Black books and say that it’s about a young woman who can see how you’re going to die when she touches you — it’s a short sharp hook that sticks in your cheek faster than you even realize it. (And the books have done very well for me, I think in part due to that somewhat elegant shiv-stab of a premise.)
Writing is a craft. Storytelling is an art. Publishing is a business. What you do is a combination of those three things, and that is very confusing — it’d be like monetizing your marriage or shilling your adorable puppy like you’re some sort of cackling puppy peddler. You do this thing you love. You bleed on the page. You art hard like an artful art-er and now here’s this thing in your hand. It’s your pulp-slick heart throbbing like the neck of a frightened toad. You want the world to protect it and care for it just as you yourself have done… but then publishing grabs the organ out of your hand and takes a big honkin’ stonkin’ bite. Chomp. Then publishing grins with its blood-slick mouth and hands it back. Craft plus art plus business makes for an uncomfortable combo but that’s how it is. The advice then is to harden your heart a little. Callus that motherfucker up. It’s still your heart. It’s still your art. Do not compromise that, but also be ready for when publishing opens its clacking maw and scooches closer and closer…
The header says it all. No map exists. None of this is science. You don’t add two reagents together to get a consistent reaction. This thing we do is weird and wonderful and horrible and soggy with luck and pickled in privilege and is very much like being lost in the woods. But take solace that at least we’re all lost together. That has to count for something.
As always: go forth and art harder, little penmonkey.
Because really, what else can you do?
* * *
Miriam Black Is Back (In Print)
Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. She merely needs to touch you—skin to skin contact—and she knows how and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, and she sees in thirty days that Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and Miriam will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.
“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.” — Lauren Beukes
Indiebound | Amazon | B&N
