The sky comes down in a crushing sheet of whiteness. Two sisters and four strangers are saved from apocalypse by mysterious beings. They suddenly find themselves elsewhere, a parallel Earth where restaurants move through the air like flying saucers and household appliances bend the fabric of time.

Confronted by enemies they never knew they had and afflicted with temporal abilities they never wanted, the six survivors band together on a desperate journey across an alien America. Their goal: to find the one man who can help them before time runs out.

* * *

You can be forgiven if the above synopsis makes you leery. My novel is firmly entrenched in the genres of alt-Earth fiction and superpower sci-fi, two fields that are overwhelmingly littered with cow piles. It won’t ease your mind to know that The Flight of the Silvers is my first stab at science fiction. It’s the first book of a series. Oh, and it’s six hundred pages long.

Yeah, that’s right. Run away, cowards.

If you haven’t fled yet, it’s for one reason: because you know that stories like this, when done right, are really goddamn good. They take all the things you love about X-Men, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Watchmen, and wrap them up in a literary tortilla. When they’re done really well, they shed new light on human nature and the crazy world we’ve built for ourselves.

I can’t promise you’ll go cuckoo-gaga for my story. After all, one man’s diamond is another man’s turd. All I can say is that The Flight of the Silvers was a four-year labor of love. I cherished every moment writing it. And I learned a whole bunch of things along the way. Here are five…

1. Worldbuilding is easy. Worldsplaining is hard.

If I wasn’t the kind of freak who keeps all his notes in his head, I would have a Tolkien-sized attic filled with trunks and trunks of scribblings about this parallel Earth I created, a world where history took a dramatic turn after a cataclysmic event in 1912. I’m crazy obsessed with my Altamerica. Like Robert Hays in Airplane!, I can ramble on in ways that provoke violent and increasingly hilarious suicides.

Unfortunately, that passion got the better of me while I was writing. The early drafts of Silvers were front-loaded with info dumps, enough to bring the story to a screeching halt. Thanks to the feedback of some very honest alpha readers (another must), I made sweeping cuts to the opening chapters and introduced the world at a much more measured pace. Not only did it give the plot and characters room to breathe, it created a cryptic sense of tension that was missing before. Now readers learn about this strange new world just as the main characters do.

In short, being a worldbuilder is like being the parent of a new child. Your baby has to be handled gently. And there are limits to what other people want to know about the bugger.

2. Too much sci can ruin your fi.

Xenu bless the hard science fiction writers. I love them but I am not one of them. From the beginning, I knew I wanted Silvers to be accessible to sci-curious genre newbs, the ones who don’t know their ass from their Rainbow’s End. On the other hand, my story takes place on a very heady Earth, one where man and machine can manipulate the flow of time. Medical revivers reverse wounded bodies back to full health. Restaurants offer special acceleration booths where a diner can enjoy a one-hour lunch in six minutes. Speedsuits allow people to slow down the clock and move through the world in a streaking blur. I didn’t want to pull these timebending shenanigans without any explanation.

Once again, I did way too much info dumping in early drafts, clogging the story with unnecessary details. For most of my test readers, the burning question wasn’t “how does this stuff work?” It was “how does it affect people?”

That question not only freed me up to advance the plot, it got me thinking about my world in wonderful new ways. Would a person healed by medical revivers lose their recent memory? (Yes.) Would that technology be abused by some? (Yes!) Would the kinetic momentum of speedsuits make the wearer more brittle, to the point where a simple love tap could break bones? Oh hell, yes.

3. Flawed protagonists are great, but they do come with headaches

Perfect heroes suck. I want to take all the Mary Sues and Gary Stus of fiction and send them off to Westeros, where George R.R. Martin can Red-Wedding their asses. They’re boring to read and even more boring to write. Seriously. Fuck them.

Though Silvers is an ensemble story, the two main characters are Hannah and Amanda Given, a pair of twentysomething sisters in San Diego. One’s a volatile actress with a history of bad life decisions. The other’s a high-strung nurse with an insufferable excess of virtue. They’re not always brave or wise in the face of danger, and Lord knows they’re not always nice to each other. But in a book with flying cars and force fields, it’s more important than ever to have characters act in realistic human ways.

The problem, I learned, is that not all readers react well to flawed protagonists. Go to almost any Amazon or Goodreads page and you’ll find at least one reviewer who knocks off stars because the main character is too weak or whiny or foolish in the beginning. Of course they are, you chucklefuck. That’s the whole point. No one likes the Tattooine-era Luke Skywalker who whines about power converters. But everyone loves the badass Luke who offers Jabba one last chance while walking the plank over the Sarlacc. Like Luke, Hannah and Amanda will grow over the course of their story. By the time they become harmonious asskickers, you’ll feel their progression.

Still, some readers will gripe. I know I shouldn’t let it bother me. What can I say? I’m a flawed character.

4. Editors. Fucking. Matter.

By the time my manuscript was acquired by Penguin, it had been through forty hard months of plotting, proofing, primping and polishing, not to mention a whole lot of focus-grouping. I thought it was as finished and ready as a book could be. It was not.

Silvers passed through the rigid hands of two Penguin editors, one for content and one for copy. Though I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the content editor, she helped me fix critical problems of structure and pacing, things I wouldn’t have noticed in a million readthroughs. The copy editor, meanwhile, opened my eyes to gaffes I’d been making my whole damn life. I repeatedly confused “further” with “farther,” and wildly overused the verb “crack.” Perhaps my crack habit stems from my farther issues. I’m no psychologist. I just know that if I had self-published Silvers during my premature congratulation phase, I would have served a half-cooked fish to my readers, which would have served no one.

This isn’t an argument against self-publishing. I’m just saying that I ever give in to my inner Hugh Howey (as we all will someday), I’ll go deep out of pocket to hire a professional content and copy editor. Anyone who doesn’t is screwing their audience, themselves, and their fellow self-publishers.

5. Smart people doubt themselves. Dumb people paralyze.

Chuck has ably covered the topic of perseverance on this blog, and Kameron Hurley recently wrote a guest post on the subject that should be required reading for every writer out there. Not only can I attest to the virtues of sticking to your dream, I can personally illustrate the perils of giving up on it.

