Category Archives: publishing

The Stars of Science Fiction Humble Bundle!!!

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Wow. I’m in a Humblebundle with Brandon Sanderson, Frank Herbert(!), Alan Dean Foster, and Kevin J. Anderson. (And WAY more…)

Seriously.

It’s called the Stars of SciFi and it was put on by Draft2Digital to mark their new efforts in moving more directly into publishing, having largely been more of a middleman up until now. (They’re the folks that get my books into libraries. Have you checked out any of my stuff from your local library yet? You should.)

The Frank Herbert book, High-Opp, was apparently a lost novel, never before published and recently discovered by his son. I gotta get that one.

There is a metric crap-ton of stuff here, folks. Thirty-five possible titles, and only eleven of them look like single novels to a real quick eyeball. Instead, you have collections of novels or omnibus editions of things.

For me, the first Science Officer Omnibus, but I’m long past assuming that you’re read that if you’re here on my blog.

Fabulous Publisher Babe™ put out a new Darius Linard collection, the first time all of these stories have been put out in a single spine. Get it here!

Brandon Sanderson has the Shadows Beneath anthology.

Lindsay Buroker’s first three Fallen Empire books.

Two complete Alan Dean Foster collections plus the novel Oshenearth.

FRANK HERBERT NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED!!! (sorry)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Robert J Sawyer. Kevin J. Anderson. Dean Wesley Smith. Tao Wong. My bud G.S. Jennsen. Tami Veldura and Robert Jeschonek from the Boundary Shock Quarterly Syndicate.

Are you people listening here?????

Millions of words. $308 listed value, that you can get for as little as $25 (more would be nice because we’re supporting the Book First Charity:

First Book is a nonprofit social enterprise that provides new books and educational resources to programs and schools serving children in need. By making new, high-quality books and resources available on an ongoing basis, First Book is transforming the lives of children in need and elevating the quality of education. For more information, visit www.firstbook.org.

Over 30 million American kids live in poverty. First Book wants to see every single one of them read, learn and succeed. A nonprofit social enterprise, First Book makes new, high-quality books available to schools and programs serving children from low-income families. More than 120,000 educators and program leaders have joined First Book to access outstanding educational resources for free or deeply reduced prices. Together we can reach every child, every classroom and every community. Learn more about how you can support kids in need at www.firstbook.org.

So this is where I ask you to kick in some cash and get one hell of an amazing library of books you’ve never read, while doing something amazing to help more kids like you turn into avid readers of science fiction.

Limited time offer, as all Humblebundles are. Runs until the 24th, but you’ll want to jump on this now, and blow it through the roof.

And tell all your friends.

The Stars of Science Fiction Humble Bundle (and me)

The Power of Novellas

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A lot of folks seem to believe that you must either write short fiction, or novels in order to be successful.

The short game gets you into magazines and such, where you build up your name and polish your writing craft. I even know a few folks that do make a steady living on short stuff, mostly by turning around and selling all that short fiction as ebooks afterwards. (Lot of effort, but if it works, go for it.)

Downside is that $0.99 on Amazon nets you about 32c from a sale, so you have to move A LOT of units every day.

Flip-side of that are the folks that are convinced that only mega-doorstop novels (200,000 words+) on long series (Epic Fantasy comes to mind, but there are others) can be successful.

Today, I’d like to talk about the humble novella.

I published The Science Officer in December of 2014. And got struck by lightning in January, 2015. Dropped The Mind Field as fast as I could get it written, edited, and published, to take advantage of that incredible spike in sales that lasted about 100 days on the magic Amazon machine before it fell mostly back to earth.

After that, I wrote The Gilded Cage and I suddenly had a series on my hands. When I sat down and started the concept of following the Amazon Pulse, it was to write the next five books: The Pleasure Dome, The Doomsday Vault, The Last Flagship, The Hammerfield Gambit, and The Hammerfield Payoff, putting them up for pre-order spaced two months apart.

