“PEOPLE OF THE EARTH, YOU WILL HEAR ME.”

Hope y’all enjoyed the cliffhanger that was the end of Shadow of the Star Dragon. I certainly had a lot of fun writing those books.

In just a few days, the series will reach culmination with Trial of the Star Dragon, out late in the evening August 9 (Seattle time, your world may differ).

I miss pulpy science fiction like they use to right in the old days. Granted, it tended to be middle-aged, CIS, white, and male, but the ideas that drove them were fun, if you could imagine getting beyond the limitations of bad writers. Plus, I grew up in a world where Nichelle Nichols and George Takei had already taken us beyond those old tropes, and into a place where anything was possible

Star Wars would come along shortly and kind of mess that all up, with again all-white heroes, but that’s just Joseph Campbell drawn to the logical conclusion.

In the Star Dragon books, I wanted to explore some really big themes.

Imagine a stable galactic culture 50,000 years old, for example. Or beings so powerful in the Chaa that they can be mistaken for gods. Or a place where people live in terrible fear that the belligerent space orcs would break out and overrun the entire galaxy. (Face it, humans are not ready for First Contact. Any smart alien species will lock their doors when they fly by our planet.)

But at the same time, Gareth and Royston represent some of the finer elements of what we could become, given time and patience. Gareth gave up his very humanity in order to stop Marc. And he knows he can never return to Earth or see Pippa again.

That does things to a man.

Royston started off with a simple theory that he could not easily disprove. With the help of rock and roll music, he became even more dangerous than Gareth, possibly threatening the entirety of creation itself and causing the Chaa to return to stop him.

And then the Gods of the Accord have to return. They bring with them Judgment Day, with the intent of simply eradicating humans forever, lest they somehow slip out again and threaten the Accord of Souls.

So, yeah, no big thing, right?

If any of you have ever read Christopher Rowley’s War for Eternity and The Black Ship (part of the Fenrille books) then you will see threads of similarity. A bad writer steals from someone else. A good writer steals from everybody else. But those books had an impact on me when I was younger, because he went big.

BIG.

Rowley gave me an understanding that the canvas I painted on was only limited by my imagination, rather than some silly rules about genre and trope.

So I went big. And had a lot of fun.

We end the current series here, with Trial of the Star Dragon, because how much bigger can it get? (Trick question. I can get really stupid, if enough people demand it. Y’all gotta tell me what you think.)

So August 9/10 it will be live. Get your copy now and prepare to stay up all night reading it.

🙂

Someone asked me the other day why it was that I don’t sell books directly off of my website, when the tools make it so easy to do these days. According to them, I was losing money because I could sell my books directly to my superfans for less than they could buy them from places like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. At the same time, I would be able to make more per sale when I wasn’t losing thirty percent to the middleman handling the transaction.

Money is lovely, don’t get me wrong.

But this is a business. And one that I intend to be in for a long time. It requires planning.

I can write entertaining books. My existing fans tell me that. I get occasional complaints from folks that stayed up way past their normal bedtime when “just one more chapter” turned into two in the morning when they weren’t looking.

The problem is that I want a bigger fan base.

Entropy guarantees me that over the next twenty years, I’m going to lose fans because maybe their life or tastes will change. Or folks will stop reading for whatever personal reasons (new parents can testify). Hell, some folks are statistically going to die of old age over that time.

If I am selling to a small, rabid, personal fan base, I can service them quite well, giving the those sorts of touches. On my Patreon, I recently included an urban fantasy short story I wrote years ago and have left in the trunk for now. It was a pretty good story, but it was obviously really just the first part of a much longer novel. Plus, it was in a genre I don’t normally read all that much or write in. Seriously. Urban Fantasy (depending on how you want to classify it. It is not the sorts of paranormal romance that are currently dominating the market, but more like old school paranormal detective, if you will).

One of my patrons wrote back and asked when I was going to write the novel. Considering the speed at which I’m writing now, I decided to slot it in and wrote it over the summer. You can do that when you are at Pulp Speed Two+ consistently.

But I want more fans. I have a comfortable writing career now, making good money, but I want to own an island somewhere with an ultratech supervillain fortress on it. Or a castle that I can rent out as an AirB&B when I’m traveling Europe, Africa, and other interesting places.