My first novel, Slick, came out in 2004 to great reviews and shitty sales. It was a meticulously-researched novel set in the world of public relations, a serious comedy. When it tanked, I fell into a pit of lily-livered skittishness that kept me from developing any new idea, much less one about superpowered people on an alternate Earth.

I dawdled helplessly for years, the worst indecision of my life. It took a five-month bout with cancer to light a fire under my ass and get me writing again.

The good news: I’m all healthy these days. The better news: my manuscript of Silvers, which I wasn’t sure would sell anywhere, netted me a two-book deal and enough money to support my food, clothing and shelter habit for many, many moons. I have no reason to complain about anything, except all those stupid years I squandered in self-paralysis.

Don’t be as dumb as I was. Just shut up and write.

* * *

Daniel Price is a novelist living in Los Angeles. He’s currently scrambling to finish the sequel to The Flight of the Silvers before his advance runs out.

Daniel Price: Website | Twitter

The Flight of the Silvers: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Add on Goodreads

Ted is worried. He’s been sleepwalking, and his somnambulant travels appear to coincide with murders by the notorious Hang Wire Killer.

Meanwhile, the circus has come to town, but the Celtic dancers are taking their pagan act a little too seriously, the manager of the Olde Worlde Funfair has started talking to his vintage machines, and the new acrobat’s frequent absences are causing tension among the performers.

Out in the city there are other new arrivals – immortals searching for an ancient power – a primal evil which, if unopposed, could destroy the world.   

***

1. THE FIRST DRAFT IS WORDS. THE SECOND DRAFT IS WRITING.

Draft zero. Vomit draft. Whatever you call it, that initial version of a book is not the finished product. Nobody expects it to be. Writing is rewriting, and never a truer word has been spoken.

One of the wonderful things about writing is discovering how you write—how your brain processes the nuts and bolts of composition, how you somehow develop style and voice without really thinking much about. How you do The Work. That’s also why the trunk novels exist: a first draft not a finished book; not only that, it’s likely the first book you ever wrote is not suitable for public consumption. Which is exactly how it works—writing a hundred thousand words of cohesive narrative that not only makes some kind of sense but is interesting is difficult. Not everyone can do it. Some have a natural talent. The rest of us can learn it with a lot of work.

Hang Wire is my fourth published novel, but the fifth or sixth I’ve actually written. And every one, from the first novel locked in the trunk, to the new book I’m writing now, has taught me more about how I write. Conscious thought doesn’t come into it. You just have to trust that you brain will work it out as you keeping typing.

I wrote the first draft of Hang Wire three years ago. I’ve done a lot of work since then, so when it came time to dig it out and take a look, I was surprised. While I remembered the story, I didn’t remember the detail, and it was very obviously written by a younger, less experienced version of myself who was still figuring stuff out. I still am, but at least I’m a little further along the road now.

But by now I’d discovered a little more about how I write—my first drafts now are long. Too long, sometimes by as much as 50%. That sounds like a waste of words, but I’ve found that I need that mass of text so I can discover the novel inside it. My second draft is like a mining expedition, carving the real book out of that initial draft.

I applied this to the Hang Wire draft—writing, rewriting, carving the book out. I ditched a lot of stuff. I changed characters. Added new ones. It still need a third and a fourth draft, but that first pass on a three-year-old manuscript told me what the book was actually about.

That process cemented the realisation of how I write: I overwrite, getting the story down from beginning to end before I forget it. That version is flabby, boring, inconsistent, in places illogical. It’s a vomit draft, no doubt. But hidden inside there is the real book. It might even be a good one.

2. WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW (SERIOUSLY!).

“Write what you know” is one of the most misunderstood pieces of writing advice. My host, Chuck, has blogged about it before. Everybody talks about it, sometimes with a sort of weary frustration. I’m pretty sure every single one of these “Five Things I Learned Writing…” will include this point as one of their number.

But that tells you one thing: it’s completely true. It doesn’t mean that you can’t write a crime novel because you are neither a detective nor a serial killer. It doesn’t mean you can’t write a space opera because you’ve never travelled to Arcturus by warp drive. But it does mean you can steep your story in real life experience and knowledge. You don’t have to add much, but in the right place, it adds a flavour to the work, something that rings true even if the reader is not consciously aware of it. As writers, we’re all looking for the Truth, apparently, so if you can throw some of your own in there, why not?

Hang Wire is an urban fantasy about ancient gods, nameless power from beyond the stars, murder, a sentient and malevolent circus, and primal evil sleeping underneath San Francisco. It’s also based on a true story.

I was in San Francisco a few years ago. It reminds me of my own hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, and I knew I had to write a story set there. After dinner one night in Chinatown, the fortune cookies came out. Everyone took turns to crack them open and read out their fortunes.

I was last. I picked the cookie up, pressed with my thumbs, and something weird happened. I must have pressed too hard because the cookie shattered like glass, fragments flying everywhere along with a lot of paper strips. Due to some manufacturing fault, I had received a duff cookie—the pastry was too crispy and thick, which made it shatter, and instead of a single strip of paper inside, the thing was filled with fortunes. I don’t remember how many there were, but they all said the same thing:

YOU ARE THE MASTER OF EVERY SITUATION.

This was my kind of fortune.

I laughed and scooped as many of the fortunes as I could, stuffing them into my wallet. Walking back to the hotel later, I thought my experience would have made a great Silver Age origin story for a Marvel comic—a superhero granted his powers from an exploding cosmic fortune cookie.

But what if he wasn’t a superhero? What if the power he is accidentally granted came from somewhere else? What if he can’t control that power, and it starts to take him over?

I had my story.

3. INSPIRATION COMES FROM THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACES (WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT).

San Francisco suffered two major earthquakes in the Twentieth Century, and in Hang Wire a third such catastrophe is about to befall the city. Tackling the second draft, I did a lot of research, and it was from reference source on the geology of the San Andreas fault that I learned about a series of spectacular comets that were observed in the Nineteenth Century. People have been superstitious about comets forever, and attribute a great many coincidental calamities to their appearance. By the 1800s, nothing much had changed, and a couple of big comets were blamed for causing floods, fires, the death of livestock, the failure of crops… and earthquakes. At the same time as I discovered this, I was trying to work out a couple of things in Hang Wire that needed to be linked, but I couldn’t figure out how.

