I go to conventions and conferences, that’s the question I get asked.

Either:

“How do you write?”

Or —

“How do I write?”

The question can mean all kinds of things. How does one write day to day? Or how does one become — and remain, and simply be — a writer? What’s it like? How to start? How to keep it going? WILL THERE BE BOURBON AND SHAME? (Yes to at least one of those.)

It’s sometimes accompanied by the look of a truck-struck possum.

It may come with an exhortation of bewilderment and exasperation.

A sound not unlike, whuhhh, or pffffffh. Cheeks puffed out. Lips working soundlessly.

This is a difficult question. It’s difficult because you’re you and I’m me. Each writer isn’t a snowflake until they are, and this is one of the ways that they are — we are cartographers of our own journeys, charting the map as we go and then burning it soon after. The way I did it isn’t the way that Joe Hill did it, or Kameron Hurley, or Delilah S. Dawson, or Kevin Hearne, or Heinlein or Dante or that one weird dude who wrote the Bible (his name was “The Prophet Scott” and he had one eye and a romantic eye for tired sheep).

Just the same, I feel like I should draw you a map.

I should attempt to answer the question.

None of this will be helpful. Zero of it will be factual.

But maybe it’ll give you a glimpse — a sense — of the scope of the thing.

The very short answer is:

“YOU JUST DO,” and that’s it.

You do it by doing. It’s like asking, “How do I open a door?” You just fucking do it. I dunno. Part of me thinks this should always be the answer, often jabbered in loud, caps-lock volume.

The still-short but not-as-short answer is:

You clench your buttocks together and tighten your middle and bite down on the belt and then you stab the fountain pen into your heart to suck up a draught of your vitalmost blood and you write furiously and without hesitation or pretension the story that lived there in the deepest part of your pulsing aorta. And you keep scribbling over it and rewriting over the scribbles until that story is as good as you can make it without killing yourself or taking up all your time.

That, too, may not be helpful.

So, let’s try the all-too-long version.

You start by reading because to want to be a writer you should first need to be a reader — no writers need to be writers despite what they’ll tell you but all writers need to be readers, full-stop, no arguments, don’t sass me. You learn to want to write by loving to read.

Then you decide to write and at first you write for yourself but soon you realize you write for other people — or at least one other person — and you write silly stories as a Wee Tiny Person, stories that might be called MOON BADGERS or THE DAY THE OCEAN POOPED THE SKY or some mythic pop-culture syncretism like FINN AND JAKE FIGHT THE KRAKEN or SCOOBY-DOO VERSUS THE BOYS OF ONE DIRECTION and maybe you illustrate these stories with whatever burnt umber crayons you’ve got hanging about.

Somewhere along the way you maybe stop writing for a while because it feels weird to not be that good at it, because it just doesn’t match the stories you read and love.

Eventually a teacher teaches you things about writing. They teach you good lessons and bad ones. Some things stick. Some things don’t. The bones of the skeleton form, awkward and herky-jerky and with a funky palsy lean, but it’s there, these bones, and it looks familiar, and somewhere you think, “This would look better with some meat and sinew packed onto its frame.”

So, you write again.

And it’s still not great, but you try to emulate the voices of other writers you love. And it’s a crass mockery of their work but it’s better just the same, and so you do this for a long time, as long as you need to. You likely run through other voices like it’s a catalog — you pick them and write them, Lovecraft to Frank Herbert to Stephen King to Margaret Atwood to Some New Young Writer I Haven’t Heard Of Yet Because You’re Just That Cool And I’m Just That Not.

Somewhere along the way, you think, I could really do this.

Like, professionally.

And people laugh. Or encourage you to your face while making panic-stricken faces behind your back. Or they tell you do to something else, anything else, be an accountant, doctor, truck driver, artificial horse inseminator (which is to say one who inseminates artificial horses artificially), and they wave their hands around like you’re careening toward a bridge that’s out ahead.

You drive past them, heading toward the shattered bridge.

And you drive off the bridge because all writers drive off the bridge.

