Yesterday, I wrote a post, blah blah blah — self-publishing is not the minor leagues. Basically: we can all do better, be your own gatekeeper, stop celebrating half-ass efforts, etc.

Shorter still: a rising tide lifts all boats.

The resultant response continued a bit across a few forums and blogs — which is good! I like this conversation, and I understand that what I said is controversial to some and I recognize that pushback is inevitable and important. Some of that conversation carried on at kboards, where — maybe unsurprisingly — it got a little hostile (anybody wonders why I find kboards not very welcoming, well, there you go).

I want to use that conversation to zero in on something, though, to maybe shine a light on maybe a core attitude that represents the culture I’m talking about.

Here’s a kboards comment from author Emily Cantore (excerpted):

In the end, more linkbait from Chuck Wendig, as per usual. His arguments aren’t supported by evidence. He builds strawmen and then argues against them (such as these supposed self-publishers who openly say they don’t care about the reader. Where are they Chuck? Are they actual authors or just halfwit idiots out there who you are picking to support your straw?).

He says this:

“Don’t celebrate mediocrity. Don’t encourage half-assing this thing for a couple of bucks.”

And my answer is: I celebrate mediocrity. I celebrate half-assing things. I celebrate someone writing a book that objectively is terrible and going through the steps to make a terrible cover and a terrible blurb and publishing it and then they keep on going and write something a little better, with a better cover and a better blurb and then they keep going some more.

I celebrate the massive tsunami of creativity that has been unleashed and unlike Chuck, I recognize there are entrants at every level. There are terrible books being put out there but those authors will iterate and get better and one day will be making a lot of money.

No one will argue that you shouldn’t try as hard as possible but it is also not true that you need a professionally designed cover and x, y, z that someone else says you need that happen to cost more money than you have.

Self-publishing tore down many many barriers (we’re down to: are literate, have a computer that can make a word document and an image and have internet access and a bank account) and here we have Chuck trying to put up more barriers. It must be professional! It must be better than traditional publishing has to offer.

No. Do your best and iterate. Go again and do your best. Soon your best will be better than their best.

Ah, but again I don’t know why I’ve spent so much effort refuting Chuck’s unsupported posts. As I’ve said before, it’s mostly low-effort link-bait and gulp, we all swallow it.

Okay, so. Casting aside for a moment I don’t think we’re going to agree on the definition of “link-bait” and “straw-man,” let’s talk about, drum roll please, the reader.

The reader is held up as a gatekeeper here, right? The idea being that all barriers have been removed from the author-audience relationship. All those kept gates of old-school publishing have been blown open and now only one portcullis remains: the one manned by the reader.

Now, let’s cue up a commercial. From darkness come the sounds of a sad Sarah McLachlan song. And soon we’re treated to a slideshow of images — images of readers staring in utter bewilderment at their WUNDERBAR KINDLEMASCHINES. Some of them are crying. Some of them look bemused, others horrified. One looks into his empty wallet and pouts. Another has broken open her e-reader and is guzzling all the e-ink just to wipe her memory of what she just read.

At the end: who will think of the poor reader?

See, I’m with Emily in that I celebrate the tide of creativity. I think this is great. The Internet has given us all a voice, and we’re all part of a beautifully discordant chorus. It’s powerful, wonderful, weird stuff where we all kind of blur together as author and audience. I love it. I roll around in it like a dog in stink, covering myself with it.

But that, to me, is writing.

That, to me, is storytelling.

And for that we have a wealth of places to put our writing. We have blogs. We have Tumblr and Twitter and FB and Circlesquare and Crowdzone and SexyFistingFinder-dot-com and whatever other social media outlets will pop up. We have places like Wattpad and Book Country. We still have the remnants of Livejournal, where you can post your fiction and then get digitally shanked by some sentient Russian spam-bot who steals your credit card and your dreams.

Point is, we can write, write, write.

We can iterate our writing. In public! We can find an audience there.

You have permission to suck.

For free.

Free, there, is key.