Stupid money. So much money that it represents a moral hazard to the rest of the world. </insert maniacal laughter here>

Not there yet. Not going to get there in the next year.

However, I want to grow to that level.

To do that, I need more fans, not just to extract more money from the ones I have.

Discoverability is the ogre that threatens all writers. We can write great material, but until you can put it into someone’s hands to read, we can’t make a living.

You can attempt all sorts of gimmicks to build your audience, but most of them are just that. Gimmicks. They’ll work for a month or a season or even a year, but one day you’ll get up and they don’t. You can do all sorts of mailing list builders, but those emails eventually melt off and recede like a tide. Things like that.

Some people are forever chasing those gimmicks instead of focusing on the writing. We refer to it as “The Magic Handshake” because it is a syndrome that takes over people. They hustle, convinced that there really exists a magic handshake, and once they learn it, they will be Made Women. Like a mafia crime family or something.

“One more class. One more book to read. One more workshop to take. Something…”

[there is a magic handshake, by the way: Sit down. Shut Up. Write.]

I’m building my career organically, because that’s the best way to get to where I want to be. To have a lot of loyal fans who will follow me when I suddenly write an Urban Fantasy novel series (book one is going to my patrons at the end of August if you want to read it. Best sign up now.)

But we need to be discovered. In the past, maybe you walked into Waldenbooks and wandered through the Science Fiction/Fantasy shelves looking for something new, and accidentally found a new author to fall in love with. That’s how I found David Drake, originally, reading a Hammer’s Slammers book when I was a kid.

More often, however, someone you know hands you a book and says “Read this.” because they know your tastes and it’s amazing. How many of you found your favorite author because your best friend or weird aunt recommended them? Yeah, I thought so.

But it doesn’t work that way anymore. B.Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Borders are gone. Barnes & Noble struggles gamely on, but they only have a small selection of books to pick from.

There is this behemoth that had slain them all and conquered the kingdom of readers. We call it Amazon.

Jeff Bezos didn’t invent the ebook. Those existed back in the 90’s. (Hell, Sony had a chance to dominate ebooks in the early days, and betamaxxed it instead. But everybody knows about the idiots that run Sony’s commercial electronics divisions, so I don’t need to say more.)

What Jeff and Amazon did was to make it easy to find, buy, and read books. He gave you the Kindle device, and then let you download ebooks onto it. You could suddenly read any book almost instantly, not even having to go to the bookstore to find it, or order it for delivering in the next 7-10 business days.

Now. In your hands. Reading.

How many of you have stayed up late because you finished one book and then went and got the next one in the series immediately and kept reading?

So let’s talk about the middleman. Middlemen, plural, actually.

You can buy ebooks from Amazon, B&N, Kobo/Walmart, iTunes/Apple, and dozens of other places, depending on where you live.

As an author, you don’t have to pay anything to have your books on those shelves, like you would if you wanted to get into Barnes & Noble with paper. (Serious amounts of payola are involved on those tables and endcaps in the stores.) Or going to a show and having a booth with your books on the table for browsers.

Instead, each of those places is a distributor (a middleman) that will take your book and make it available for readers interested in a genre. Free. What they take is a cut of your sales at the end of the month. But only a cut. You aren’t renting space up front.

If you don’t make any money, Amazon doesn’t make any money from you. As a result, it is in their best interest to help you sell books. And there will be a million new titles published this year, so you need to compete.

For me, I could sell my ebooks to the thousand or so hard-core fans that would rush to my website to buy it, especially because I could also charge $5.99 and keep most of that money, instead of the $4.07 I normally make.

But it is not worth it to me.

By having over one thousand people buy a new release when it comes out, I’m coming to the attention of the automated robots at Amazon that serve up “You might also like” books, because suddenly there is a big new book out there and the robots know you like these sorts of books.

They want you to see this book, because if lots of people are buying it, it must be good, and they want you to buy it. Like I mentioned above, at $5.99, they are making about $1.92 themselves. Money.

Because I have those fans buying the book from Amazon, I have the chance to be put in front of tens of thousands of other potential fans who see an interesting cover, open the page, read the blurb, and then download the sample to read. (I know it works like that, because The Science Officer has exploded twice now in ways unexplainable any other way.)

