Coupla weeks back, Delilah S. Dawson swung by on her mighty unicorn to lay her scrolls of wisdom at our door — she left us with 25 Steps To Being A Traditionally Published Author, and so here I thought I’d respond with the self-published analog.

I have no unicorn, however.

I do have a highly caffeinated leprechaun who rides my skull like a hat and who clubs me about the head and neck with his knobby shillelagh. That is not a euphemism.

Just ignore him.

Let us begin.

1. Notice This List Has More Than Two Steps

If you thought the two steps of this process were STEP ONE: WRITE A BOOK, STEP TWO: CLICK “PUBLISH” ON THAT SUMBITCH, you need some deep brain rearranging. If you’re going to do this, you need to take this seriously, and not just upload every barf-bag with your name on it to the Internet at large. Some of these steps are practical. Some of them are about your mindset. These steps are not universal nor are they meant to constitute an exhaustive list. But this process should never include just two little steps.

2. Adjust Your Mindset, Part I: Lose The Term

Being self-published in this day and age is no longer the albatross around your neck it regrettably was — once, if you told people you were self-published, they’d look at you like you were a smelly old jobless hobo just come off a dusty boxcar with soupcan shoes and a hat made from a coyote skull. Though sometimes even still you get that look, as if the person listening is thinking, oh, you’re one of THOSE. Here’s a radical notion, then: get shut of the term “self-published.” Forget “indie.” Forget “DIY.” Just be an author when you’re being an author. Just be a publisher when you’re being a publisher. (Or, go with a term I quite like, “author-publisher.”) People ask you what you do, you write books. People ask who you’re published with, give them the name of your one-man publishing company. Or say, “I did that shit myself,” and if they look at you funny, pee on their shoes and smash gum in their hair. This isn’t because of shame over the term. It’s because the term is increasingly meaningless. Anybody who asks is probably inside publishing somehow anyway, because most readers just plain don’t care who publishes someone, whether it’s you, a Random Penguin, or some magic coyote hobo.

3. Adjust Your Mindset, Part II: You’re The Publisher, Now

You’re not just an author. You’re not just a “self”-publisher. You’re a publisher from bottom to top, from feet to forehead, from asshole to eyebrows. Being a publisher means being a business. A small business of one. I’m not saying to go get an MBA, but you need to start thinking at least a little bit what it means to go beyond being a writer to become a micro-publisher. Start wrapping your head around marketing and advertising, distribution, budgets, taxes, and so forth. A traditional publisher ideally brings things to the table to help the author’s book succeed; how are you going to help your own book succeed? You’re the publisher. The responsibility is yours. But so is the fancy chair. You did go buy a fancy chair, right? No? Rookie.

4. Adjust Your Mindset, Part III: Bitterness Does Not Become You

If part of your publishing plan includes, “Go find a forum on the Internet to bitch about traditional publishing,” you’ve already fucked up. And you’ve already outed yourself as an amateur hour bush league asshole who isn’t publishing his own work because it’s the right choice but is doing it instead because you’re pissy about perceived oppression (blah blah rejection, blah blah gatekeepers). Be a fountain, not a drain. Other authors have made a different choice and that does not make them wrong. It does not make them better or worse. Their choices do not invalidate yours. This is not a contest over who got it right or whose bitterness is the strongest. This is about doing what’s right for you and your story.

5. Write Your Story However You Write Stories, You Crazy Diamond

Writing a book is easy. Writing a good book is hard. It’s like shitting out a typewriter — either whole or one mechanical part at a time. Giving this epic adventure a single item on this list of twenty-five seems like short shrift, but every week I talk about writing and storytelling so hopefully you have a rather oceanic-sized back catalog of posts in which to snorkel. I will say this: for now, it’s important to think a lot more about the story than it is about the publishing. The one will feed into the other, and the choices you make now will matter for publishing later, but at this point, it’s about the book. The best goddamn book you can write beats out any bullshit brand or pompous platform any day of the week. So: write like your heart is on fire. (Oh, and don’t forget the most important part: finish your shit. An abandoned story at page one or page 356 has the same utility as a story you never wrote in the first place.)

6. Consider Taking Risks

Here, perhaps, is some bad business advice and some good creative advice. Self-publishing right now looks a lot like traditional publishing. We see the same types of books, genres, stories, characters. It feels often as if self-publishing is just trailing after traditional, repurposing the waste or mirroring the successes. One of the limitations of traditional is that it just plain can’t do some things. Traditional is a big rock. A big rock can’t move. A big rock cannot dance. But that means you are afforded a chance to put riskier material into the world. Unusual genre mixes. Formats that trad won’t touch. Why play it safe? Whatever you may think of Hugh Howey, the guy really said fuck it and did what no traditional publisher would: he wrote a serious of sci-fi novellas that felt fresh and original. That’s a risk for traditional, but it’s a viable option for you. Write big or go home. And if you do go home, take a sad bubble bath alone while listening to old John Tesh albums, you safe, milquetoasty, wilting little daffodil.