Because the moment you go somewhere — Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, wherever — and you start charging money, that changes the equation. By a strict reading, that’s no longer Hobbytown, Jake. You’ve entered pro grade territory. You’re asking readers to take a chance on your work for one buck, three bucks, five bucks, etc. You’re not hosting a party. You’re running a lemonade stand.

So stop pissing in the lemonade and asking people to give you cash to drink it.

When an author says — I celebrate mediocrity. I celebrate half-assing things. I celebrate someone writing a book that objectively is terrible and going through the steps to make a terrible cover and a terrible blurb and publishing it and then they keep on going and write something a little better, with a better cover and a better blurb and then they keep going some more.

That’s the culture I’m talking about.

It’s a culture that scares me a little. It’s a culture that cares more about itself and its personal freedom to publish than it does about the result of that publishing. It’s a culture of me-me-me, a culture of wagon-circling, a culture that refuses to look at itself and take responsibility for what it’s putting out. It feels exploitative. It feels careless.

And it’s is not an uncommon attitude amongst author-publishers, and what it tells me is, you care about yourself as a writer but not your readers.

It tells me that you’re comfortable asking readers to pay you so that you can get better.

It tells me you have no interest in being your own gatekeeper — and, very plainly spoken, it literally says you’re not going to give this your best effort and investment.

Readers are a resource. A living, breathing resource. They’re how authors get to do what they wanna do, and the more we pile on the audience’s shoulders, the more garbage we rain on their heads, the more turned off they’re going to be. You know how many readers will tell you, “I tried a self-published book and now I won’t give them a shot?” This is true in traditional publishing, too. A reader reads a bad book by a publisher — not bad as in, I didn’t like it, but bad as in, Doesn’t meet basic standards, they’re potentially going to stop reading books by that publisher.

Asking readers to be your gatekeepers is putting a lot of responsibility on the people who are paying you. Stop saying you’re going to let the readers figure it out when it comes to sorting through what’s crap and what’s not. You need to figure that out. That’s on you.

Eventually, readers will grow tired of having to be your gatekeepers.

And they’ll ask someone else to do it for them.

I’m not advocating new gatekeepers or new barriers.

I’m advocating you as your own gatekeeper. A critic of your own work. Be an example for others. Help lift the other boats. Help other authors be great, not mediocre.

This is true in all forms of publishing.

Said it before, will say it again:

Writing is a craft, storytelling is an art, publishing is a business.

If you’re charging money for your work, you owe it to the reader to give them your best. Not your most mediocre. Not your half-assiest. Is this really that controversial?

[UPDATE: I don’t intend to be hovering around here too much today — too much to do, I’m afraid — but I will ask that folks keep it civil in the comments, or I’ll punt you into the Spam Oubliette. While I don’t agree with Emily’s post in its entirety, her points deserve fair consideration and commentary.]

(This plays a little with the baseball metaphors dropped by Scalzi last week.)

Let’s all agree that self-publishing is a viable path.

It’s a real choice for authors.

You can, if that’s the type of person you are, be the publisher of your own work.

You are author-publisher. Behold your mighty yawp! Freeze-frame heel-kick high-five!

It is, overall, an equal choice to traditional publishing.

Let’s go ahead and just agree that. Even if you don’t agree — for now, nod and smile.

That means it’s time to stop treating self-publishing like it’s the fucking minor leagues.

See, here’s the thing. Though acting as author-publisher is a viable choice, it’s one that retains a stigma — lessened, these days, but still a stigma carried by other writers, by those in publishing, by bloggers, and in some cases by readers. The air, suffused with an eggy stink.

You want to get rid of the stigma once and for all? Clear the room of any bad smell?

Good.

Then it’s time to take a long look at the culture surrounding self-publishing. We’ve moved past the time where we need to champion the cause, okay? We’ve seen enough success in that space and have plenty of positive examples it’s time to stop acting as cheerleaders.

And it’s time to start acting as critics.