I’m good enough to hook you at that point.

But if I don’t get that surge, driving me up the category list into the top 100 or even top 10, then random strangers don’t get shown my books. Lots of people bandwagon by looking at what is in the top 100 and using that as a filter.

How many of my sales emerged as a result of cracking one of those lists and coming to someone’s attention that might have otherwise missed me?

Or you?

If I make money, Amazon makes money, because there are readers out there who want new stuff to keep them up at night.

I’m not interested in you and your Amazon Derangement Syndrome about how Amazon is destroying traditional publishing. That happened long before Jeff Bezos got involved.

More readers are buying more books now than at any point in human history.

Read that again, because it is a simple truth.

They are out there, credit card burning a hole in their pocket for more things to read. If it is not you, it will be someone else, but Amazon constantly tracks down all those gimmicks and makes some tweak to make them not work anymore. (I have friends who smile and nod knowingly, but can’t say anything, because of what they know and where they work.)

If you look at Amazon as a service, an honest broker middleman who is trying to make as much money as possible by building the single biggest marketplace in history, then you will begin to understand why I want to leverage all their tools to my advantage.

• Wide instead of narrow, because folks after subscriptions for books won’t buy.
• Passive advertising, because I make about $2.50 for every dollar I spend (and we’re not talking many dollars, either way), but I also don’t have to spend a lot of time paying attention.
• Dropping new titles every 30 days. (You can drop a short story on the same day every month, or maybe you should ask yourself if you are really a writer.)

I’m not working the system for a gimmicky edge. I’m using the tools that exist to maximize my own income over the incredibly long horizon of seventy years after I die of old age in another fifty.

My grandson is going off to college next week. I want his grandkids to be earning money from my books.

That’s the power of the middleman.

Many of you know about my weird diet. I blame my damned, hippy wife, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm).

Over the last whatever, I’ve taken to building out what we call flavor packs, which is usually an odd assortment of meats, individually parceled out, so that I can just dump one in the slow cooker, along with whatever the primary meat is that week. Add every vegetable in the freezer or fridge (about 12-15 different kinds, depending, none of it starch, all of it colorful), nicely chopped up, several flavors of vinegar, and olive, coconut, and avocado oil, and spice. Cook overnight. Throw into a casserole dish and cut into six chunks to nuke for breakfast for the week. (Sunday mornings, I go down to Krain Korner, just north of Enumclaw, for breakfast as a treat to myself.)

In the past, the flavor packs have generally been more pedestrian, but I’ve gotten weirder as time passes, mostly because Uwajimaya Grocery in Renton is close enough for me to drive in and load up on fun stuff, like large chicken thighs, pork skin, and duck confit.

However, we went to the neighborhood grocery on the way home from errands today, and it got even better.

Was down to one flavor pack, so I needed to start new ones. Usually do four at a time. I look at the “leftover” meat on clearance for things I can immediately freeze, since there will be a lot of cayenne involved anyway. Wasn’t anything good to pick from, since I want bone and fat on the meat, and my grocery store is having a “lean meat” fetish right now. (Seriously people? Fat’s good for you.)

But there were other things. Picked up some lamb shoulder chops (2 packs of 2) for cheap to add for the meat and bone to make a nice broth.

Still had a pack of pork skin left over. (1″ by 1″ x 6″ strips, with a little meat and a layer of fat). That went into the mix.

Then I found ox tails for soup. Never had ox tail before, so that’s a new thing to add, just so I don’t get stodgy. (Ask me about “stodgy” sometime, but be sitting down first.)

Dug out the last package of boiled beef tongue, cut into cubes and frozen, and was able to break it down into four lumps to add to my new packs.

Then it got weird. Heh.

The store had chicken gizzards, hearts, and livers. Got one package of each, so just under three pounds of offal. Pulled out my sausage grinder and made “Chicken Offal Sausage,” adding salt, pepper, chili powder, cayenne, and garlic powder in between the first and second grindings.

Split it four ways and shoveled that into my four plastic bags.

That’s a flavor pack. Enough to last me a month. Couple of pounds of stuff with a rotating variety of trace minerals. (No shrimp right now. No duck confit this time. No chicken thighs.)