You take the plunge.

You write and write and write, and you write to whatever direction you think the market is going. You write the Hot Genres, from Vampire Nuns to Erotic Kalepunk to Literary Doge to whatever is you think is going to sell the book, and you study agents and you study publishers and you think about self-publishing and really, honestly, you have no fucking idea what you’re doing. You finish one out of every ten books you start. The ones you finish feel weird, like they were written by someone else, like maybe you just walked into a room where the angles are off and the mirrors are cracked and it sounds like a television is on with that white noise weirdness but you see no TV — these books seem written by a doppelganger, some alt-world version of you, but you figure fuck it, this is what writing is, and so you keep trying to do it.

Writing and writing and writing.

And reading and reading and reading.

And thinking, too. You study writing advice. You get good lessons. You get bad lessons. You take it all to heart, all the useful bits and shitty rules, and maybe along the way you go to school for writing and you give some institution tens of thousands of dollars to make you a writer, and once more: good stuff, bad stuff, all of it goes into the crockpot to make the stew-beef slurry that is your writerly soul. Bubble, bubble, bourbon and trouble.

You think: I NEED THESE RULES BECAUSE RULES MAKE THE WRITING GO. You cleave to them like a thirsting man licking tears from the face of a sad panda.

Then later you decide: I HATE THESE RULES BECAUSE ALL RULES AND NO CHAOS MAKE WRITER A DULL BOY. You discard them like ruined underpants.

Eventually you figure out: SOME RULES ARE CRITICAL AND OTHER RULES ARE LESS SO AND SOME RULES AREN’T RULES AT ALL AND WRITING IS DIFFERENT FROM STORYTELLING AND I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS I SERIOUSLY CANNOT DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH THIS.

So you go back to the basics.

You keep writing.

You keep reading.

You start to submit work.

Maybe something small. Maybe something big.

Maybe to a magazine. Or an agent. Or a publisher. Or to a digital marketplace as a self-publisher.

You, of course, are rejected. Or reviewed poorly.

And, of course, it stings like a motherfucker.

It hurts your heart. And within the tear made in that most necessary of muscles, the fungus of self-doubt grows — fuzzy and black, sucking the confidence out of you with the hunger of a leech, with the tenacity of a tumor, and for a while you just sit and rock back and forth on your heels wondering if you should really do this thing. And others hesitantly agree out of what they perceive to be a kindness — once more they try to steer you from a sure collision with disaster, hoping you’ll turn your boat away from the waterfall ahead.

And yet you chug on.

The boat goes over the falls.

Another plunge.

Over the falls, rejection letters trailing behind you in the moonlit mist.

You start to think, fuck it.

I’m going to do this my way. At least a little bit.

At the bottom of the churn, the water punching you into the rocks, you decide that if you’re going to drown you’re going to drown your own way, and you’re going to write the book you really want to write, the one that squirms inside your guts like a pit of eels, the one story that chokes you with its emotions, the one tale that’s scary as a clown with spider-teeth and serpent-fingers and a Tea Party membership, and down there in the dark you put that story to paper.

You don’t know if it’s any good but it’s yours.

And that makes you feel good.

Because it sounds like you. It feels like you.

You ran after your voice for so long, but your voice found you.

You were the voice all along.

You submit that book.

And for once, it pings some radars.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

Holy shitwich. Holy fucksnacks. Holy handjobs-from-hell.

Someone responds. You call out into the lightless space, your plea just a flurry of bubbles, and an echo responds, and they respond that they want the story. But they want you to make changes because it isn’t quite there yet and that scares you, frustrates you, makes you mad because it’s perfect of course it’s perfect you finally figured out how to do this execrable job and now some cocky know-it-all piss-ant hyphen-loving word-nerd is telling you otherwise.

And for three hours or three days or three months you sit on it and pace back and forth upon those notes like a jaguar trying to suss out how to escape its zoo cage and suddenly there’s this moment, a moment like when you figure out how to open a puzzle box and — click — you realize, oh, you know some things but mostly you know nothing, Jon Snow, and so you go ahead and take the notes to heart and you make the changes and suddenly, you have a story.