7. Titular

HEE HEE HEE TITULAR sorry I know I possess the sense of humor of an already-immature 12-year-old boy. SHUT UP. Ahem. You need a title. This title needs to not be completely horrible. In traditional publishing, if you title your book with a crapgasmic title, someone in marketing will probably change it. (Or, dirty secret, one of the buyers at Barnes & Noble might change it if they decide they don’t like it.) And here’s where again you need to think like a publisher as well as a writer — the title ideally satisfies your creative and artistic needs, but also works as a great title that attracts those people that will keep you fed, clothed, and liquored: AKA readers.

8. Boomcake

As Delilah points out, your most important job upon finishing your work is to fire the cupcake cannons. Writing a book, even the first draft, is a miraculous act extracted from the seas and from the stars and from all the mouths of all the gods  and no matter what your publishing path is you should be so proud that your glow can be seen from space. Celebrate in whatever way you find most appropriate. Cake. Pie. Churros. Vodka. Roller coaster. New pony. Consensual sex with a darling freak whose freakishness is equal to yours. Hunt, kill and eat one of your critics after performing the chimpanzee battle dance. Point is: TREAT. YO. SELF.

9. Now Purify It In Fire

Walk away as if you’re in a movie and the thing behind you is exploding but you just don’t care. You don’t flinch. You don’t look back. You just walk away. Relax, you’re going to come back. You need that exodus. You need exile, egress, exuent, and other nifty ‘e’ words. You need enough time away from your manuscript so that, when you return, you can imagine that some other asshole wrote it. It gives you a clarifying critical eye and you’ll need that because then it’s time to play a game: read it and rewrite till it’s right. Or at least right enough to let another human look at it. Eschew perfection. Perfection is a meaningless and impossible ideal. It’s a bullseye the size of a fly’s eye. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

10. Hire Your Own Personal Editorial Han Solo

Walk into the dusty tavern at the far end of the hive of scum and villainy that is The Internet, and hire yourself a quick-shooting fast-flying snark-tongued editorial mercenary. You need an editor. Repeat: you need an editor. If you feel yourself twisting up and saying, I donot need an editer, I can edit this myself thnak you verry much, I’ll casually note your typos and misspellings and then jab you hard in your trachea — like, some fucked up Jet Li shit where suddenly you’re gasping and can’t get a breath and also you poop your pants. You need an editor. Self-publishing is a terrible name for what this is because you really shouldn’t be doing it alone. Hire an editor. Hire an editor. (Oh, and if they want to be credited, you better damn sure credit them in the book. Along with anybody else who helped birth this book-baby into the world.)

11. To Print Or Not To Print?

“PRINT IS DEAD,” people cry even as the print market equals the e-book market and the e-book market’s growth flattens. Print is not dead, it’s merely not always necessary — it’s not necessary in the same way that hardcover releases are not necessary to complement a mass market paperback release. Digital has offered a new way to get books into hands by not getting rid of the middleman so much as chopping him off at the knees and watching him flop around on the floor like a drunken harbor seal. Time to decide: is print important to you? Will your book not feel like a proper book unless you have a physical copy to sell? Do you think it’s a financial value-add? If you’re going to print, you should snag an ISBN number (and some e-book distributors want you to have them, too). Hint: buy ISBNs in bulk, not one-at-a-time, and be sure to own your ISBNs (which means, don’t take free ones offered by any online service). Also: where will you print the book? Lulu is good for casual print-on-demand. Createspace is better for an expanded, persistent run. Don’t hesitate to check with local printers. Do not try to print copies on that dot matrix you’ve been keeping since 1987, the one that smells like cigarettes and burned plastic.

12. Kickstart(er) Your Heart

Putting out a proper book means sinking cash into it. One option to help mitigate costs is crowdfunding — Kickstarter being the most popular, though not necessarily the best, option. Crowdfunding is simple in theory, occasionally complicated to execute: you put together a song and dance video. (Mine featured juggling cats, a capybara show, inverted twerking, and a great deal of plaintive weeping.) You set a goal. You ideally use the campaign as a pre-order service for pledging contributors along with a series of escalating pledge rewards (e-book, print, autographed copy, Tuckerization, prostate massage, lunar excursion with the author). Be aware: crowdfunding is for authors who already have an audience waiting. The crowd will not crowdsurf you from the stage but rather to it. No crowd to start means you’ll never see the stage at the end.