When it comes time to use them, I’ll throw in a pork loin chop (the 30 or 50% off kind, frozen until I chuck it in the pot) or a bone-in pork shoulder piece.

Maybe dig out one of my cans of Wild Planet tuna just because I haven’t had one in a while.

Still have one package of seaweed noodles. (Don’t try them with pasta. Did. Doesn’t stick. Will have to go back to fettuccine, ravioli, or tortellini next time.) So I need to get some more. Or maybe more tuna. Dunno.

But I’m getting all sorts of trace vitamins and minerals. Eating healthy, because crossing 50 a month ago means I’m halfway, and I’d like to still be churning out novels when I’m 100, just because you people need something to read.

Gotta make the kids look bad, and I’ve got a grandson who just graduated high school this summer. He’s likely to be one of them that takes over the publishing side of the business in 20-30 years, just because he’ll die of old age long before my books come out of copyright. (Y’all do have a will, right?)

Eat healthy.

Yes, you.

I don’t give a shit what excuses you want to make. When the conversation starts off with “I know I should be doing…” I stop listening, because you’re just going to give me a lot of nonsense excuses about why you’re too lazy to take care of yourself.

I promise not to piss on your grave one of these days, but if most of you don’t do something to take better care of yourselves, I’m gonna outlive you. And laugh.

Blame my damned, hippy wife. She’s planning to do the same.

I’m not sure where Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I picked up the term, but we use it to describe a certain subset of writers who seem to believe that there really is a Secret Handshake to fame, and that it they learn it, that’s the missing piece they need to make it big.

Of course, that leads to all manner of scam artists preying on said people, promising them that if they take this class or whatever that’s the thing they need. (CAVEAT: Most of the folks I know who do teach are reliable and honest, and I’ll even tag a few at the bottom of this post that I think would help most writers, but that’s a different thing.)

There is no secret handshake.

Read the again.

Oh, sure, you can spend a lot of time on various advertising schemes and scams. You can do things to juice your numbers right now. You can spend a stupid amount of money to make sure everyone on the planet sees your book cover at least once.

That’s lovely, if you want to have a career that’s about 1-2 years long. What we occasionally call a witch’s hat, because you spike up on month and collapse the next. Whatever scam works this week won’t next week.

I don’t want a short career. I want to spend my next 50 years writing down all the crazy shit in my head and getting paid for you by my fans.

The secret is not a handshake, but a way of living.

“Sit down. Shut up. Write.”

There, you have the secret handshake. Put your ass in the chair and write the next story. Your fans want to reward you buy buying your books. They want to tell their friends about you, so that those people buy your books.

If you have exactly one book, you can advertise the hell out of it, but what do you do after folks have read it? Nothing. You have to go find more fans.

If you’ve been advertising, you have to spend more. (I always ask folks their NET income rather than gross, if I know they do heavy ad spending. And by heavy, I mean four digits in a single month. If you spent $5,000 US to make $7,000, I’m not that impressed.)

You need to write. Then you need to learn to write compelling stories (which is a skill you develop). Then you learn to write clean copy. (I cycle every time I open a document, so that by the time I’m done, it’s ready for copy editors. I don’t ever write a second draft. I’d rather write a second novel instead and get paid twice as much.)

Covers and blurbs are harder skills, but you can learn them. There are also folks out there that you can hire to do good stuff for you, if you just don’t have an eye for what makes a good cover. Listen to them if you are paying them money. (And get references from other folks who use them. Always.)

There is always an element of luck to publishing. I like to compare it to rolling 10d6 (10 six sided dice) and adding them up. If you roll a 58+, you’ve just written the next Harry Potter, the next Hungers Games, the next something.

Every time you pull the lever to publish, you have that chance.

What’s more likely, however, is that you’ll start getting lower numbers to make a decent living. Maybe roll a 40 and you get a thousand pre-order from your book. Something that makes life nice.

The single best thing you can do to advertise is to write the next book. The other morning, Amazon let all my friends on the planet (anyone following me, basically) that I have a new book up for preorder. I didn’t pay them for that. They did it for me.

I’ll get more preorders over the next few days because of that. And the book isn’t coming out for six weeks.