Until I thought about the comets and, more importantly, what people thought about them. What if they were right? What if comets were not only portentous but carried something malignant and alien to the Earth? There’s a theory that comets were responsible for seeding life here… but what if a comet seeded something else?

Inspiration can some from anywhere, and it can come when you least expect it. In researching earthquakes I stumbled across an entirely different part of my plot, entirely by accident.

Read as much as you can, whether it is for research or not. You just never know what you might stumble across!

4. FOLLOW YOUR OUTLINE (EXCEPT WHEN YOU DON’T).

Because I’d written the first draft of Hang Wire so long ago, part of the rewrite was to create a brand new outline. My outlines are more a list of events than a full synopsis, because once I get started, my characters tend to do their own things and go off on tangents, so it seems an exercise in futility to create a detailed outline only for the story to deviate, sometimes substantially. Every writer is different—I know someone who carefully crafts 60-page breakdowns. Stephen King advises everyone to ditch the outline and just write, except he’s Stephen King and we’re not, so I tend to take that with a grain of salt.

During the rewrite, I followed the new outline, stopping and adjusting every so often as needed. Only… something wasn’t right. There was something missing from the book, although I wasn’t sure what exactly, only that it was tangential but also required. Confused? I was. Eventually I narrowed it down to the antagonist, one Joel Duvall. He was fun to write and when working on his scenes he kept whispering to me at the back of my mind. He had another story to tell, something broader than the what I was writing.

So I went back and wrote what was essentially a short story, how Joel first got involved with the evil at the centre of Hang Wire. Then it clicked—we needed to see his story, one spanning the whole of the Twentieth Century. That short story spawned a 20,000-word narrative interwoven with the main book as a series of interludes. Joel led the way and I didn’t need an outline. His backstory was unplanned, but was exactly what the book needed.

5. KEEP AN EYE ON THE ENDING (AND DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHANGE IT).

I finished the book. That old draft had been re-engineered into something new. I sent it to my agent. She liked it… except for the ending. Everything was tied up, the story came to a conclusion. It even followed my outline. But it didn’t feel right. It was downbeat. Very downbeat.

She was right, of course, so while addressing her notes on the rest of the text I let the problem of the ending bubble away at the back of my mind. Finally I figured it out, and wrote an ending that was literally the opposite of the original. There is still death, and loss, and change, but there is also hope and life, both missing from the original.

The ending of a book is important. It’s the last thing the reader takes away when they close the book. But not only does it have to work, it has to be the right kind of ending.

The end of Hang Wire switched from the wrong kind to the right kind, and that actually effected the whole feel of the novel – much for the better!

* * *

Pre-Order contest!

Adam is giving away a prize pack of THIRTEEN signed books by Lauren Beukes, Paul Cornell, Mur Lafferty, Emma Newman, Cherie Priest, Greg Rucka and Michael Lark, VE Schwab, Adam Sternbergh, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, Jen Williams, and oh, also, Chuck Wendig, to one lucky person who orders Hang Wire and/or The Burning Dark between now and April 8^th. The contest is open worldwide, and full details can be found here.

Hang Wire is also being launched at Forbidden Planet London on Thursday, March 6^th, 6pm, together with The Burning Dark. Details here.

* * *

Adam Christopher is a novelist, the author of Empire State, Seven Wonders, The Age Atomic, Hang Wire, and the forthcoming The Burning Dark. In 2010, as an editor, Christopher won a Sir Julius Vogel award, New Zealand’s highest science fiction honour. His debut novel, Empire State, was SciFiNow’s Book of the Year and a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2012. In 2013, he was nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel award for Best New Talent, with Empire State shortlisted for Best Novel. Born in New Zealand, he has lived in Great Britain since 2006.

Adam Christopher: Website | Twitter

Hang Wire: Amazon | B&N  | Indiebound | Add on Goodreads

J.C. Hutchins is one of those guys who I admire the hell out of for his eye-goggling work ethic and the talent he brings to bear. I also call him a friend. I also call him “Honey Snuggles Tickle-belly Nuthatch McGee,” but that’s between him and me and none of you can get in the way of what we have. Whatever. Point is, lately I’ve been making hay about authors who are going at it themselves, and you want a top-shelf high-octane example of an author doing it right every day, it’s Hutch. He’s got a new project out, a serial storytelling event: THE 33.

Trust me when I say: you wanna check it out. Here’s JC, then, to talk about This Thing We Do.

* * *

This is a crazy-making business, this writing thing. It’ll drive you goddamned nuts.

You walk this preposterous tightrope, this impossibly delicate strand hanging between the Here And Now — our real-life meatspace with its endless insistence, and its distracting jamming-the-thumb-on-the-doorbell-ding-dong-ding-dongdingdong of Twitter and Facebook, and its bills and crying babies and mortgages and flat spare tires — and a Somewhere Else, the place where your soul swims, deep-diving for the words that do the things in your mind justice.

The words always flop onto the computer screen as soggy things, never quite what you wanted, but they’re better than nothing. And it’s better than not writing, right? It’s better than ignoring what you were born to do, to herd words.

What a thankless, ill-paying profession.

It’s the best job I know.

This writing thing is crazy-making because it demands you to run with the thing inside you, that shaggy thing that never stopped playing make-believe. Hell, you’re a wordherder. You know how this goes: Sometimes it frolics, and sometimes it lumbers, but it always breaks the china. The thing is a blessed pain in the ass. It can be pretty insistent, especially when you’re not writing. You gotta feed it, you know, lest it wither.

Running with this beastie alienates you from others, too. Norms. People with different talents, folks who spend a little less time in their heads than you do in yours. Or a lot less, depending on just how far inside your noggin you are. Me, my brain’s a frickin’ IMAX 3D theater, the fancy kind like the one across town, with the plush reclining seats and the Super Gulp cup holders in the armrests. I’d never leave, were it not for dumb things like using the bathroom and feeding the cats.

This alienation — this half-step out of sync with the norms — can confound an artist. It most often breeds doubt and fear. You can never decide if what you’re writing is Shit or Complete Shit (answer: it’s better than you think, but still needs a polish), but in the bleak weeks writing your book’s second act, you’re absolutely certain you should’ve listened more closely in math class. If you’d done that, you’d be a computer programmer with a spiffy German car right now. You wouldn’t be puking your feelings onto a Word doc to make payments on a shitbox Chevy.