The attitude that pervades self-publishing is that it’s a good place to test your craft, to hone your work. We are reminded constantly that the cream floats to the top, that all the crappy self-publishing efforts have no effect on anything or anybody ever despite evidence to the contrary. The culture forgives and sometimes congratulates even the most meager of efforts because of how courageous someone is to take the plunge to publish their own work. The culture says, “Just click publish!” The culture criticizes the faults of traditional-publishing, but excuses (or celebrates) its own. And yet, sometime in the same breath, self-publishing gets painted as a path to traditional publishing, not as a path separate and scenic all its own.

The culture is full of contradictions.

“Traditional publishing screws you and you won’t get paid anything!” And then: “It’s okay to make $100 off your self-publishing because you just bought yourself dinner, now you’re living the high-life.” Well, which is it?

“Traditional publishing is just corporate control! Down with the Big Six! Er, Big Five! Big Four? Whatever!” But then: “Let’s hug and squeeze Amazon, a giant monolithic corporate entity kaiju who has changed the rules on us so many times our heads are whipping around wildly upon our necks! Amazon is the Big One! Yay lack of competition! Huzzah, all our eggs in a single basket! Woooooo corporations!” Wait, do we like corporate control or not?

“The readers are our gatekeepers, that’s who we care about.” Except: “Publish your first effort — it’s okay that it has errors, as long as people buy it! Who cares about readers as long as I’m satisfying myself?” Do we like readers, or do we wanna punish them with sub-par efforts?

“Self-publishing is a revolution! Traditional publishing is risk averse!” And then: you publish the safest, softest low-ball efforts that suggests it’s not a revolution but, rather, more of the same.

“Traditional publishing does it wrong!” And then: you do it worse. What the crap, people?

Get your head straight. Point north. Care about this thing you’re doing. You don’t want to be inferior to the books on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. This isn’t a garage sale. You want to be better than the books on the shelves at bookstores. You say those books have errors? Ugly cover or bad books or lack of risk? So go and do different! Do better, not worse.

Let me get ahead of this — someone somewhere, here in the comments or on another site, is going to accuse me of bashing self-publishing and its authors.

I am not.

Self-publishing is an amazing option. You can now write a novel however it is that the novel demands to be written. That book that lives in your heart? You can now crack open your breastbone, rip the book out and hold the throbbing crimson creature in front of readers and say, “This is the story I wanted to tell and nobody was able to stop me.” You can not only write it your way, but edit it, design it, market it — again, all your way. Nobody but readers can say “boo” about it. You’ll have no publisher telling you the material is too risky. You’ll have no publisher trying to put a cover on your book that you don’t feel represents the story you told. You won’t feel like the publisher has forgotten the book when it comes time to market it. If anybody fucks it up, it’s you.

Self-publishing is also great for traditionally-published authors. Acting as your own author-publisher is a way to put out material staggered with your other releases. It’s also great to have as an option for if the time comes when publishers don’t want your other work. They start giving you the we love it but can’t sell it story, all you have to say is, “Well, if you won’t publish it, I will.”

I will continue to exercise my own self-publishing options this year with a few releases.

I don’t just like the option. I fucking love the option. It has changed the game for authors. Anytime creative people have a new door carved into the giant wall in front of us — the wall separating our work from our audience — I’m going to cheer and gibber and wail and probably swallow a half-dozen gin-drinks and maybe rub an aromatic lotion into my beard and then summon dark entities from beyond and couple with them.

But that love can still come with a criticism of the culture. Just as my love of traditional publishing can be tempered by its own criticism, too.

In fact: I criticize because I care. Because I want to see the option done right. If I didn’t give a shit, I’d just point and laugh from the sidelines and snarkily snark with other smug, self-superior traditionally-published authors. (And just as that superiority isn’t attractive from them, it’s not attractive from the side of author-publishers, either, by the way.) The authors who often get held up as paragons of the form? They’re doing it right. They’re treating it like it’s a professional endeavor, not some also-ran half-ass effort. They’re acting like it’s the real deal — a trip to the Majors, not time spent in some Dirt League.