You learn that writing is really rewriting.

And you rewrite it once, then again for another reader, and again for an agent or an editor, and again and again, writing until it’s right, cutting through your own nonsense, carving through your own fog, recognizing your own stink — and you see your work out there.

A shining moment. A diamond in the dark. A beam of light through it, made prismatic.

An imperfect moment because the story still isn’t perfect.

But you’ve got the scars of rejection to show you’re fighting the battle.

You realize you’ve gotta suck to not suck.

You embrace the time you tried to be someone else just to realize you had to be you.

You push past the idea of trends, because chasing trends is trying to catch and bottle lightning — some do it, but most don’t, so maybe it’s time to make your own motherfucking lightning instead.

You submit and you hate yourself and yet to push on you spear self-doubt to the earth with a spear made not of unearned confidence but with a pike formed of experience and instinct and awareness of what you’re doing and why.

You have your rules and your ways.

You have your process, cobbled together over many years and wordy iterations.

You have your voice.

Each ginger step into this dark forest becomes quicker, nimbler, more sure-footed as your eyes adjust and your muscles tighten. You run, unabashed, unfettered.

And you write.

And you read.

And maybe, just maybe, you get published.

And soon, you do it all again.

Again and again and again.

Because you’re never really done forming.

You’re always a protoplasmic blob.

But at least you know that you can twist into shapes when need be.

You know you can always — and will always — write.

You will write to stave off the cuckoo bananapants feelings.

You will write because you love to read.

You will write because you want to be read.

You will write because you want to be paid.

You will write because you love it even when you hate it.

You will write because you want to, not because you need to.

It’ll get easier and it’ll get harder.

Everything will change and sometimes you will, too.

And some day someone will ask you how you do it, how you be this thing called a writer, and you’ll have no idea how to answer them, so you’ll shrug or yawp or lie, you’ll write a tweet or a blog post and answer their question with a question or with a short answer or a long solution and most of it will be true even when it’s made-up because truth is almost never beholden to fact.

But at the end of the day you know the reality is, everyone does this differently. And no map through this dark forest will look the same, but all will carry themselves through it with the same conveyance: we all step through by reading, by writing, by living our lives, and by doing it again and again and again until we maybe, maybe, think we know what the fuck we’re doing.

All this is just step one.

Who knows what step two looks like?

* * *

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

If you go to Goodreads, I am now participating in their ASK AN AUTHOR thingy.

If you go there and deposit your question, I WILL ATTEMPT TO FIELD YOUR QUERIES, MEATSACKS. … uhh. I mean, “I will do my darndest to try to answer your questions, readers!”

Because I’m definitely not an insane robot masquerading as a human.

One who wishes to milk the blood from your precious meatsack to fuel my cyborg crusade.

Totally not.

Pay no attention to the robot behind the curtain.

And go and click that link.

And ask me questions.

…

…

…

MEATSACKS.

So, I figure while I’m at Phoenix (presuming this challenge posts and doesn’t give me any issues), I think it’d be nice and thematic to stay with the Phoenix motif.

Except, forget the city.

Let’s go with the mythological creature.

Or, at least, the ideas or visuals or powers surrounding the Phoenix.

So: write 1000 words of fiction that ties in some way to the legend or theme of the Phoenix.

You can interpret this as loosely as you choose.

Story due in one week, by the following Friday at noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link back here in the comments.

RISE AND BE REBORN, SQUAWKING FIRE BIRDS.

Whenever I talk about character in storytelling — seriously, I’ll talk about this stuff with Target clerks, zookeepers, parking meters, carpenter bees — I frequently bring up the notion that, for me, good characters possess agency. And this, I often say, is one of the things that really matters in a so-called “strong female character” — not that she is a character who can bend rebar with her crushing breasts, but rather that she has agency within the story you’re telling.