After that, I had enough material to go monthly (this would have been Fall, 2017)

Around that same period, I got struck by lightning a second time, in that the machines saw me dropping single genre, single series, back to back. It put me on the big advertising roundup. Plus I broke through somewhere with someone (to date, I have no idea who) blasting me all over the planet.

Put it this way, I was flying cross country in 2018 and got into a conversation with the woman next to me. Told her I was a writer and she was WAY interested, but turned out she didn’t like science fiction. Her husband was just across the aisle, so she handed him my Science Officer business card, because that was his gig.

He looks at it, smiles, and tells me that he liked the book.

Wait, you’ve already read it????

Cool.

To date, almost eight years later, The Science Officer remains my single best mover in terms of units. Every month, I release a new novel/project. Every month, Javier is my second or third best selling title in terms of movement.

Don’t make hardly anything, since it is up for $0.99, so we’re back to that 32c again. At the same time, my top twenty titles frequently contains ALL THE REST OF THE SERIES (book twelve coming in December. Y’all pre-ordered?) including the Omnibuses.

I literally make my living on Javier and the crew. Fortunately, I figured out what Season Two should look like, and am slowly working my way through that arc. Currently, they’ve been annual, but I might manage two per year for a bit, as I have a pretty good idea what the next story should be, plus the one after that.

From The Science Officer to The Hammerfield Payoff, those are all novellas. 24,000 words up to about 32,000. The Bryce Connection (#9) is actually a collection of four short stories that introduce four new sets of characters and runs about 24,000 words combined. From there: Alien Seas, Buried Among The Stars, and Captain Navarre are all novels, running 50,000-65,000 words, mostly because it gives me the space to write bigger stories.

But novellas are where it started, and you have to be to book ten to hit the first novel.

Past that, I have an erotica penname (Cole Braddock) that is currently writing a series that is (intentionally, consciously) a pastiche/homage to Star Trek (TOS and TNG for the most part). I have four of those done so far (Haunted Space, The Rift, Secrets, and Dreamer) that are all specifically targeted as novellas.

Finally, starting in January, I will publish a whole new space western series inspired by something I saw on tv, but radically altered because I wasn’t pleased with the choices the showrunners made. “I could have done that so much better” sort of thing.

Book One in the space western is 31,000, because I needed to introduce eight characters (not counting the ship, who is also important), a universe, technology, culture, and tell two separate story arcs in one spine. Book Two came in at about 18,000. Three through Six (so far) are all right around 22,000.

I learned to write screenplays under a mentor who was good at them (though we never got the money to make them. Anyone got $5m they want to invest? I have five that are all pretty damned good. Horror to Animated Kids Adventure.)

The software you should use is called Final Draft, because it handles all the formatting. (On Linux, I use a variant called Fade-In, which is almost as good, and have not yet paid for the full product, because I might not ever open it again. Different story.)

In a screenplay, one page of text is traditionally one minute of screen time, depending on dialogue. The timing rules are STRICT, so you have to hit 90-120 pages of screenplay. Period.

It also taught me how to write to length. And identify genre, sub-genre, and expected tropes up front.

An American one-hour drama on TV, with commercials, is about 38-40 minutes of show, plus opening and closing credits and 18-22 minutes of commercial breaks.

I wrote the Science Officer as a one-hour episode of a TV show. The Space Western and the Stephanie Machesky erotica are all targeted to that same length. The Space Western is even listed as Episode One, rather than Book One, because I want someone to make it into a TV show or animation, one of these days. (Options available cheap, serious inquiries only, expect contract redlining otherwise.)

Novellas. My goal is 20-24k each. And I’m greedy here. They’ll sell for $2.99 (for now, not counting inflation later) so people can get a good fix for not a lot of money. I’ll clear about $2.05 per unit at that rate, instead of $4 for a $5.99 novel, so I have to make up for it in volume.

I tend to write about 120,000 words per month, when I am on pace. (That comes down from time to time due to reasons.) If I write a pair of Space Western novellas, plus an erotica, that’s a good month’s work, and I’m not putting those out that fast, so I can write ahead and still keep the monthly pulse going. (Flip side is the second book in Kincaide’s War, which came in at 157,000 words, because that trilogy requires mass. Took me two months to write, with other projects slipped in as I went.)