13. Thou Shalt Not Smear A Booger-Ugly Book Cover On My Screen

Sit down. Let’s talk for a minute. The hazy nebula of self-published books contains a disturbing margin of shit-nasty covers. Some of them are mediocrity given form: minor league graphic design skills pushed beyond their rational limits. Others are downright offensive to the eyes: the visual equivalent of the author misting me in the eyes with hot cat urine. If you’re going to do your own book cover, have a few independent sources verify your capability. Otherwise: hire out. Look for artists and designers able to produce book covers that look as good as — hell, better than — the books you see on bookstore shelves. Also important: the book cover has to look good small. See those book covers on Amazon? That big.

14. The Vagaries Of Book Design

Sometimes, it really is as easy as taking your Word *.doc and drop-kicking it into the processing e-book sausage machine provided by Amazon or B&N. (Quick tip: when B&N creates your ePub, you get a screen just before finalizing where you can download the ePub direct to your computer. Do this. Now you have the ePub file that B&N buyers will get. Ta-da.) This doesn’t always work as super-awesome as you’d like, especially if your book requires a bunch of fidgety formatting fiddlybits like a table of contents or specific headers and page breaks or flashing ASCII text set to a glitchy dubstep beat. I’ve used Mobipocket Creator to create Amazon MOBI files pretty easily, and a program like Scrivener will output direct to ePub. All this gets even more complicated when you’re tasked with creating a physical design for a print copy. As always, do not hesitate to pay someone to do a professional job if you’re only capable of muddled inelegance.

15. How Much Is Your Book Worth?

The proper price of e-books is a much-debated topic — and by “much-debated,” I mean “so hotly contested that you might get shanked by a broken coffee cup just for talking about it.” The $0.99 price is probably a hair too cheap for novels, but plays well for shorter works (novellas, novelettes, serial stories, short stories). At $2.99 you get people to take a risk on you if you’re a new(er) author. More established authors can probably rock $4.99 to $9.99. Any more than that and you might get dirty looks and/or kidney shankings. My only caveat here is: free is not a price. Free is a promotional effort in which you offer a sample taste of your literary heroin in order to secure the addictive loyalty of new readers. Free is temporary. Do not price free in the long-term. If your book is always free, I assume that’s its value: worth zero.

16. Where Will You Sell?

You’ve a lot of options for where to sell your books. Amazon is the stompy 800-lb. mecha-gorilla, and you’d be a fool not to jump on his back and ride him around. I knew B&N’s Nook was in trouble long before the news did, because my sales there hovered around 10% or so of total sales. Between 15-20% of my sales are direct through this very website, and for those of you truly concerned about what percentage of each sale you keep, direct makes the most sense because it allows you to keep the lion’s share. Smashwords is so ugly and utilitarian it makes Myspace 1.0 look like THE FUTURE and I’ve found it to be unpleasant in terms of uploading books (further, I sold less than 1% there when I used that site). You’ve also got Kobobooks and iBooks to consider. All this is YMMV, of course: find where your audience buys their books and sell there. (Hint: this might also mean making friends with your local library or bookstore.)

17. Adjust Your Mindset, Part IV: The Wonder & Worry Of Amazon

I like Amazon for what it offers to those who want to publish their own work. It’s a great service, if occasionally flawed, that works in favor of the author-publisher. What’s curious is that the self-publishing mindset is sometimes, “Fuck those Big Six jerkweasels, those EVIL TENTACLED CORPORATE ENTITIES will screw you fast as they can look at you,” and yet, curiously, so many self-publishers also cheerlead Amazon — which, by the way, is a giant corporate entity. Amazon has shown a willingness to change the rules without warning. And this is where I offer: you want a diverse publishing environment that includes the counterbalance of the Big Six publishers pushing back on Amazon as well as other options for getting digital books into the hands of digital book readers. Because if “traditional publishing” falls to pieces and if we have no more options other than the Kindle on which to read our books, Amazon will have no impetus to keep author-publishers happy at the current “royalty” rates of 70%. Diversity creates competition. Competition is good. Support competition.

18. Yeehaw, Punch That Button To Go Into Publishing Hyperspace, Motherfucker!

Click ‘publish.’ Do a pants-off dance-off. Freeze-frame high-five yourself. You’re a publisher!