Often when I talk about this in public, someone — maybe the zookeeper, maybe the parking meter — raises his hand and asks the question:

“Wait — what is agency, again?”

And it occurs to me I don’t know that I’ve ever defined my terms.

And that is a Naughty Wendig.

(The Naughty Wendig is also the gamboling goblin-like creature who will steal the teeth right out of your mouth if you throw cigarette butts or fast food containers out of open car windows. The Naughty Wendig is a vengeful spirit, also known for gobbling down human toes as if they are cheese doodles in recompense for your shitty behavior.)

(Oh, also? The Naughty Wendig is also the name of a tavern in D&D, a sandwich you can buy at various transdimensional delicatessens, a sex toy, a sex move, and a Japanese candy that squirts blood when you eat it. Please update your records.)

(Parenthetical asides are awesome.)

(Whee!)

(Okay, sorry, moving on.)

So, let’s talk a little bit about character agency and why a character needs it.

Character agency is, to me, a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.

The story exists because of the character. The character does not exist because of the story.

Characters without agency tend to be like little paper boats bobbing down a river of your own making. They cannot steer. They cannot change the course of the river. The river is an external force that carries them along — meaning, the plot sticks its hand up the character’s cavernous bottom-hole and makes the character do things and say things in service to the plot.

Because characters without agency are really just puppets.

It sounds easier said than done. In the writing of a story it’s common to find that you had these Ideas About The Story and the character appears to be serving those ideas — she is not driving the car so much as the car is driving her. And it’s doubly tricky when you write a story that has more than one character, which is to say, uhhh, nearly all stories ever. Because one character who has agency can dominate the proceedings and set too much of the pace, too much of the plot. Other characters lose their agency in response. For example: an antagonist puts into play a particularly sinister plot that forces all the other characters to react to it again and again, never really getting ahead of it. That’s not to say that reacting to events is problematic — just that reacting to events shouldn’t be passive. It shouldn’t be the character going another way just because the plot demands it. At some point reaction has to become action. It has to be the character getting ahead of the plot, ahead of the other characters. The power differential must shift.

And it’s the character who should be shifting it.

Look at your characters. Are they fully-formed? Ask yourself: if the character in the middle of your story went off and did something entirely different from what you planned or expected — something still in line with the character’s motivations — would that “ruin the plot?” That might be a sign that the plot is too external and that the character possess too little agency.

Characters without agency feel like props.

Worse, they’re boring as watching a bear wipe its ass on a pine tree.

(Okay, that’s pretty comical for the first 30 seconds, but then it gets boring.)

(I’m just saying.)

Characters with agency do things and say things that create narrative. Plot is spun out of the words and actions of these characters. And their words and actions continue to push on the plot created by other characters, because no character has agency in a vacuum.

(Those who play tabletop roleplaying games understand this in a practical way, having embodied characters at the level of agency. If you’ve ever rolled bones with an RPG, you know when you’ve got a gamemaster who railroads the plot versus one who puts the characters into a situation and lets the plot spin out of their actions and reactions around that situation.)

What gets interesting about a story isn’t when some Big External Plot is set into motion. What’s interesting is when the agency possessed by multiple characters competes. This push-and-pull of character motivations, decisions and reactions is how stories that matter are created. Because they’re stories about people, not about events, and people are why we read stories. Because we are all made of people. Our lives are made of us and all the other people around us. We live in a people-focused world because we’re solipsistic assholes who think that unless we behold it and create it, it probably doesn’t matter. And in stories, that’s pretty much true.

Stories must be made of people.

And that can only really happen when those people — those characters — have agency.

(Because after all, your characters shouldn’t be parenthetical to their own story, should they?)

(Whee!)

That’s right. I’m at the Phoenix Comiccon this week.

I’ll be there the whole damn time, from Thursday through Sunday.

YOU SHOULD COME AND FIND ME.

Gosh, that sounds sinister.

Edit:

YOU SHOULD COME AND FIND ME AND GIVE ME BOOZE AND COOKIES.

Much better.

Anyway.