Self-publishing isn’t a lifestyle choice.

It isn’t a hobby.

It’s not a panacea. It’s not pox on your home.

It is neither revolution nor religion.

(Oh, and it damn sure isn’t a place to improve your craft. That’s called “writing.” Writing is how you improve your craft — by doing a whole lot of it, by reading, by having your work read by friends and family and by other writers and by editors. Publishing is not where you improve your craft. You don’t learn to pilot an airplane by taking a job with U.S. Airways. A job as an executive chef is not analogous to a cooking class. You wouldn’t expect that of other careers, so why are we okay with it when it comes to author-publishers?)

Self-publishing is a financial and creative decision.

Self-publishing has no gatekeepers. That is a feature, not a bug.

So you’re going to have to be your own gatekeepers.

You are your own quality control. You are your own best critic.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again: it’s time to put down the Pom-Poms and time to pick up a magnifying glass — or, for some, a mirror. Don’t celebrate mediocrity. Don’t encourage half-assing this thing for a couple of bucks. This is scrutiny time. This is time to not to say, “Here, you’re doing this wrong,” but “Here, let me help you do this better.” This is time for conversation and constructive critique, not empty applause and pedestal-building.

The culture will need to start asking tougher questions. If we’re going to admit that self-publishing is an equal choice, then it’s time to step up and act like it. It’s time to stop acting like the little brother trailing behind big sister. Time to be practical. And professional.

Defeat naysayers with quality and effort and awesomeness so blinding they cannot see past you.

To reiterate:

Fewer cheerleaders. More critics.

Self-publishing isn’t the minor leagues.

You’re in the majors, now. Which means:

It’s not time get hit with a pitch and expect a high-five for it just because you stepped to the plate.

It’s time to play hard or get off the field.

I reported earlier that I have officially gone Full Coffee Snob, and I am now blissfully in love with my Chemex and my Tonx Coffee subscription.

But — if I am a burgeoning cellist or museum curator in the coffee department…

Well, in the tea department I’m basically a garbageman.

I have no technique when it comes to tea. No care for quality. I take a bag. Not long ago I microwaved the water and the bag together — now I’m actually at least using my swan neck kettle to pour the hot water over it. Then: milk. And I leave the tea bag in there the whole time I drink it.

My teabags are probably filled with pesticide-shellacked pencil shavings. It’s probably a 1:1 ratio of actual tea and somebody’s pubes. The gods only know what the hell I’m actually drinking.

I’m told many of these things are anathema to the true tea drinker, so much so that some of you right now are probably suffering Scanners-like head-rupturing effects. So, I’m talking to you tea-sipping snobs out there: what’s your tea ritual like? I’m looking for anything and everything I would require to join the Ancient Order of The Pristine Tea Leaf — where do you get your tea? How do you brew it? Is there a temperature thing? A technique?

School me, tea nerds. School me.

Hey, look, a flask!

Which you can now buy.

I am also told that today, January 24th, Zazzle is running a special on these flasks, and if you use the code: FLASKSLAUNCH, you will get yourself 25% off the price.

(After today, I dunno if that code will work, but Zazzle usually has some kind of general code running if you do a Google search for Zazzle Codes or Zazzle Coupons.)

At present, the only flask is a NSFW version.

I figure, if you’re the person who carries around a flask, it’s hidden, not sitting on your desk like a coffee mug, so it’s less important to have a safe-for-work version…

… but if I have that wrong, do let me know.

Also noodling doing a poster of the Write Till Your Fingers Bleed image. Plus maybe something with the Big 350 Writing Plan, and something offering bits of the Writer’s Prayer.

More to come, eventually. (And other merch available now.)

MY MERCANTILE EMPIRE EXPANDS.

Boshuuuuuuda.

Last week’s challenge: The Who, The Where, The Uh-Oh

Pick a fairy tale.

Go on, do it.

I’ll wait.

If you don’t know your fairy tales — Google is your friend, of course.