But I’ve trained my fans that I have something dropping in the 10th of every month. And have for the last couple of years now. Amazon lets people know I have preorders. Sometimes it says “new book from Blaze Ward now live” or “Did you miss this book Blaze Ward published two weeks ago?”

I happen to be dropping novels every month, but there is no reason you can’t drop a short story. None. Hell, start a patreon like mine and send folks that story early, letting your superfans read it before anyone else. Maybe even before it has been edited and they can find things for you to correct. and then publish the final later.

But publishing is the key. That supposed Secret Handshake.

Put in keyboard, fingers on keys.

Sit down. Shut up. Write.

Learn to tell a better story with the next one by writing this one as good as you can. You can be a better writer, and that will make you more fans, but it’s hard work.

People complain that it is hard work and a lot of luck. Of course. You need to treat this like a job, not a hobby. (Caveat: I got the best hobby in the world, but I still work my ass off daily.) Work at it.

You need to write. All the advertising in the world won’t save you when your fans have read everything you’ve written and ask “so now what?”

By the time you get back around to writing again in a year or two, they’ll have forgotten you. You’ll have to build up your fan base again. Possibly from scratch.

Just write. That’s it. Publish something that is good enough instead of rewriting it 14 times until you’ve workshopped out every bit of interestingness in the interest of polish. Eventually, you get a mirror when you do that, and I’m pretty sure that most of you could send your first draft to a copy editor, take their suggestions, and publish a better novel anyway.

There is no secret handshake. Not one-more-class that will do it. No magical advertising gimmick. (Those work for a very short time and then fail. If you can see the bandwagon, it is already gone.)

Sit down. Shut up. Write.

However, if you want to get better at your craft, here are some of the people who do have useful things to teach you.

WMG (Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith) teach craft in all sorts of forms, both online and in-person in Vegas. They made my life possible.

Online Workshops

Craft Workshops

Newletter Ninja (so you can look like a pro when you engage your fans)

And I even wrote a Business For Breakfast book on Beginning Marketing for writers, to make you look like a pro when your fans come looking.

Always ask someone offering advice on this sort of thing two questions: How many books have you published? How much WRITING income are you making (not editing, not teaching classes, nothing but words for sale).

Then write.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

🙂

Those of you who’ve known me for a long time will understand that I don’t talk much about the stuff that goes on inside my head. Most of the time, that’s a good choice for just about everyone involved, because I never claimed to be sane. Fake it well enough most of the time, but that’s a scam I’m pulling on the world.

Last couple of days, I realized just how depressed I’d gotten over the last month or so. No one big thing set me off, so much as a bunch of little things. Death of a thousand paper cuts kind of build-up, if you will.

July’s always hard for me. My first wife died of breast cancer eleven years ago this week. My birthday was a month ago and turning 50 really has made me look sideways at a lot of things and wonder if I needed to make some changes. Screwed up my ankle about three weeks ago and it got so bad at one point that I actually had to buy a brace, just to be able to walk.

Then I saw a conversation on the social medias talking about how children deal with trauma and what it does to them as adults, so I got to thinking about that, and who I was.

Warning: enter at your own risk.

I was the weird kid, always on the fringe of whatever group you wanted to put together. Too intellectual when hanging with the jocks. Too much a jock when hanging with the nerds. Not crazy enough to be an artist, but too crazy for normal folk.

Realized that I’ve spent most of my adult life fearing the sorts of ostracisms that I had gone through as a child. As a result I don’t build deep and permanent ties to organizations, because some angry and terrified part of me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and me to have to start over with nothing.

I’m done that more times than I care to even remember, let alone admit. It made me a hard, bitter, angry SOB in the bad old days. Cost me a lot along the way, but that’s all water under the bridge at this point.

In 2013, July was also a trigger. Couple of things set me off into a white hot angry. I don’t ever remember that much rage that close to the surface. Burn the whole fucking world down and salt the smoldering ruins kind of bad.

But then I stopped and asked “Why?”

Realized that the anger had taken over and was going to put me in a very bad spot soon.