My schedule:

What I Learned Writing My Latest Novel : Friday 10:30am – 11:30am

Angry Robot Preview Panel : Friday 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Urban Fantasy and the Real World : Friday 1:30pm – 2:30pm

The Taco Council : Friday 3:00pm – 4:00pm

Author Batsu Game : Saturday 4:30pm – 5:30pm

Drinks with Authors: Saturday 9:00pm till?

Supernatural in Contemporary Fantasy : Sunday 10:30am – 11:30am

Gosh, obviously I’m gonna be very busy on Friday.

And Saturday is some kind of Batsu game which is — you know, I don’t know what it is. I just know that whenever Sam Sykes asks you, “Do you want to be involved in X?” Assume ‘X’ is something really weird and embarrassing and horrible and your best answer is “NO NO GOD NO WHAT WHO ARE YOU” and then you should Taser him except I didn’t do any of those things and maybe, just maybe, I said “yes” (Sam claims I spoke an oath), and now I’m in this Batsu game.

Then, afterward, COME DRANKY DRUNKY DRINKY WITH ME. Drinks with Authors! Woo!

(I’m also noodling a kind of informal meet-up “kaffeeklatsch” with readers if there’s interest. If you’re going to PHXCC and that might interest you, drop a comment below.)

When I’m not at panels and not hunting wily taco prey with the rest of the Taco Council, I will be at my Author’s Alley table (#2414) with fellow deviant Stephen Blackmoore, author of the supremely kick-ass Dead Things. (Actually, I just read the follow-up, too, Broken Souls, and mmm. So good.) At the table, I will be signing books. And talking to people. And signing folks up for an army with which we can destroy my nemesis, Jaye Wells, whose books are always right next to mine on bookstore shelves so we are forced to do battle until one day we realize we’re better off teaming up and going to war against Brent Weeks (sorry, Brent).

Point is: this thing’s gonna be “off the hook,” as the kids say.

Personally I like things on hooks. More orderly that way.

But whatever.

So many good authors. Some I know, some I’ve yet to meet in person, some I’ve never communicated with in any meaningful way. So, come to the desiccated hell-chamber that is Phoenix (100+ degree temps already! A sun like Sauron’s eye!) and we can frolic in the cholla and take peyote tabs and become coyote-people together.

People keep wanting me to have thoughts on Amazon versus Hachette.

And I do! I do have thoughts. They careen drunkenly about like bumper cars.

I feel like this Slate piece by Evan Hughes kinda tells it fairly true.

I like a lot about Amazon. Amazon is one of my publishers. They’ve treated me well and treated my books well and — whaddya want me to say? They’re cool, I’m happy. (And expect me to be promoting my newest with them soon enough.) I also like that Amazon was one of the only companies that saw the Internet as an opportunity rather than a storm that would one day pass. The Kindle is great. They gave life to indie publishing — life it hasn’t had in a hundred fucking years. They put books in hands, man. They get books to people who don’t have bookstores nearby.

But, Amazon also scares me. They have a lot of power. They’re erratic. Some of the company’s behavior could easily be called “bullying,” and who likes bullies? Uh, yeah, nobody likes bullies. And right now they’re going nose-to-nose in the prison-yard with Hachette which means authors — some of whom I’m friends with — are getting shanked in the kidneys and left bleeding on the shower floor with delayed shipping times or lost pre-orders or whatever.

I like Hachette, too. I love a lot of their books and authors. I mean, shit, I love publishers. We can bag on Big Publishing all we want, but at the end of the day you still have to look back and say, okay, all those books that I loved growing up — the ones that made me want to be a writer — they were published by, in most cases, big publishers. I know a lot of people inside publishing. They are frequently awesome people. They are frequently book-loving humans.

I also know that Hachette, along with other Big Publishers, sometimes do scary things. Sometimes they write scary contracts with creepy provisions. Sometimes they’re not forward-thinking. Some of them still treat the Internet like it’s a rash that needs medication.