Hell, here’s a pretty good list of the Grimm’s tales.

I want you to pick one — I’ll let you do that — and rewrite it.

Except, wait now, hold on.

I want you to also roll to choose a random subgenre. You will then apply said random subgenre to the fairy tale you have picked for maximum awesome. Get it? Got it? Rad.

You have 1000 words.

You have one week — due Friday, January 31st, noon, EST.

Write it at your online space. Link back here.

Do tell us which fairy tale you’re using by making it the title of your story.

Subgenre

(roll a d20 or go to a random number generator)

1. Cyberpunk
2. Dystopian
3. Erotica
4. Spy Thriller
5. Southern Gothic
6. Satire
7. Urban Fantasy
8. Space Horror
9. Space Opera
10. Young Adult Contemporary
11. “Grimdark” Fantasy
12. Psychological Horror
13. Hard Sci-Fi
14. Slasher Film
15. Ecothriller
16. Sword & Sorcery
17. Lovecraftian
18. Zombie Apocalypse
19. Superhero
20. Detective

Avast, ye scum-swaddlin’ sea-dogs! Listen up! I’m geeked by creators who are doing it their own way — a storyteller like Andrea Phillips does it her way, every time. She worked on the Game of Thrones transmedia campaign and is also the author behind A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. She also makes HELLA WEIRD fudge. Spicy fudge. Curry fudge. Tasty fudge. She’s here to talk about her episodic narrative, The Daring Adventures of Lucy Smokeheart!

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m Andrea Phillips! I’m a game designer and (of course) a writer. For my day job, I get to write stuff like The Walk with Six to Start and Naomi Alderman and make professional Game of Thrones puzzles and fanfic (uh, sort of.)

I also have a book out called A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling that’s all about how to use multiple media platforms and interaction to tell great stories.

But that’s not why we’re here today! We’re here to talk about The Daring Adventures of Lucy Smokeheart. (Whose first part you can totally sample for free, right now.)

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Carnivorous mermaids! Socialist lizard-people! Vast quantities of chocolate! Lucy Smokeheart is a serial pirate adventure and treasure hunt.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Early in 2013, I was long on time and short on cash, so I started dreaming up a fun project to fill my hours and maybe line my pockets. Maybe something I could do on Kickstarter. Story of the month club? Hard sell. Maybe if it was a unified theme? Maybe… a serial story of some kind? One chapter a month?

But if I was going to use Kickstarter, it had to be something with a fast hook – something the citizens of the internet agree is unequivocally awesome. So I sat down and wrote a list titled Things That Are Awesome. That list included video games, puzzles, ninjas, anything over-the-top, cats and dogs, love stories, HP Lovecraft… and of course pirates.

As soon as I thought of pirates, Lucy and her world sprang into my head fully-formed. It all came together pretty fast after that. I collected $7700 on Kickstarter, launched the ebook-only series in April, and we’ve been sailing onward ever since.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

This story is deeply infused with the essence of everything important to me. I’m a loud-mouthed activist, so I wanted to try to subvert some of the entrenched colonialism, racism, and sexism in pirate tropes.

This idealism sounds boring and joyless, but it’s behind some of my most favorite elements in the whole story! The super-racist classic voodoo witch doctor is transformed into a Swedish sorcerer, instead. (I figured Sweden was the nation the least commonly associated with dark magic.) My lizard-people, instead of being sub-human savages, are enlightened socialists very much concerned with socioeconomic justice.

And of course coming from me, people do expect something-something-transmedia. I needed a way for readers to spend more time with Lucy’s world. So each monthly episode includes a puzzle (fair warning: many of them are extremely difficult). If you enter the correct solution at the Lucy website, you get a piece of a captain’s log kept by Lucy’s brother.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE DARING ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN LUCY SMOKEHEART?

Keeping the tone even has been extraordinarily difficult. It’s meant to be a light, fun romp. But at the same time I want to create tension and conflict. I want to provoke strong feelings. It’s really hard to be funny and moving at the same time, it turns out.