19. Shudder, Towel Off, And Pull Up Your Pants

Settle down, you slippery sweat-frothed eel. Being a publisher is not the same thing as being a good publisher. You’re in the middle of the hill, not the top. This is when a whole new spate of work begins. You’re in for a long haul, here — but that’s a good thing. Traditional publishing often relies on the short shock of a release day supernova to get word out. A book drops from the sky. Lands on shelves. Has a flurry of promotion and then, sometimes, you know, it’s onto the next one with the author left behind. Good publishers — including author-publishers — realize that this is a long con, not a short game. You don’t have to sell the lion’s share in that first week. You sell a little here, a little there, and then you build on that every week forward.

20. A Diverse And Not Irritating Marketing Approach

Target readers. They’re your gatekeeper now. Don’t build an audience: earn your audience. Find where they are and talk to them — not above them as if on some bullshit platform but among them because you are them. (The best writers are also readers, after all.) Get a website. Let that be your central space. Use social media to talk to people, not at people. Engage with readers and with other authors: doesn’t matter if they’re traditionally published or self-published or whether they write comic books or blog posts or whatfuckingever, you all have shit to talk about, so talk. Your job is to figure out how to be the shiny pearl in a pool full of poop because, trust me, a lot of what else is out there is a steaming heap of ordure. Cream floats in a cup of coffee but this is a pile of shit and it’s easy to get buried underneath it. Stand out. Be the best version of yourself. Try lots of things. Don’t be a jerk.

21. Adjust Your Mindset, Part V: You Are A Human, Not A Sentient Spam-Bot

Bears mentioning, because I’ve blocked a lot of self-published authors for this kind of behavior: you’re not a sentient spam-bot. Quit with the auto-DMs. Don’t sign people up for your bulk emails. Don’t use social media to forcibly invite folks to some dubious online event based around your book. Your marketing efforts should be beautiful music that draws me nearer, not a hammer that clubs me where I stand.

22. Ask For Reviews

Reviews are helpful. Book bloggers are great mouthpieces for interesting work. Ask them for reviews. Engage with them as a human and an author. Excite them about your book. This is where free is valuable: give out free copies to reviewers. Let them read it and be compelled by your cover, captivated by your description, and crushed by the might of your prose.

23. Be Very Careful About Scammy Fuckfaces And Cultish Zealots

Being an author-publisher tends to violate one of those old cardinal rules about writing where the money flows to the writer, not away from the writer. You will have to put out some of your own chits and ducats to make this thing work. Just the same, be very wary: lots of scammy scummy fuckfaces out there who want to separate you from your cash and provide you with services that you really could’ve done yourself while simultaneously locking you into contracts that force you to give up various rights and licenses and toes and first-born children. Also, while we’re putting up red flags, watch out for any of those cult-of-personality types who swear they have the One True Way to self-publish. They don’t. What they have is a small but shiny collection of anecdotal information — “artisanal data” — that supports their claims and ignores evidence to the contrary. Everybody in this gig finds their own way up the mountain. Try new things. Solicit data and opinions. Eschew cultish zealotry.

24. Stick And Move, Duck And Feint

You will need versatility. You are not the clunky slug-ass oil tanker that is a Big Six Publisher. You are the little guy — the zippy coke-fueled wave-cutting speedboat that can make sharp corners and course correct in the wink of a sphincter. Book not selling? Change your cover. Your price point. Your book description. Your marketing tactics. Do a new dance.

25. Do It All Over Again

Write more — keep spilling your guts and your heart and your brains on the page. Edit your story to a gleaming stiletto point. Publish that motherfucker like a professional. Market it like a human. Write, edit, publish, market. Keep doing it. The more you do this, the more you have a chance of connecting with the readers who will support you and your storytelling career. Throw more pebbles: ripples into other ripples. Keep doing it. Stay positive. Stay awesome.

You’re in control, now.

* * *

You know the drill: Random number generator or d20. Roll it. Grab a setting from the list below and go forth and write yourself around 1000 words of fiction set in that location.

Due in one week, by September the 6th, noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

The list, then, is:

1. A Starbucks during the Apocalypse
2. The gates of Heaven
3. A slaughterhouse
4. A library on an alien world
5. Satan’s palace, Pandaemonium
6. Inside a giant creature
7. On a pirate beach
8. In a penal colony built by elvish astronauts
9. Route 66 during a tornado
10. On a crashing plane
11. Inside the virtual reality landscape of a robot’s mind
12. The NYC subways
13. Ancient Sumer
14. A monster brothel
15. A shopping mall in Arizona
16. In a police department during an epic blizzard
17. In the base of the Moon Nazis
18. In a serial killer’s nightmare
19. A distant island far from home
20. Lost in New Jersey

Choose. Write. Rock it.