But more importantly, that it was unnecessary. I didn’t have to be angry. Sat down with an inventory and decided to be happy instead. Cut a couple of toxic people permanently out of my life. Met the future second Mrs. Ward not long after that, and became someone so totally different than I used to be that I barely recognize him.

People will say “Do you remember…?” and my usual response is something along the lines of “That was so many me’s ago that I barely remember the person, let alone the date.”

It’s generally been a better time since then. Happy.

So a hard bout of depression that snuck up on me over the last month or so caught me off-guard. Squirreled me in on myself in bad ways, and it’s taken me a couple of weeks to really wrap my head around that. Finally think I have my hands on it, and I’ll work it out, but it’s been a rough couple of weeks. (Not that most people would notice. As I said at the top, most folks never know what’s going on in my head. Most of you couldn’t even guess, despite a few of you who’ve known me for 20-40 years.)

But I also occasionally forget that I don’t have to be bulletproof all the time anymore. That the world isn’t necessarily out to get me, the moment I let my guard down, not like in the old days. (You read my poetry from 25-35 years ago and tell me I was sane.)

Not really looking for sympathy right now, so much as trying to publicly acknowledge that I’m an occasional fuckup, and that it’s okay. That I can apologize to people when I do screw up and hopefully it doesn’t cost either of us too much.

That I’m in a better place now than I’ve ever been, and this is just a bout of depression that I can get over with self-care and patience, like a really bad cold.

But I also figure that there are folks out there that would do better to know that we’re all human, and that it’s okay to be depressed from time to time. That they can acknowledge it, understand it, and hopefully move past it. I’m 50 now, and I’ve got 50 more years of fun ahead of me, so I need to make sure I’m making the most of these second chances that have fallen into my laps.

Because I got friends like you.

thanks.

b

Just finished a business book on branding that I think will be rather useful for artists.

WARNING: people who like spreadsheets should lock their doors now, avert their eyes, and just keep driving.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

Rory is an advertising guy, through and through, and extremely successful at it. What he’s doing with this book is getting people to step out side their normal (“rational”) comfort zone and reply to certain static observations with “Why not?”

As he says, rarely will people get fired if they follow the herd mentality and rational decision making process, even if the idea eventually fails. But you will end up looking and sounding just like every one of your competitors when you do that.

In writing, as with other art, our voice and vision is what sets us apart from everyone else. (In business, most companies either make widgets, or move widgets around.) We should embrace the unique.

So the suggestion is to ask pointed, annoying questions that challenge accepted wisdom on a topic, to see if there is a better way. And also thinking about how to frame bad things with silver linings. One example he gives is landing at the airport, but not being able to get to the terminal gate, because some other flight is still there. The pilot announced that folks would have to ride the bus (boo) but also that the bus would take them much closer to passport control, so they wouldn’t have to walk all that distance dragging their stuff (yay). A different way of looking at something. Silver linings are a human thing you can take advantage of.

The whole book is like that, asking if there are different ways we can look at things to make them more unique. Or give better service in some off-hand, strange way that doesn’t necessarily make sense. (His example is how much more frequently he eats at this one restaurant he liked, once he discovered a car park right behind it, and how a few other places could do the same. Put up a sign showing how to get to nearby parking, rather than changing the menu, for example, and it might increase your overall sales. Cheap, non-linear solution that helps your customers.) Not everything you do has to make the product easier, so much as making the process less painful.

Another example was a website that originally asked POTENTIAL customers to fill out all their personal information before they got to the ordering part. Once they flipped the sequence and gave people the option to just browse now and then fill out all their information later, the company supposedly saw a $300 million difference over a year. All that, just by making the process more user friendly.

Looking at a problem and asking about weirder solutions that might not cost as much money or effort than the one that the dipshit MBA with the pretty tie consultant immediately recommends. (And oh, by the way, his company can sell you that solution, too. “Cheap.”)

You are a brand as an artist. Doesn’t matter what your art is. Words, images, music. You have something special about what you do that sets you apart, and will make fans flock to give you money. (Maybe not much, but that’s the goal, else why are you here?)

from the book’s blurb:

“Why is Red Bull so popular, though everyone—everyone!—hates the taste? Humans are, in a word, irrational, basing decisions as much on subtle external signals (that little blue can) as on objective qualities (flavor, price, quality). The surrounding world, meanwhile, is irreducibly complex and random. This means future success can’t be projected on any accounting spreadsheet. To strike gold, you must master the dark art and curious science of conjuring irresistible ideas: alchemy.”