Crazy. It’s all kinds of crazy, man. It’s uncertain. It’s lonesome. It’s just you and the words — the fucking words, the things that aren’t alive but are, the rats in your attic, baby, the things that keep you up at night. There are the great days when they’re your ally, and not-so-great days when they don’t return your calls. And it really is a miracle, come to think, this whole writing thing. Birthing stories and characters. Making them do interesting things. And finally, eventually, sharing your big fat wordbaby with the world.

Of course, miracles are crazy-making, too.

I’ve been in the crazy-making business for longer than I haven’t. First as a newspaperman, then as a novelist, then as a transmedia writer. I’ve busted ass on articles that became the next day’s fish wrap, spent years crafting and promoting good (but quickly remaindered) novels that you’ve never heard of, and helped create award-winning, groundbreaking viral TV & film campaigns that are no longer online. I’ve done more good work than bad, and never, ever phoned it in.

Wayyyy back in 2008, a whimsical notion occurred to me. In my head, I envisioned a series of episodic short story sci-fi / supernatural adventures. Some of these adventures would be serialized and span a few episodes (kinda like a four-issue comic book arc), while others would be presented as standalone one-shots. They’d all be packaged like a TV series, see, with seasons and recurring characters and villains, and Big Personal Problems for the protagonists, and a Great Big Conspiracy fueling the multi-season narrative.

I chowed down on that idea and started riffing on it, riding that creative wave like the high it genuinely is, brain buzzing as the notebook pages filled up and up, inventing mythologies and characters and episode storylines. Prequel fiction? Plotted it. Spinoff fiction? Planned it. Dude, I even picked the music that’d be the intro anthem for the goddamned audiobook. This shit was on.

It was a crazy concept with crazy characters and crazy inspirations: a super-sized salute to the TV shows and comics of my childhood, where science and sorcery coexisted, where city-stomping lizards roamed and roared, where cars could talk, where every hero had a code name.

I pondered this creative concept for months, knowing only that I desperately wanted to write it. I didn’t have a clue what to do with it after that. It wasn’t a conventional project; I knew traditional publishing wouldn’t touch it. 2008 was too early in the indie ebook game to know with any certainty if it would fly. The idea was risky. The entrepreneur in me loathes risk. Risk is harder to write, harder to sell.

Turns out, it didn’t matter. Life is complicated. Life isn’t like the stories we write; it’s not obligated to be narratively fair. It laughs at concepts like Chekov’s Gun, flings poo at foreshadowing. And so, life threw me several hand-grenade curveballs not long after I cooked up that strange fiction idea, and I — being financially unprepared — was left with a smoking crater that had once been my checking account. Fun sci-fi stories about code-name heroes would have to wait.

And it did. And did some more. And did even more, after that. For five years, it waited. It withered.

But like I said, it’s a crazy-making business, this writing thing. It’ll drive you goddamned nuts. And that’s what this idea did. It stuck with me, like a sliver of popcorn between the teeth. It wouldn’t let me forget. It nagged, man. It was the shaggy thing, the thing that never stopping playing make-believe, rapping on the window of my childhood bedroom (the room I reckon we all still have in our hearts), pleading to come outside and play.

So a few months ago, I finally said fuck it and did just that.

Dunno if it’s risky. Dunno if I’m gonna bleed out on it. Don’t care anymore. Stories gotta get told, s’all I know.

I won’t shill hard for The 33, other than to point you to its page at my website, and to say that I’m proud of what I’ve started, and am keen to keep writing in its weird, warped world. If you dig what you see, give it a spin. Costs less than latte.

And so. Back to the crazy. The cray-cray. The rats in the attic. The preposterous tightrope between Here And Now and Somewhere Else.

Say. A tightrope. Come to think, that’s a scary place to be. Kinda dangerous, dontcha think? Being up there, so high?

I mean, what if you fell?

A part of me is absolutely convinced that while your loved ones — the ones who genuinely understand that if you’re not writing you’re not living — want you to do this writing thing, the rest of the world doesn’t. It’s a hostile place, a thing that hunts wordherders with its endless insistence, and flat spare tires, and jamming-the-thumb-on-the-doorbell Twitter and Facebook updates, and hand-grenade curveballs. It doesn’t want you to do this. It doesn’t want you to succeed at this writing thing.

It will conspire. It wants you to fall, hard.

I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to fall. It’s human to fall. And it’s okay to forsake a thing for a while — perhaps for even five years, as I did with The 33. But don’t you dare walk away from it, not for good. Don’t turn your back on the shaggy thing, and that soggy first-draft copy. Don’t you dare ignore what you were born to do: to herd words.

Stay in the crazy-making business. It’s the best job I know.

J.C. Hutchins: Website | Twitter

This is likely to be a big, rambly-ass blog-post so let’s just clear the way for some ground rules.

a) I do not hate self-publishing and I am in fact my own author-publisher on a number of releases, and will continue to be so. I am in fact one of those “hybrid authors” you keep hearing about, which means I have fins like a dolphin and claws like a badger and I can both play the violin and kill with my mind. This is not a post bashing self-publishing, but rather a post that aims for critical awareness and constructive thinking.

b) This post is going to have some naughty language. If that bothers you — which is totally fine! — you would be best-served by frittering off and seeing if Wheel of Fortune is on. That Pat Sajek never utters a dirty word because he is clean and fresh like an unused bar of Irish Spring.

c) You will need to be nice in the comments. I am comfortable with disagreement as long as it isn’t flavored with salty dickheadedness. Disrespectful commenters will be pitched into the spam oubliette where they may slap themselves wetly against the pink, quivering dungeon walls.

d) I’m serious this time when I say I won’t really be attending much to comments — I’m starting a new book and am also trying to thaw my way out of the icy Wampa bowels that comprises this shitty winter, so please excuse my lack of presence below. But do talk amongst yourselves!

Can we begin?

We can begin.

The Thesis

Both old-school publishing and self-publishing publish a whole fucking fuckbucket of books: in the United States alone you have about 300,000 new books added per year to the traditional pile, and Bowker claims the number for self-publishing is somewhat higher (~400,000 in 2012) if you count them by ISBNs, and many self-published authors do not use ISBNs, so when you add in other countries and territories, you could be looking at twice or more of that number.