So, while it’s really, really easy to fall prey to the narrative of Good versus Evil (with various Side-Takers and Zealots claiming different sides as good and different sides as evil), I think it’s vital to resist such lazy categorization. I’ve seen what indie authors call Amazon Derangement Syndrome, which is when folks in the traditional system decry anything Amazon does as being some kind of Lovecraftian Evil — any change in the way they do business is just them building a throne out of the bones of innocent children. But I’ve seen the opposite, too — where indie authors cannot abide criticism of Amazon, as if Amazon is like, a pal they hang out with at a bar somewhere. “Amazon will never betray me,” the indie author says, even as Amazon breaks a bar glass and quietly cuts off the indie writer’s fingers because it hungers for fingers.

(Tip for indie writers: giving all your eggs to the Amazon basket means Amazon gains a lot of power over you. And you may say, “Well, then I’ll just jump ship if they change the deal,” which is all well and good until you realize your investment in them also helped create market dominance for the Kindle device. That exit strategy from Amazon doesn’t look so awesome now, eh?)

Again, good, evil: both of these ways are lazy thinking. Amazon isn’t apocalyptic evil. It isn’t your religious savior, either. It’s just a big company whose goal is, y’know, to get bigger.

And the same goes for Big Publishing.

Let’s try this.

Think of big companies as:

a) giant monsters

and

b) bacterial colonies.

Two creatures of wildly different size, but each with notable behaviors.

The giant monster — a kaiju, let’s say — does what a giant monster does. It stomps around. It doesn’t stomp people because it hates people. It stomps people on the way to find its breeding ground or on the way to mate with a particularly saucy skyscraper. People end up stomped like grapes because the giant monster couldn’t see them. The bigger it gets, the more it loses sight of people. The more it loses sight of all the little things underneath it. (Like, say, book culture.)

The bacterial colony wants to grow. It wants to replicate. It is programmed to fill space, to colonize — in a way, like humanity has itself done. Given no competition, bacterial colonies bloat exponentially. Seeing competition, some bacteria cheat to become resistant to that competition. Being resistant to antibiotics, for instance, allows bacteria to enter a period of unfettered growth. An epidemic. A pandemic. A holy-fuck-a-demic.

Big companies — Amazon and publishers alike — are big monsters and little bacteria.

They want to grow.

They want to stomp.

It’s their nature.

Now, generally, big companies push against other big companies to create competition. And our own government, in theory, regulates big companies so that they don’t stomp everybody or infect everything or completely destroy all their competition. That’s in a perfect world, of course, because that certainly doesn’t seem to happen very much anymore. (Mini side rant: the American public is cast further and further apart from the political system. Meaning, companies are allowed to give money to government in order to influence government to give companies more freedom. As companies get more freedom, they can spend more money to influence government. It’s a circuitry loop that We The People are no longer a part of, and you can see it with food, medicine, health care, insurance, and even here in publishing. If you are totally averse to forms of governmental regulation, then you at least need to try to regulate how money gets into politics. Regulate that and a lot of other things will take care of themselves. End mini-rant.)

Big companies acting without mitigation is how you end up with tons of money spent on war but no money spent toward the health-care of its citizens. (If only we classified illness as a foreign combatant!) It’s how getting antibiotics out of our food is a glacially slow process, and it’s why the FDA has far less regulatory power than you prefer (or think).

Again, this isn’t because companies are evil.

It’s just because companies have the motivation to grow.

Which means, somewhere down the line, making money.

Amazon wants to make money.

Publishers want to make money.

You want things more cheaply.

And there, a digression:

Recently, with food, I’ve come to understand that sometimes, food shouldn’t be cheap. This is a very privileged perspective, I recognize, but here’s the thing: food is something vital you’re putting in your body and cheap food isn’t often good food — at least, not cheap processed food. The cheaper it is, the more corners have been cut to get it to you. And the less people have been paid and the more people have been removed from the equation, which means more people have less money which means those people need cheap food and once again the goddamn carousel goes ’round and ’round. But there’s been some pushback there and you have the rise of farmer’s markets. Some markets are small stands and farmer-driven and offer good real food at competitive prices and some are big affairs where rich people go to buy purple broccoli because, I dunno, it’s fucking purple. All of that is good. It’s good we can shop at Wal-Mart, or a grocery store, or a farmer’s market, or a farm stand. The spectrum is necessary. The problem is when that spectrum is weighted too heavily — and that’s what’s starting to happen with book culture.