And a lot of it is alchemy. You can’t spreadsheet your way to solutions and expect to win. You can do okay, by looking and acting just like everyone else, but damn if that doesn’t sound a great deal like writing to market and expecting to get rich. Sure, you can put in a lot of work and make some money, but you’ll be another utterly interchangeable one-hit wonder pop star, here today and gone tomorrow.

You’ll want to look at your branding from a broader, weirder standpoint. How can you use alchemy to work to your advantage?

You’re artists. There’s a lot here for you to unpack. Just leave the rational, consensus-minded part of your brain behind.

🙂

Stopped by the PO box on the way home today from the South Sound Writers Lunch to a lovely prize. The paper edition of Blaze Ward Presents 001: An Interpretation of Moles had arrived. Looks lovely.

The rest of the way home, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were reflecting that the world has changed, yet again. “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

Nothing remains the same, because change is constant and ongoing. Tomorrow will be different than yesterday, that is the only promise worth understanding.

We tossed the idea for the anthology out just about May 1 (we’ll round for ease). I closed submissions June 1. Published July 1. Got my paper copy printed and delivered July 13.

Seventy-five days. An Interpretation of Moles.

In order to survive and thrive in this modern age of publishing, you must Surf Chaos (with an Eff, not a Vee).

You must be efficient in your use of time and money. Every day, things get cheaper and faster, but that means that you must constantly take into consideration investing in the tools that will improve your life.

I am just now finishing edits on a new Business For Breakfast book for the fall on writing Series and understanding Continuity. There’s the usual section in there about writing fast and clean, but we also need to publish fast and clean. I use Vellum to make fast, clean, pretty books. They take minutes for me to format, as compared to a friend of mine who demands that everything be done in Adobe In-Design, because she has to have complete and utter control of the final document. (Control freak of the first order.)

She spends days getting everything formatted exactly the way she demands that it must be done. DAYS.

I spent minutes. And it looks almost as good.

Plus, the cost of a refurbished Mac Air I picked up on amazon with points, plus the one-time fee for Vellum ($250), versus the annual subscription for what looks like $600 USD.

So in one year, it pays for itself, just out of pocket.

Plus all those days spent tweaking a manuscript, when 99%+ of readers won’t notice. Days when I’m writing the next novel and she’s still formatting the last one.

And next year, someone will probably invent something better. I have no idea what it is, but it will handle some chunk of stuff that’s either impossible today, or not cost-effective to pursue. (I’m personally waiting for the day that your Alexa/whatever device can pick up the text of a book and do a human-acceptable level of audio book. That’s coming)

The world has changed.

That is my refrain in publishing as well as in writing. Tomorrow will be different from yesterday.

I could take an idea from “fuck it, let’s do an anthology” to holding the print edition in my hands, in under seventy-five days. Worse, I’m kinda lazy, so I took a three weeks reading submissions and organizing them, before putting it up for pre-order.

I could quiet possibly do the next one in forty-five days, if I was feeling crazy.

Compare that to my friends who spend a year writing a novel. Or a week formatting it over and over again to get it just right. (Mind you, print, which is even funnier, since print keeps representing a smaller proportion of total book sales every year, as ebook and audio keep getting to be larger slices of the pie.)

Tomorrow will be different from yesterday.

What are you doing to keep up?

So we didn’t realize it at the time, but we managed to set the pre-order for #3 and #4 both to July 10, when Shadow of the Star Dragon should have been Aug 10 instead.

Whoops.

And it’s too late to fix, so the discussion was just pull Trial of the Star Dragon forward one month, since we can then slot in the rest of the Shadow of the Dominion books one month early. Got them all done. Halfway through the copy edit cycle.

Note for the rest of you: this is why the publishing schedule is always written in pencil!

It’s also why I’m trying to stay 12-15 novels ahead of the publishing schedule, so that we don’t have to panic and can just rearrange March 2020 right now.

Seriously.