The very, very long tail of digital publishing actually increases this number quite a bit because all the books released every year form a rather large pool — and with self-publishing in particular, this number is increasing at a cuckoo bananapants rate. It’s like watching coked-up paramecia have an orgy in a petri dish. It’s like that scene in any movie about a pandemic where they’re like, “Today, it’s Smallville, USA. Tomorrow, New York City. Tuesday, it’s the East Coast. By Friday, we’ve lost the world.” And the red pandemic blob grows and grows until it eats the moon.

The sheer number of releases is an issue all its own. It becomes increasingly hard to stand out merely by publishing a book in either form. It’s like trying to get a droplet of water to stand out in an entire goddamn ocean.

The issue becomes more complicated when you add in the fact that, in my opinion, a whole lotta these author-published releases are going to be the equivalent of smearing poopy handprints on the windows of your Plexiglas enclosure. This is par for the course, maybe, because one of the features of self-publishing is that the door is open to anyone. Everyone. Always. No bouncers at this nightclub door, which is fine, but that also means you get folks with no shirt and no shoes. You’ll get folks dressed to the nines in sharkskin suits and you’ll also get wild-eyed dudes who are eating goulash out of rubber boots and who are quietly masturbating in the corner. You let anybody swim in the pool and, well, anybody can swim in the pool.

The Goals Of This Post

In short, the goal of this post are:

a) To dispel the notion that the “slush pile on display” is entirely harmless

b) To create a general awareness of quality

c) To offer solutions to help countermand the erupting shit volcano

d) To in the end help readers find awesome books and

e) To help authors find readers. Oh! And

f) To get angry emails from self-published authors HA HA HA I kid please don’t send me any more of those. I already have enough to wallpaper my home both inside and out.

A Note On The Nature Of Quality

A common refrain here will be: “But traditional publishing releases stinkers, too.”

And that is entirely accurate.

Someone will mention Snooki.

But here’s the deal. The works that are generated by publishers big and small are works that in general are vetted. That’s the whole “gatekeeper” thing. Someone is there at the gate making sure the books that release are of a level of quality before they are allowed up in the First Class cabin.

Further, let’s pretend not to care what the big publishers do.

Let’s focus on what you can do as an author-publisher.

An addendum refrain is, well, who am I to say what stories are good or not?

Except here the issue is not purely a matter of taste. An author on Facebook the other day noted, quite correctly, that writing is a craft and as a craft it can be evaluated fairly easily. This isn’t about whether a story is to your liking, but rather, does the author know the basic rules of writing a story? Rules can be broken, of course, but they must be broken with some skill — breaking the rules out of ignorance creates, you know, a fucking mess. A writer not knowing the difference between a possessive and a plural is not some avant-garde hipster trick. It’s a basic lack of craft awareness. At that point you’re not a marksman doing tricks; you’re a toddler with a handgun.

Yes, you’ll find books that have typos and fucked-up formatting and other errors inside traditional books, too — particularly in e-books because the big publishers were slow to figure out they need to actually design e-books as their own entities, not just as copies of the print books. But this is less true these days (I said they were slow to figure it out, not that they never figured it out).

Here, in fact, is an exercise:

Choose ten random author-published releases.

Choose ten random traditionally-published releases.

You don’t even have to purchase them. Just look at the available samples through, say, Amazon.

(Random book finder: bookbookgoose.)

In my experience, you will find considerably more errors in author-published releases than in those published by publishers small and large. As with this entire post: your mileage may vary.

The Shit Show That Is Book Discovery

This calls for a side journey, if you’ll come along.

Let’s talk about book discovery.

Let’s say you’re a reader.

Finding new books to read has gotten both very hard and very easy depending on your situation. Word-of-mouth remains the primary vector for viral book transmission, where we share our favorite books with one another through memetic delivery. Word-of-mouth relies on a circle-of-trust, and that circle of trust has gotten a whole fuck-of-a-lot bigger since the advent of social media. Used to be you’d talk to people at home, work, school — maybe a circle of ten people.

Now you can have circles of hundreds. Thousands, even.

In this sense, if you surround yourself online with other book lovers (meaning people who read and talk books, not people who “love” books with, say, their naked bodies — HEY NO JUDGMENT HERE), you will be subject to a fairly steady frequency of story recommendations.

A few downsides, here:

a) Sometimes that steady frequency can become more noise than signal.

b) If you are not a social person — in person or online — but still like to read, then you’re shit outta luck on this front and you’ll still have to rely on Ye Olden Wayes to find new books to read. (We should not assume everyone is savvy with social media or particularly compelled by it.)

c) Social media word-of-mouth still requires some measure of discovery to precede it, though. Word-of-mouth does not spontaneously generate (BUT IN OUR SPAM-BOT FUTURE WE CAN DREAM). Someone still needs to discover and love your book in order to talk about it.

You still have to use various methods to source new books — to “discover” them — as a reader.

This includes, though is not limited to: bookstores, libraries, other meatspace booksellers (Target, Wal-Mart, etc.), online book distributors/sellers (Amazon, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords), magazines, TV, YouTube (ex: Sword and Laser), blogs, websites, podcasts, professional review outlets (Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, etc), online forums (AbsoluteWrite, kboards, etc.), bestseller lists, award nominations and wins, and so forth.

Probably sources I’m missing there. Feel free to mention in comments.

Now, at present, the traditionally-published author has some access to all of these. This access is more theoretical than guaranteed — nobody’s going to talk about my books on TV, though some of my books have seen mentions in magazines (I think SciFiNow just did a short piece on the three Miriam Black books, for example). But in general, the bulk of traditionally-published authors have some kind of (imperfect) access to all these channels of discovery.

Self-published work in general does not have the same level of access, in my experience. The door that is open all the way to traditional releases is open only a crack to author-published works. You won’t generally be in bookstores or on library shelves. Few magazines will review you. Professional review sources require you to pay them to source the review.

This ultimately leaves online sources as the primary channels for discovery.

It means: social media in some form. Or it means browsing online booksellers.

Given that word-of-mouth still requires some genesis in discovery, let’s talk about one’s experience when going to browse an online bookseller to discover new work.