For folks that many can only write 20,000 words per month (average 5,000/week, or 1,000/day with weekends off), you might consider writing a whole series of novellas, rather than spending a year writing a magnum opus doorstop. It will get you in front of fans faster and regularly. It likely makes you more cash, assuming the quality of your craft is high enough to draw the reader into a high read-through. (The Science Officer series has a read-through above 50% to book eight, for example.)

And it will force you to write tight, taut stories, because at 24,000 words, you do not have any time to side quest. In fact, 24,000 words might be a complete side quest loop in the longer arc of five or ten such novellas, but then you can make it entirely self-contained and hype up the energy to draw the reader in, instead of taking forever walking to Mordor. The Pleasure Dome literally set up the next four titles, with The Doomsday Vault and The Last Flagship being side quests to get to the Hammerfield duology (cliffhangered in the middle).

So you might look at your writing speed. Your commitments outside of writing, and what you could reasonably expect to produce in a year. Half of a 200,000 word doorstop, or 4-5 individual titles on that long arc, each making you money now? (And you can go back and collect them into a single spine later. Javier has Omnibus One and Two for those first eight.)

There are no rules anymore. If you publish it, folks will find it and read it. (Your craft and especially your luck will factor in, because I have been very lucky, but I was also poised to take advantage of that luck, both times it hit so far, as well as any future occurrences.)

YOU need to find that story length that makes you happy. I grew up on comic books, so incredibly long, serialized arcs are my wheelhouse, broken down into monthly, digestible lumps, with occasional cliffhangers. Comic books, ya know?

What will fill you with joy to write? How do you make your writing compelling? And anyone that tells you you can’t do something is either a fool or a foe.

I’m telling you that you have more options, and that you need to consider what you can do with them.

Because we’re all here to make money and have fun, aren’t we?

The Power of Breaking Streaks

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The power of breaking streaks has been on my mind. I quit the day job to become a full-time writer at the end of February, 2018 (No Pants Day, as we celebrate it around here). I had previously been tracking my writing as an annual thing, but in March and April I realized that I had greatly increased my writing speed and output, so I created a new spreadsheet to track. Ended up with just over 75k words for the month.

Pulp Speed One is only 83,334 words per month. One millions words per year. Pulp Two is 100,000/month. Hell, I can do this.

In May of 2018, I pushed a little, aided by a writing marathon. Ended up at 120k, or Pulp Speed Three. In the four years since, I have never fallen below 100,000 words, though there have been several times where I had to crush in in the last week to make that number. Usually February (short month) and August/September (busy season.)

This August, I’ll be going to Minneapolis for a week of family vacation, then doing CONvergence after that. I told them I was open to doing a lot of panels when I signed up. At most cons, that means I’ll get 4-6 over a 3-4 day weekend. They took me serious. Way serious. I have, between panels, signing, reading, and appearing on a podcast, sixteen things I’m doing from Thursday to Sunday. Like, all day, every day, basically.

I can do it. Have done it in the past. However, to do something like that, I turn on a mode called “Carnival Barker” which I’m pretty good at. However, he’s a mask. Not me at all. A bright, energetic, hyperactive lunatic.

Last time I did it was Rose City Comic Con in 2018. Ugly weekend.

Basically, I stop writing, because all my energy goes into performance instead. Different kind of creative.

Minneapolis will be no different, considering how much of each day I will be “On.”

Travel day out, plus four days of con, means I can expect to lose 20-25,000 words from my normal pace, plus however long it takes me to recover afterwards. (Taking a train home over two days, just to see the sights and do something Anti-Stodgy.)

With that in mind, I was talking to Fabulous Publisher Babe™ last night. Came to realize that I COULD do catch up afterwards, but that would drain me even more.

There’s this thing called a Streak. I’ve been on it for more than four years now. It threatens to take control, because we’re all competitive that way. I’m competing against myself, and nobody else, but it is still a competition.