For the rest of you, the cliff-hanger than is Call of the Star Dragon can be immediately resolved with Shadow of the Star Dragon, instead of making you wait for a month. Shadow’s cliff-hanger is still out there, and some of you will be cursing my name, but these things happen, and I’m quite pleased with the end of Shadow, thankyouverymuch. It’s even better than Call, when you get there.

Audio might be a little weirder, but we can pull it forward as well, so those of you listening to the Star Dragon books (thank you, by the way) will be able to stay caught up.

For the fall, the schedule probably looks a little different. Maybe.

• August: Trial of the Star Dragon (#5)
• Sep: Hard Bargain (Longshot Book 2)
• Oct: Outermost (Longshot Book 3)
• Nov: Dominion-427 (Longshot Book 4)
• Dec: Petron (Jessica Keller Book 9! And DONE)
• Jan 2020: Phoenix (Longshot Book 5)
• Feb: Princess Rualoh (Longshot Book 6)
• Mar: F@#$ if I know.

I’ve got another Handsome Rob novel done. WinterStar and SeekerStar. Two Lazarus Books. And the popcorn kitten that bit me on the ass yesterday and has me furiously taking notes on a whole new SF universe from all the others.

I am also getting close to the end of an Urban Fantasy Book One that is going to be part of a new series. One of my Patreon fans read the short story and asked when I was going to expand it into a novel, damn it, so I did.

You will not have to miss a month. Never fear. There’s even a sequel novel to Rebels done and sitting in the can, part of a new series of high orc fantasy, if you like that sort of thing.

No, I have no control over the next idea. Just the publishing order.

So if you haven’t already pre-ordered both of the new Star Dragon books, now would be a good time, as they drop Wednesday.

• Call of the Star Dragon
• Shadow of the Star Dragon

Get yours today!

and hang on tight…

Hey, gang.

The Space Travelers Bundle runs out on Wednesday and then you will no longer be able to purchase a copy of WinterStar to read until sometime in 2020. Move quickly on your quest.

Same goes for the others, since I’m just one of four exclusives this time around. Kristine Smith, Robert Jeschonek, and Leigh Saunders also have bundle exclusives here that you might want to pick out. Plus a special edition of Fiction River Presents and issue 003 of Boundary Shock Quarterly: Grand Theft Starship.

BSQ has the first of the Handsome Rob stories in it: Can’t Shoot Straight Gang. It’s a relatively long short story, and sets up a new novel series. Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns is out and I recently finished Hunting Handsome Rob, which will come out sometime soon and be part of a longer, on-going series about a Lincolnshire secret agent in his battles with Salonnia and Corynthe.

Eight novels. Two collections. All gone in just a few days, so you better move.

Because it was just that silly.

“Moles.
Seriously?
Yes. Mostly seriously.
Chemists, Zoologists, Dermatologists, Government Agencies, and Mexican Food.
Over a dozen modern authors offer their take on an Interpretation of Moles. Every kind, every definition.
From silly to sublime, this anthology takes you on a wild ride, where the only rule was that it had to include moles. And to be entertaining.
Come revel with us.”

Got a group of lunatics together and challenged them to give me short stories on the theme of Moles. Do you have any idea how many different ways that word can be used in English? Neither did I. Still not sure what the hell those folks did.

Zoologists. Chemists. Dermatologists. Government Agents. Mexican Food. Large piles of rock. Craziness.

It is now available at all the usual places. Shortly, the paper edition will be out and I’m hoping several of you have to buy it in paper so you can read cool stuff and keep it on your shelf.

My story, Old Flames, is another Carl and Deke adventure (#3, for those of you keeping score at home), after Hack and Unintended Consequences. Modern day punk. Living in the shadows.

There are military romance, silly fantasy, historic, and some seriously crazy science fiction. I will draw your attention to Richard Quarry’s weird ride: The Transubstantiation of Gerald the Mole. Utterly bizarre story about a star-nosed mole hyperspace explorer. You gotta read it to understand.

Ya gotta read all of them. The silliness went off the rails, crashed into a munitions warehouse, fell off a cliff, and landed on Wile E. Coyote.

Even better, this is just the first “Blaze Ward Presents” because I already know what I want to suggest to the lunatics in my life for Issue 002.

Stay tuned, and keep your seat belts fastened.