Books are food for our mind. A strained, mawkish metaphor, but true (for me) just the same.

Food is bad when it’s too expensive, but problematic when it gets too cheap.

We need that spectrum.

And books are like that, too.

When advocating for indie bookstores, it’s tricky because you can’t just say, “You should pay more for books.” “Why?” “Because indie bookstores.” “But why?” “Uhhh. Something-something freedom?” How do you convince people to spend more money just because?

Here’s why.

You pay more sometimes because you’re supporting an indie bookstore you love. (And if you do not love it, if you don’t feel that the bookstore is good to you or is worth supporting, don’t do it. Indie bookstores aren’t awesome just because they’re indie.) Good indie stores support a community. They bring authors and readers together. They foster book clubs. They create a curated environment for people and full of people that love books. IT’S LIKE MAXIMUM BOOKAWESOME UP IN THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS. And so, we support them.

We also pay more sometimes because it contributes to the health of the whole. It’s worth realizing that you can price yourself out of existence. You can make books so cheap that it’s very hard for the entire industry to survive. You can also salt the earth for everybody else so that only one provider exists — and that one content funnel can then set the rules for how everything is done. Books and book culture are threatened by carelessness and monoculture. Just as it is with antibiotics or food production or global warming, sometimes we need to think beyond our own margins and to the health of the thing outside of us.

This isn’t to say you should eschew Amazon entirely. (I still buy there. I still publish there.) Or that publishers are somehow charity organizations who have only your best interests at heart. Publishers, as with Amazon, are filled with people who are awesome. But they are companies who fill spaces like floodwater, who do what they must not only to survive but to excel. And it’s also not to say that Barnes & Noble is the best thing ever because hey, they’ve done this same shitty thing to authors and publishers — just recently with Simon & Schuster. It’s not even to say that indie bookstores are unilaterally beneficent creatures — because I publish with Skyscape/Amazon, I’ve actually received some overtly shitty treatment from a handful of bookstores by dint of being associated with Amazon. (One store outright banned me with great anger and vehemence.)

Listen. Amazon has seized on opportunities that have sometimes been rejected by book publishers — and book culture is the stakes on the table to be won or lost. Amazon cares about content and low prices. Big Publishing cares about preserving its own culture and relevance. Readers and authors are left in the middle.

So, what the fuck do you do?

I will scream this until my throat collapses, but:

Diversify.

I think that as readers and authors our best bet is to continue to diversify how we write books, how we publish books, how we buy books, and how we read books. We should get shut of the idea of MORE CHEAPER BIGGER FASTER and reject the idea that stories are just “content.” We should then ask how to foster competition both by voting with our dollar and by voting with our actual goddamn votes. We should think about books less as personal entertainment devices or as content blobs and think of them as parts of a whole — as parts of a culture beyond just self-satisfaction. Thus we support stories and storytellers all around the world. Books: vital for our mind as food is vital for our bodies. An old, outmoded idea, maybe. But one I believe in just the same.

We should shop at multiple locations. Buy all kinds of books from all kinds of authors. Buy traditional. Buy indie. Publish that way, too. Go everywhere. Try it all.

Do not be married to a single ecosystem.

Fuck the monoculture.

And, while we’re talking about Hachette authors —

Hachette books now have their own dedicated digital storefront at Books-A-Million.

B&N is doing a Buy 2 get one free deal on Hachette books.

Hell, Wal-Mart smells blood, too, and are offering many Hachette books at 40% off.

Or, you could always go to your friendly neighborhood indie bookstore.

You have seen Indiebound, right?