*inchoate screaming*

Oh, jeez, sorry! I tried to browse Amazon for new books and found myself plunging into a nightmare of noise and garbage. Amazon — the primary vector for online book sales — is a fuuuuhuuuhuuuuckin’ mess when it comes to browsing books. It didn’t used to be. I rememeber a time where browsing Amazon felt like a lazy, pantsless version of browsing the shelves at B&N. I could pick a genre or an upcoming releases list and check it out. Now, it’s less like wandering the aisles at a bookstore and more like wandering a labyrinth made of old, frozen diapers. Sure, I’m trying to find David Bowie and his Magical Yam Bag, but all I find instead is a drunken minotaur who just wants to make out.

It’s not pretty.

(I am not claiming this is self-publishing’s fault, by the way. This is on Amazon.)

So, you’re an author with a new book via whatever publishing path. Cool!

See that graphic?

When your book comes out, it gets thrust into a rather large pool — that same pool I was talking about at the fore of this post. It is one of millions of other books. It is a data point. Just a squiggly sperm launched from the creative scrotum. That is represented in my hastily-created graphic which depicts not a scrotum, but the crusty underhanging dirt-clod beneath the city.

The city in the image is where you want to be. Above ground, not below it.

The city represents channels of discovery. The higher you go in those channels, the more rarified the air. At street level you’re one of the mob, but at least you’re not subterranean — but as you climb the buildings you warrant greater attention. You join fewer and fewer authors as you get mentions at blogs and in reviews, in magazines and perhaps ultimately, on bestseller lists.

Of course, discovery feeds on discovery — the more readers find you, the more they’re likely to talk about finding you (particularly if your book is awesome or at least scratches some curious cultural itch). Attention in this sense is multiplicative.

Books below the surface or at street-level don’t actually affect the books that go higher-up, of course — but they can affect one another because at that level they are in some fashion competing (not for sales, necessarily, but for attention). A clumsy analog for this (because all analogs are ultimately false) might be the divide of the rich and the poor. The poor don’t really affect the rich all that much on a day-to-day level. But the poor affect one another in ways both good and bad (competition for resources, competition for jobs, cultural clashes, community building, community disruption, etc).

To sum up this point:

All books go into the big undiscovered pile at first.

All books need some manner of discovery to, duhhh, be discovered.

Traditionally-published books have access to more channels of discovery.

Self-published books have access to fewer channels.

So: what does this have to do with the quality level of author-published books?

The Deluge

As an author-publisher, I wish I had access to more channels of discovery than just what’s online. I wish it was easy to get into bookstores and libraries. I wish it was easy to get reviews and critiques. I wish that those same channels were open as completely for my self-published books as they are for those of my books published with publishers.

The reason they are not is, in part, because of the belching shit volcano.

I’ve noted this elsewhere but feel that it needs repeating:

I open the blog on Thursdays to self-promotion by various storytellers. I was once open to self-published authors sharing this space, but when I open myself to that, it’s like trying to get a sip of water from a water fountain and getting a fire hose instead. A fire hose that shoots sewage.

For every one author with a big publisher I get ten who have self-published.

Which is, in theory, fine.

But these books. These books. And these authors, man. I get so many unprofessional emails by folks who don’t read the already-meager submission guidelines. Some of them are pushy and presumptive. I’ve had authors send me their book and their answers and tell me when to post it — not ask, not submit, but just straight up assume I’m doing it, and then when I tell them it’s not a good fit, they send me back cranky emails.

So, what I get is: a bunch of ugly books with quality issues pushed forward by unprofessional authors. Now, that’s by no means all of what I get from the self-published, but it’s at least half of what I get from them. And here someone is going to say, “Well, I’m sure you get the same from the authors with big publishers,” and here is where I say: not once. Not ever.

Given that I do not have a lot of time and I provide this service for free, this means I have to close my door to self-published authors. Because when I open the door to let the good ones in, all the bad ones come in, too.

Hell, even when I don’t open my inbox to self-published authors, I get ’em anyway.

I’m not the only one. This is a phenomenon I hear about from reviewers.

Here’s a comment from last week, by Amanda Valentine:

“I review middle grade books at reads4tweens.com and I’ve struggled with how to handle self-pub books. On one hand, I want to support indie authors, and I have discovered some really great books I would never have discovered otherwise. Also, self-pub and small press are more likely to provide me with review copies of the books, so that helps.

However, even if I’m not paying for the books, I’ve grown wary of accepting self published books. When a book is poorly written and essentially unedited, I pay for it with my time and opportunity cost. I want to do right by an author who has taken the time to write a book and contact me about reviewing it, but I can’t in good conscience bring attention to a book that isn’t ready for public consumption. And I do feel disrespected. You think you’re doing me a favor by adding to the to-read pile that threatens to crush me under its weight? Not so much. I’m doing you a favor by reading your book and writing a review. Please have enough respect for me to send me a book that’s gone through multipe revisions, careful proofreading, and at least plenty of beta readers if you can’t afford a professional editor.

I know a lot of reviewers have simply stopped accepting self pub books, and I can understand that. I’m not there yet, although I won’t *buy* self pub books unless they come highly recommended by someone I trust (no, somehow the seven glowing 5 star “BEST THING I EVER READ” reviews you got your friends, your writing group, and your mom to post don’t do much to convince me).

The stuff I’ve read with typos, huge plot holes, major inconsistencies, cliched characters and situations is painful. And I get a good bit of it. I’m not a slush editor. No one pays me to slog through your attempt at writing looking for unpolished gems. I expect to get a book that’s ready for a reading audience. One that the parents who come to my site can recommend to their kids.

The books that make me saddest are the ones with real potential. They need more work, but there’s a story worth working on there. But if you put your rough drafts out there and charge people for them or expect reviewers to spend their valuable reading time on them, you’re *losing* audience. I’m not reviewing your second book if your first was awful. I’m not buying your third and maybe much better attempt if I couldn’t read the first because it was such a mess.

The slog wears down readers and reviewers alike. We value the time we have to read, and we feel cheated if you don’t value our time enough to give us something worth reading. It’s disrespectful to your audience, your reviewers, and your work.”

You’re still saying, “So what?”