I am a fan of James’ fiction reviews, so when given the chance to give him a place to talk about his new Sherlock Holmes novel, the answer was an easy, “Oh hell yeah.”

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

I the hell am James Lovegrove, author of more than 45 books, father of two sons, husband of one wife, owner of a cat and a dog. I am in my late forties and have been a professional writer since I left university. I live on the south coast of England with a view of the sea from my study window, which I never stare out at dreamily when I should be working, honest. I review fiction regularly for the Financial Times and I am a complete, out-of-the-closet comics nut, contributing consistently to the bimonthly magazine Comic Heroes. I’m Capricorn, stand six foot two in my socks, weigh don’t-know-how-many pounds but probably more than I should weigh, and have been known to be cantankerous.

Give Us The 140-Character Pitch: Where Does This Story Come From?

It’s Sherlock Holmes meets steampunk Iron Man analogue. With added French kickboxing.

How Is This A Story Only You Could’ve Written?

No one else would be crazy enough to. A mash-up of a classic detective fiction character with a steampunk superhero? I am uniquely positioned to be the fellow who came up with that idea. Mainly because I am into comics (see above) and I have been a Holmes nut ever since my father read most of the stories and novels to me when I was a wee lad.

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing Sherlock Holmes – The Stuff of Nightmares?

Making sure the plot worked. I’m something of a novice to the detective genre and there are various rules and stipulations you just have to abide by, e.g. clues cannot fall into the hero’s lap, he must find them for himself. It was tricky getting the story absolutely right so that it worked as both mystery and rollicking action-packed thriller, and I owe a great deal to my editor Cath Trechman, who shepherded me through the whole process and offered brilliant and cunning solutions to any plot holes I inadvertently dug.

What Did You Learn Writing Sherlock Holmes – The Stuff of Nightmares?

Make sure your mystery plot is completely, thoroughly sorted out beforehand. I’m an instinctive plotter. I rough out a synopsis for each novel, but by the time I’m halfway through actually writing it I’ve almost always strayed some distance from the original storyline and am flying by the proverbial seat of my pants. That’s fun, and it keeps things fresh, but with a detective tale there has to be a consistent backbone to build the novel around. I learned that lesson on the job, and I’m pretty proud of what I achieved with the novel and the new skills I picked up in the process.

What Do You Love About Sherlock Holmes – The Stuff of Nightmares?

It kicks butt. It moves along at a fast lick. It’s got twists and turns and loop-the-loops. But it also succeeds as a Sherlock Holmes novel and is firmly canon, in my mind. I went to great pains to make sure it fitted into the established timeline of Holmes adventures, and I used a glancing reference from one of the stories as the niche into which to slot it. I also think I’ve captured Watson’s (and Conan Doyle’s) literary voice pretty well, not aping it slavishly but adapting it to dovetail with my own style and vice versa.

What Don’t You Like About It?

That it had to finish. I had a blast writing it. The first draft took me seven weeks, the rewrites (with edits) a further week. I haven’t turned out a novel that quickly since my debut, The Hope, back in 1988. I was on fire with this one.

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

(Sherlock visits Mycroft at the Diogenes Club)

Holmes’s brother awaited us there, and the pair fell to talking immediately, without preamble or greeting, as was their wont. I never failed to be amazed by the difference between them – the corpulent and well-connected Mycroft, the wiry and antisocial Sherlock. It seemed almost inconceivable that two such dissimilar creatures could have sprung from the same set of loins. The sole feature this study in contrasts shared was a prodigious, voracious intelligence.

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

I’m three quarters of the way through my sixth Pantheon novel, Age Of Shiva, which tackles the Hindu gods. After that, it’s another Holmes, Gods Of War, which is, I guarantee you, the first Sherlock Holmes godpunk novel ever.

James Lovegrove: Website

Sherlock Holmes – The Stuff of Nightmares: Amazon / B&N

Today, to build off of yesterday’s paean to authorial fear, Andrea Phillips (author of the above pictured Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling and also of the new serial pirate story, The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart) stops by to unpack that fear a little more and to talk about the specific flavors of fear that find us in our worst moments — and, also, just what the hell we can do about it.

Writers! Today I’d like to talk to you about one of the deep, dark secrets that unite the society of writers as one. I know this is Wendig’s house, but surprise! that dark secret isn’t bourbon, blood rituals, or sticky, crumb-infested keyboards. It’s the fact that we’re all RIDDLED WITH FEAR.