It’s also really hard to write light and funny when you’re running past a deadline – and Lucy episodes are meant to be roughly monthly, but in practice they tend to be about five to six weeks apart. You don’t want to deliver a bad episode under the gun, but it’s hard to sound playful when you’re filled with guilt and self-loathing. Go figure.

The result is a mosaic where sometimes it’s light, sometimes it’s darker; sometimes it’s over-the-top cartoon funny, and sometimes it’s more serious and realistic. Whether this is pleasant variety or uneven and unprofessional… I’ll leave that decision to the readers.

There’s a similar problem with pacing for a serial – you have to tell a whole story in each episode but also carry forward an overarching plot every time. It’s a tricksy business, writing a serial! Or just writing.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING LUCY SMOKEHEART?

I’ve learned that it’s totally OK not to be too precious about word choice and elegant phrasing. Consider me a convert to the Dan Brown school of workmanlike prose.

Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some finely crafted prose. But since this is an exercise in gonzo storytelling and not Haute Literature, I made peace early with using simple language. I’m not casting about for ‘the corners of her mouth twitched up a hair’s breadth’ when ‘she smiled’ does the trick and I can move on with the story.

I’ve also learned that in the self-publishing arena, inertia is a big deal, and an inconsistent publishing schedule is a terrible strategy. I’m a big believer in transparency, so this whole time I’ve been sharing my budget and sales numbers, which by and large aren’t particularly impressive (well, excluding the Kickstarter backers, anyway!) The one month I missed putting out an episode, September, was also the month I had the fewest sales, by far.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT LUCY SMOKEHEART?

The joy of it! If I was going to commit to working on one thing for a whole year, I wanted it to be something fun to write (and read, one hopes).

I’m really exhausted from how dark-gritty-realistic has become our dominant narrative aesthetic. I didn’t want to spend a year in that mental space. I wanted to write something harking back to the days of Xena Warrior Princess, instead. Something that isn’t trying to be the pirate equivalent of Breaking Bad or The Wire. There’s a value in levity, too.

The result is that I can get away with writing the most implausible or ridiculous things I can think of, simply because I think they’re fun to put into the story. Giant snowball fights, the Royal German Marinological Society, monkey spiders (not spider monkeys!)

The luxury of not trying to do something serious, not trying to be important or say something meaningful… I can’t tell you how good that feels. I mean it feels good, is what I’m saying. But not in an inappropriate way.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I wish I’d been just a tiny bit less gonzo when I started. Right now, the process of edits, revising, formatting, etc. all happens within the space of three days, tops. It’s the pace I’m accustomed to; when you do a lot of live interactive work, sometimes the time between finishing a draft and seeing it go live is counted in minutes.

But I always feel under the gun to stick to my delivery schedule. If I’d been wiser and more patient, I’d have held off on releasing the first episode before I had another couple completed, so I’d have a little bit of wiggle room built in.

Deadlines, man. Deadlines.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

This is SO HARD! Here’s a bit from the second episode, in which Lucy is in a diving bell:

Lucy had made this journey before, but familiarity didn’t do much against the feeling that the small amount of air in the bell was pressing into her ears and lungs. With every exhale, the air felt warmer and wetter, like she had somehow been transported to the inside of her own mouth. She began to regret eating sardines for breakfast.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Bunches and bunches! I’m working on a spec for a game that takes place in the Lucy Smokeheart world, and with luck that’ll be out in mid to late 2014.

I have a book about The Wiki Where Your Edits Come True that I really want to get in front of readers, plus there’s a YA project about luck that I have impossibly grand ambitions for. So many projects!

I’ve parted ways with my agent this year, so I’m on the lookout for new representation. I’d prefer to work with a traditional publisher for some of my upcoming projects, but if that isn’t progressing to my liking by summertime, I’m all about exploring other options.

I, uh, I better get cracking on all that, shouldn’t I? …Gotta go. Thanks for letting me stop by!

Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart: The Lucy Store | Subscribe