Self-published authors don’t have access to all the same channels of discovery afforded to other authors because of the quality level — and that’s a problematic quality level that exists both in the books and in the authors’s demonstration of marketing and basic professional conduct.

You want in bookstores? Libraries? You want another axis of review or critique?

This is (in part) why that’s hard.

You might be saying, “Fine, we’ll stick with Amazon and our other extant sources.”

Okay, sure. Except as noted, Amazon’s discoverability factor is already in the toilet. And with more books published every year across all of publishing, regardless of the quality of those books, it’s going to get harder and harder to Get Noticed — harder to become signal amongst all that noise.

This ties too into some of the other problems the constantly erupting shit volcano presents:

Lump Sum

You’d like to think that self-published books don’t get lumped together — certainly traditionally-published books aren’t, right? One bad self-published book doesn’t reflect on the others.

I’d argue that’s, at least in some cases, inaccurate.

First: just as you can generalize about traditional publishing, you can about self-publishing, too.

Second: You can often — not always! — spot a self-published book by its cover.

Third: You can sometimes spot a self-published book by its listed publisher on Amazon.

Fourth: Price is a signifier. One of the watermarks of self-published work is that the price tends to be less than that of those put out by larger publishers — so, indie books tend to be $0.99 to $4.99. To tell an admittedly anecdotal story, I have a family member who discovered that Amazon had this wealth of cheaper e-books in genres she liked to read and so she dove in and bought several and tried to read them and found that, to the number, they were all of significantly inferior quality to what publishers offered. And her first realization wasn’t that they were self-published but rather that they were all inexpensive, and so she swore off buying those inexpensive books. (Later, she realized why they were inexpensive when someone explained self-publishing to her.) She no longer buys self-published books in general because she no longer buys books priced accordingly. Cheap books mean cheap books. So, if one of your primary advantages as an author-publisher is price but that price level becomes a signifier of poor quality — what then?

What happens when you’ve poisoned the price point, which is a powerful motivator for people to buy those books in the first place? (If your answer is that cheaper books are sometimes cheaper in quality, then I’d suggest you have the wrong mindset. Readers do not want to hear that.)

Results Both Present And Potential

The quality problem has a handful of results both real and potential.

Real results include:

Channels of discovery remain closed.

Channels of distribution remain hard to access.

Readers sometimes stop buying indie books.

It gets harder to get noticed because of a glut of books.

Pay-to-play opportunities (i.e. costs $425 to get Kirkus review).

Potential future results include:

Authors avoid trying to self-publish because of the association.

Sites friendly to self-publishers begin charging fees. (Actually, this happened with a site called Awesome Indies. You can get priority treatment through their epic submissions pile by paying $125 — and for those who bristle at gatekeepers, their site has a list of content criteria you have to meet to get a review.)

Amazon implements actual standards for accepting self-published work. Meaning, Amazon becomes another (less rigorous) “gatekeeper,” likely with some kind of algorithms or programming in place. (Think this can’t happen? Amazon wants to be Netflix more than it wants to be YouTube. It doesn’t want to be eBay or CraigsList. I’ve spoken to folks inside Amazon who are… aware of the quality problem and are a little worried that over time Amazon could be positioned as a bargain basement content provider. If Amazon ever feels that their already thin margin of profits are threatened because of this perception, you can be sure they’ll bring the axe down quick. And Amazon has used that axe more than folks would like to admit — they have removed books, including books of so-called monster porn, from their ranks. To quote the KDP guidelines: “Content published through Kindle Direct Publishing is held to the high standards customers have come to expect from Amazon.”)

Alternative: Amazon segregates self-published work. Either again algorithmically or just by giving it its own “site” — just as they do with, say, digital video, or how they set aside items sold by third-parties through Amazon. Other sites could follow: Goodreads, B&N, etc.

Another alternative: Amazon changes the fee structure. Maybe they cut the royalties (they will be upping the price of Prime, reportedly). Maybe they charge a fee to self-publishers (“listing fee”).

All speculation, but speculation I’ve seen elsewhere. It’s not like I dropped peyote in the desert and am just making up wild, harebrained ideas. I mean, I did drop peyote in the desert, but that was like, yesterday. I’m fine now, I swear. Soon as I clear these screaming robot bees out of my skull, we’re good.

*drinks pesticide*

What The Hell Can We Do About It?

The two questions you see regarding concerns over the overall quality level of self-published work is: a) does it even matter and b) what the hell could I do about it, anyway?

The above is my answer to the first question (I believe that it does matter).

As to the second question —

Well, listen. I’m not trying to make this some grand call to action, some rah-rah standard-bearer trumpety kind of thing, but I do believe that as an author-publisher you have ways to countermand the vibe of low quality. Some thoughts in that direction (and I’m aware that these are not all entirely original and that some of these exist in some form or another already):

Put On Your Oxygen Mask Before Helping Others

Publishing isn’t an art — publishing is a business. A creative business, a weird business, but a business just the same, and so it behooves you to treat this like a business and to put out the best work you can. The overall property values of a neighborhood go up when you tend to your own yard — the more author-publishers who commit to doing their best and not just regurgitating warm story-barf into every conceivable nook and cranny of the Internet are going to contribute to an overall improvement. If you want the stink out of the air, spray a little perfume, you know? In short: we can all do better, so do better.

And once in a while, it behooves us to mention to a neighbor: “Hey, mow your yard, wouldja?”

Quality of Marketing

Part of the spewing shit volcano isn’t just in the quality of the books released but also in the quality of the efforts to support those books. In short? Sometimes author-publishers can get a little spammy. You may not feel comfortable shouting down examples of books you think don’t meet your standards; that’s fine. But personally, when you see self-publishers actively acting like spam-bots given flesh? They maybe need a good talking to. Or at least report their asses for the spammy spam-flavored spamgasm that they are.

Best Practices

I said this in a comment elsewhere but I’ll note it again here — when I worked at the library, I worked for a department whose task was, in part, to increase outreach to under-served communities. Elderly, disabled, etc. And as kind of a hub in the library system we produced a document that listed the Best Practices for that kind of outreach. These were not laws or enforceable guidelines. They were a collection from various libraries nationwide that said, “We have found and agreed that these criteria have been effective, and here’s some evidence.” That’s it. It wasn’t a gun to anybody’s head, it was just a collective document where lots of folks said, “XYZ might work if you apply it.”