Now I’m not talking about the more serious kind of anxiety where your heart pounds so hard and loud it feels like a hobo is using your bed as a trampoline when you try to sleep at night. That’s maybe best fixed by talking to a kindly tweed-garbed professional with a lightning-fast Rx pad. I dunno, I’m not a doctor. (Though I’ve had my dance with that kind of anxiety, and it is incredible how well-managed it is if I just ditch caffeine and get some regular exercise. …YMMV.)

For now let’s stick to the more ordinary and commonplace fear that doesn’t keep you from living… it just keeps you from writing.

Like home-made ice cream, these anxieties come in many, many delectable and word-stopping flavors. As many as you can imagine! And we’re all writers, so our imaginations can cough up some really impressive and persuasive things to be afraid of. …Go team?

For right now let’s chuck ’em into a few quick categories. Though this is by no means an exhaustive list, my friends.

FEAR ABOUT (LACK OF) TALENT

The great idea I have is too ambitious, I can’t execute on it.

I’m just not good enough.

This thing I am writing sucks, it will never be better, and when I am done writing it everyone will hate me for having produced such a steaming pile of rhino dung.

This is one of the most common, dare I say garden-variety fears a writer must face. The yawning lack of self-worth, the hopelessness, the certainty that any success you acquire is by chance and certainly can’t last.

This is fundamentally how writing is, ducklings.

Writing is an uncomfortable act. You’re making yourself vulnerable — exposing the softest, squishiest bits of your psyche and putting them out there in public where people will know what is in your deepest heart of hearts, and just might stomp on it with extreme prejudice.

Your good ol’ reptile brain perceives this as a threat to your personal safety. No sense hating the reptilian bits of your brain, though. Its job is to minimize risk, and it does it to keep you as fat and happy as it can. So it comes up with tons of fantastic reasons for you to not actually take any risks at all.

But being a creator is fundamentally about acknowledging that risk and then saying “fuck it” and heading into that mofo heart-first. It doesn’t matter if you (or your craft, or your project) are good enough if you’re not writing. The only way to become good enough is to write more words.

FEAR ABOUT FEEDBACK

They’re just being nice to me because they don’t want to hurt my feelings.

I can’t even get my friends to read my stuff so I must be really terrible.

Oh no! Someone said something terrible about my work! It is 100% accurate and I should swear a blood oath to never handle language again in my life.

This fear is often first encountered in the proto-stages of your career when you’re workshopping or having beta readers go through a manuscript. But even after publication, these same fears pop up again and again. In impeccable circular logic, any bad feedback is completely true; good feedback is just people trying to get on your good side even though the work sucks; and no feedback means you’re so bone-grindingly bad nobody can even bear to break the news to you.

This is crazypants.

You will save yourself so much mental energy and so much sanity just by accepting what people say about your work at face value. Sure, your parents may tell you they loved your story no matter what, and maybe even your close friends… but you probably shouldn’t be seeking feedback only from people who love you in the first place. Just sayin’.

And bad reviews… well, you can’t write something that will be all things to all people. Some are going to hate what you have on offer. This is OK, it takes all types. But once you get over the first flush of rage or panic over a bad review or a harsh crit, sometimes you’ll realize it’s exactly what you needed to hear, or at least a fair warning to the kinds of people who were never going to be fans of your work in the first place.

And again: If your work really is in fact that bad… the only way to get better and do better is to write more words.

FEAR ABOUT PUBLICATION

I will die in poverty at this rate.

I don’t know how to promote so I’m doomed.

I don’t know the secret handshake or which way the pentagram should be facing or how to pronounce “fthagn” so I’ll never be published/I won’t sell.

These are fears about stuff that happens after you’re done writing. Secret handshake notwithstanding, it is actually true that you might not earn a living as a writer, and in this day and age doing a ton of promotion is a mighty effective tool to furthering your career. (You can still have a viable career without it, it’s just… a lot harder.)

This, o luscious rabbits, is why you should come into a writing career with clear eyes and managed expectations. But you know what? This stuff shouldn’t affect your writing one way or the other.

In many cases writers worry about this stuff before even completing a manuscript and starting on the query treadmill. These fears keep you from writing, or from finishing, or keep you writing slowly, all because as long as you haven’t actually failed yet you haven’t lost your beautiful golden daydream where you’re an instant #1 bestseller. Having a dream crushed by reality is hard, yo.

Wouldn’t you rather make an honest go of it and actually find out? Maybe the thing you’re working on really won’t publish, but so what? Don’t borrow trouble; you won’t know unless you try. The only path to succeed is to write more words.

FEAR ABOUT BEING JUDGED

People will laugh at me for writing this kind of thing.

People will finally know how screwed up I am inside if I write this.

The last thing I did was so super-spectacular and well received that I have set an impossibly high bar. I will forever be unfavorably compared to my own rad self.

What we have here are two run-of-the-mill starter fears and one for the newly hatched writer to look forward to one day. But really these are two sides of the same neurotic coin. All of them involve what other people think of your work, and by association what they think about you as a human being.

This is another fear with an atom of truth behind it, alas. Remember how I said that writing is uncomfortable, and makes you vulnerable? Yeah, sure, there’s a chance your great-uncle will never look you in the eye again once he reads that steamy scene where your characters make hot love with three quarts of pickled herring and a set of fishing lures.

But this is a fear that leads you into pulling your punches. You start to back off the intensity of your writing, the truth of it. You’re so afraid to get hurt that you clam up and hide so nobody ever gets the chance.

This makes your writing suck. The absolute best work you have in you is always going to be the stuff that’s closest to your heart, the stuff that’s absolutely the hardest to let another human being read. It’s risky to show people those deep and true parts of yourself, but life is risk. Look that fear in the eye, spit it in the face, and then write more effing words.

Here’s a guest post by author Tom Pollock, who wrote the fantastic City’s Son (and who was kind enough to blurb Under the Empyrean Sky). Here Tom talks about the fear all authors experience, and it’s a short but powerful horse-kick of a read. He nails it.

The truth about the fear is: it never gets any easier.

It’s March 2013 – I feel like I have a herd of specially miniaturized buffalo stampeding through my lower bowel and I’m sweating enough that if this writing gig doesn’t work out I could probably get a job as a water feature at Buckingham Palace. My finger’s hovering uncertainly over the return key on my laptop, pointlessly so, because I’ve already hit it, and even though I want to, I know there’s no way I can take the email I’ve just sent back.

I’ve sent in the last round of edits on The Glass Republic, the sequel to The City’s Son,  which just enough people read and liked to mean that there’s a readership to piss off and disappoint if I’ve fucked this up. The book’s off to the printer’s tomorrow. That’s it. No more changes. It is now, officially TOO LATE.  In my head, I can hear the typeset falling with the ominous thud of a coffin lid. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this situation with a book already out, and yet the sensation is eerily familiar. In fact this feels almost exactly like it did back in…

August 2012 – I’m sitting at my computer, furiously hitting refresh on Twitter as The City’s Son is about to break like a glorious, urban fantastical wave over the literary world. Anyone who has tried to talk to me for the past week has received a spew of hyperactive and incomprehensible mumbling in response, and I appear to have wholly lost the ability to hold objects in my hands.  It’s been a year of eighty hour weeks, sleepless nights, and my fiancée pointedly referring to my book as ‘the other woman,’ and laying an empty place for it at the dinner table, a brilliant rhetorical tactic only slightly undermined by the fact she has to tell me about it on the phone, because I’m not at home having dinner because I’m writing my fucking book.

It all comes down to this. What if everyone hates it? Worse, what if no one reads it? Worse, what if they do read it, but simultaneously misconstrue and read too much into it and come away convinced that I derive sexual kicks from getting butt-naked except for a Nixon mask and choking the life from innocent penguins? No, you’re right, no-one reading it would be way worse.

GODSFUCKINGDAMMIT WHY WON’T TWITTER LOAD?  I haven’t been this stressed since…

March 2009 – I’m sitting at my keyboard. The return key is still pressed under my index finger, and I know with a sickening certainty that no matter how slowly I lift my digit, even if I leave it there for ever and get catheterised and never leave my seat, it won’t get un-pressed again. There’s no getting that email back –  the email that contains my query and  the first three chapters of my novel.  And even though in reality,  if this agent rejects it, and the one after her, and the one after him, it won’t make the book any less worth writing;  won’t make it any less a story I needed to tell, right now it feels like it would. I’ve spent a year and a half telling myself I can do this, and I’m terrified of finding out I was wrong.

It never gets less scary, I don’t expect it to any more. Also, I try not to let the fact that it never gets easier fool me into thinking it was ever really hard in the first place. Being a soldier is hard, being a miner is hard, being bloody nurse is fucking hard, and sure, being a writer can be hard too, but mostly it’s the “ Particularly Fiendish Sudoku” kind of hard, rather than the “I have to stick a catheter in this guy, then turn around  and get up to my elbow in this other guy’s turd-canal, and then tell this guy he isn’t going to be around to see his daughter’s fifth birthday before heading home for three hours sleep before coming in to do it all again tomorrow” kind of hard.

Everything’s relative, and nothing worth doing is ever easy, and there are a million other things I could be doing, and so every now and then the question naturally arises: “If it never gets any easier, why carry on?”