(Actually, the list of criteria from Awesome Indies is a good start, maybe.)

Hell, just a simple checklist of, “Are you really ready to click publish?” could be helpful.

Signifiers of Quality

Possible, too, to invoke various signifiers of quality.

For instance: editor listed alongside author. Editors are the secret rockstars of the publishing world — so why can’t author-publishers out them as the badasses that they are? Editors may, over time, get a reputation for stamping quality work — and further, that editor could become an axis for future discovery.

Also — someone who uses and applies the entirely theoretical Best Practices above might earn some kind of note in the description of the books (though how this is administered and by whom becomes a stickier wicket).

Collectives / Union

Consider Andrea Phillips’ blog post: “Publishing on a Spectrum,” where she speaks about collective teams of author-publishers producing content together. That would then serve as its own kind of signifier.

A More Critical Look

I advocated this last week but it bears repeating again: self-publishing is at a stable place. It’s no longer clawing for market share — so, it’s time to take the critical laser often focused on traditional publishing and turn it inward. It is understandable to feel one’s hackles raise — defensiveness is a quality many writers share — but trust me when I say, a constructively-critical look at How Things Are Done can do more to help everyone produce quality content. Stop circling the wagons. Put your chin up and chest out and run the gauntlet.

Support Folks Doing It Right

Not only does this mean buying and championing author-published books you think are exemplary, but also checking out the works of folks like Joanna Penn or David Gaughran — or have you checked out the Self-Publishing Podcast (Sean Platt, David Wright, Johnny Truant)? All folks who are offering up good advice and practical wisdom (and are in fact helping to contribute to that idea of “best practices” I talked about above) in addition to producing high-end material all their own.

Sum Up

Some of you might be oiling your pitchforks.

You’re already forming the words to say that what I’m trying to do is create more gatekeepers.

That’s okay, I understand that — though I’d ask that you recognize I’m not actually trying to destroy self-publishing through a post like this. This isn’t about installing new systemic gatekeepers but rather to surround ourselves with gatekeepers to keep us in check. That means editors and designers. That means beta readers and fellow authors. That might mean publishing collectives or unions, or documents like best practices, or even forums like kboards or AbsoluteWrite.

As authors we want the absolute freedom to publish what we want. We have that, and nobody wants to see that go away. But readers — readers want the freedom to buy books that meet a professional standard, stories offered that contain passion and power but that are also presented by someone who treats publishing as a business decision and not an amateurish, artistic one. It pays to surround ourselves with those who will check us and our work and who will help ensure that what reaches the readers is the very best we can produce.

You may disagree that the “slush pile on display” hurts anyone — and certainly this is a YMMV IMHO situation. It doesn’t bother you, then hey, don’t worry about it. But for my mileage, this is has the vibe of climate change — just because it’s not affecting you personally doesn’t mean it’s not affecting somebody. (And further, it doesn’t mean you’ll be insulated from it forever.)

I know it affects me. It affects me as an author, a reader, and a blogger.

Right now, the shit volcano still spews over reviewers and readers. You don’t have to look hard here or in threads on Goodreads to find readers who feel burned by indie releases. We can do better. We can suggest doing better without getting out our knives. We can help to elevate other practitioners to a better, smarter place instead of drowning them like a bag of kittens.

It’s easy to believe that it’s impossible to collectively up the game. It’s tempting to think that self-publishing isn’t even a community or a culture. But the very existence of self-publishing as the robust option it has become is one that comes out of a culture of people. And the books that exist now and do well now are sometimes the product of that culture and of the collective passions of people who freely share information. The improvements I’m talking about are already happening — but, me, I like to think we can always turn up the volume on the good stuff.

Lot of noise, and sometimes it’s hard to find signal.

So the question I pose to you is:

How do we limit the noise?

And how do we increase the signal?

Yesterday, to my surprise, Blackbirds went on sale at B&N and Amazon for $1.99. (That price remains at B&N, by the way, and you might be able to get Amazon to price-match.)

At Amazon, the book was a Kindle Daily Deal.

By the end of the day, the book pushed to a rank of #34 across Kindle books. And it reached #1 in its respective categories (fantasy for kindle, dark fantasy for kindle, dark fantasy across all books). It’s actually still at #1 across those categories, if the page tells it true.

Folks have asked me a couple questions, and I thought I’d answer.

First, on how you get to be a daily deal — first, you slaughter a black unicorn and a white bull on an altar made from druidstone (which forms over time from calcified druid bone), and then you —

Wait, no, that’s not right.

In this case, the publisher — Angry Robot — solicited Amazon.

Though I am told that Amazon sometimes picks books to be Kindle Deals, too. And in this I envision an insane Amazon Robot in its control booth somewhere choosing books based on the sparking, snapping guts of some rock-smashed robot seagull.

Second question: what does this mean in terms of sales?

Well, we have some sales numbers back.

And it looks like the book sold around 3,000 copies on Amazon.

Which is, of course, pretty amazing. Hard not to be happy that 3,000 new readers now have the book. More, actually, now, because while the sale is over the book remains well-ranked and still in the lists (which I believe is one of the primary ways folks search/browse Amazon these days). Plus, looks to be some bump to the two sequels, Mockingbird and The Cormorant.

Anywho! Thanks to Mike and Lee and the other fine folks at Angry Robot. Thanks to Amazon for letting this dark little cantankerous bird of a book a recharge almost two years after the book first released. And thanks most of all to you darling deviants and marvelous miscreants for checking the book out and spreading the word. YOU’RE THE BEST AROUND.

(Oh! You will also find books by other Angry Robot authors for sale, now, too — $1.99 books by Wes Chu, Ramez Naam, Madeline Ashby, Anne Lyle, and more. Go get ’em.)

Figure after last week’s pair of apparently controversial self-publishing posts, this is high-time to go to you, the army of audiovisual hallucinations I call my “audience,” to recommend some self-published books you have read recently.

Use the comments below to talk about some self-published books that you enjoyed very much — and, as an extra mark of criteria, books you think meets a professional standard equal to or beyond that of what you’d get from a Big-Ass Publisher.

Tell us what the book is, who it’s by, why you dig it.

And if you’re so inclined, a link to purchase.

GO FORTH AND SHARE THE AWESOME.