For you, maybe it’s necessity, maybe your life, or your livelihood or your sanity really do depend on putting one word in front of another, in which case, like the soldier and the sailor and the nurse before  you, go forth and do what you do. Godspeed to you. Power to your pen.

But if you’re like me? If it isn’t necessary, if you could be doing something else? Well then, I guess all you can do is smile maniacally at the backwards ‘QWERTY’ the keyboard raised in bloody bruising the last time you smashed your forehead into it, because apart from necessity, there’s only one other answer to ‘why carry on?’:

‘Because it’s worth it.’  And it is, I mean it really is.

What if I’ve forgotten how? What if the last one was a fluke? What if it doesn’t come, and still doesn’t come tomorrow, and again the day after that? What if I can’t What if I can’t What if I can’t?

It’s August 2013 and with a friendly herd of miniature buffalo thundering their way towards my colon, I sit down to write.

Hello, class. Today’s filmstrip is called Scalzi Owns The Dudebros.

 (The too-long-didn’t-read is that some Dudebros — or, rather, Douchebros, as I like to call them — thought to make the Scalzi-in-a-dress charity photo a meme about what feminism looks like in much the same way they made a meme out of Kelly Martin Broderick, who had her picture stolen and used for the same toxic anti-feminist meme.)

Scalzi’s post has been linked over at Metafilter, with accompanying commentary that is occasionally reasonable and witty, and is just as occasionally toxic or (perhaps overly) critical.

I don’t know that I’d call myself a feminist. I mean, I like to hope that I am and that I support those ideas and those goals — I just figure I’m probably not very good at it. I try. I do! I believe that the scales are way fucking imbalanced in favor of all the shiny happy money-having white straight gender-normative dudes and I think it takes effort and agency to balance those scales back toward an under-served and often oppressed population. I just worry about calling myself a feminist because, well, the world is home to real feminists walking the walk and talking the talk. I feel like I’m amateur hour karaoke. Not yet ready for adult swim.

*waggles arm floaties*

Just the same, I’ve seen actual commentary — fair, understandable commentary — that says, “Oh, guys like John Scalzi, Jim Hines and Chuck Wendig get to be heroes for calling this stuff out but soon as a woman says it she’s labeled a troublemaker or a slut or she gets rape and death threats.” And that’s true. And that sucks. And I say that with no sarcasm. That genuinely dulls the knife-blade that I call a heart. That’s fucked up and it isn’t the way I want things to be.

I think it’s important for us guys having our party on Heteronormative White Dude Mountain to acknowledge that privilege. It’s there. Big and shiny and practically bulletproof.

But I also think it’s important for us to hopefully use that privilege, such as it is, to do good things instead of bad. (It’s like, “By the vagaries of fate I was born rich and my parents gave me this sweet Maserati despite the fact I did nothing to deserve it. So let’s drive it fast and use it give food to the homeless! VROOMY-VROOM VROOM, PRIVILEGE AT THE WHEEL!”)

We can take the criticism and slings and arrows for being male feminists — flawed as we may be — but I do hope you’ll see us as allies in this fight. As boosters and mouthpieces — not heroes, not white knights, but as friends. And we have to accept that, in being male feminists (or whatever we call ourselves or are called by others), we won’t get rape threats or death threats.

I see that a lot of folks don’t believe in privilege or they think it’s somehow attempting to diminish them instead of increase the rights of others. Here’s privilege: the criticism that we get will never match the criticism you get. Men get to be sexually adventurous and it’s boys will be boys. Women do it and they’re slut-shamed or viewed as tarts and targets instead of as having agency and choice. A guy can get on the VMAs and be as batshit as he wants and nobody will call him out for his male traits — but Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga does it and all you can hear about the next day is how trashy they were, how they were dressed, how “oversexualized” they were. Scalzi — or I — can say what we’re going to say and we’ll never catch the kind of shitty, vile, bilestorm that splashes on the heads of someone like Anita Sarkeesian or Caroline Criado-Perez. This world is home to countries where a girl will literally get acid splashed in her face or get her stoned or get her killed just for showing some skin or having an opinion. I know of no present country or culture where a matriarchy will do the same to men for getting uppity with his ideas or daring to flash a patch of scrotum. That is privilege. And it is woefully real.

We’re not equal in what we make in our pay.

We’re not equal in what we get to do.

We’re damn sure not equal in the criticism leveled our way.

And we dudes have to acknowledge that. That’s what our privilege is. Ours is the privilege to do what we want to do — hell, to have the excuses to do what we want to do — and not be judged.

Privilege is real and hopefully we can do something good with it instead of something bad.