I realized that I needed to come to grips with the streak breaking. Then I decided that I should simply break the streak entirely. Gone. Over. Start a new one for a while.

So instead of a cap of 120,000 words per month (all she’ll allow me), my cap in August will be 80,000. Yeah, I realize, still a shit ton of words compared to some folks. I also know people that put that out in a week and a half.

Stopping at 80 (and I do mean stopping, whichever day I hit that number, whichever paragraph, too) means I will not cross Pulp Speed One for the month. I think that I will still sustain Pulp Three for the year, as that’s 1.4 million words, and I’m currently about 50,000 above that, which I will offset by losing 40k here, which I can make up down the stretch.

If I want to.

Breaking the streak means that I don’t have to. I am currently about a year ahead on my publishing schedule (writing things now that will come out next summer/fall), with another year or so worth of Book Ones in the can where I need to write the rest of the series before I start publishing them.

Losing 40k here is not the end of the world, mostly because I’ve been really jamming on novellas this spring and summer. Ballpark 20k for a complete story as part of a much longer series arc, in a manner similar to the first eight Science Officer books (all 24-33k).

And I’m having fun writing. Short, medium, long. I have the second Kincaide’s War book done. Vehicles of Epiphany came in at 157k. (The Eden Package was 163k).

So I’m going to take something of a reverse vacation in August. Do other things, though I’m not sure what. Not write as much or as focused, which likely means that I’ll be backbraining a lot of weirdness.

That and maybe working with English Paul on a Punk Rock Opera. There’s always that.

But I’ll control the breaking of the streak, so it won’t weigh on me with the guilt. I’m a little sad ahead of time, but I’ll be over it and moving on by then. That’s good.

What kinds of streaks do you have, and should you consider breaking them now, so they don’t take over your life?

CONvergence 2022 schedule

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So I am going to Minneapolis in August for the CONvergence convention. Hopefully, I’ll see folks there, but I just found out my schedule, and things are going to be a bit hectic. Fortunately, I’m also going to be in town for a few days ahead of time, so if you want to get together for a meal or coffee, let me know now so I can arrange things. (Move quickly, ya hear?)

This is my first time at this con, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ is from the Twin Cities, and knows a lot of folks from the con scene, as well as on the ConComm. These people are pros, from all I’ve been told. And all I’ve seen, talking to them.

It was last night during dinner when I nearly swallowed my tongue. 😉

Each panel came as a separate email. Back to back. Fifteen of them in short order.

I’m gonna be busy. Flat out crazy, from dawn to dusk, it seems. And will be introverting in between often, because I’ll have to basically be ON for four days. It will be fun. I will learn lots, share lots, and meet a bunch of folks. I’ll get to see some old friend IRL, as well as IRL some folks who have only been email addresses until now.

So, if you are coming, or are local, check below and see if any of these look like fun.

Fabulous Publisher Babe™ also informs me that her schedule isn’t nearly as hectic, but I made the foolish mistake of saying I’d be fine with a lot of panels. They took me up on it. Usually, being wide open means half as many, and then I will frequently volunteer as a panelist when something comes up. (Someone sick, someone late, utter catastrophe. One OryCon, they realized the day before that they had a panel with nobody on it and sent out a frantic call for anybody to help. I was there.)

Anyway, hope folks feel like making the trip to Minneapolis in a month. Would like to see you all and maybe start putting faces to names. If all this works out, she and I have talked about this becoming our “Home con” since Orycon is skipping 2022 and might be done. (Sad, but nature of things, ya know.)

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Me or her. As noted, we’re coming up a little early to see family, so I’ll be around.

Cheers,

b

8/11 (Thu)

Indie Publishing 101, scheduled for 8/11/2022 2:00 PM.

Clothing Styles, Textiles, and Politics, scheduled for 8/11/2022 5:00 PM.

Physics of Space Combat, scheduled for 8/11/2022 8:30 PM.

8/12 (Fri)

Going from Short to Long, scheduled for 8/12/2022 11:00 AM.

Rock the Genres, scheduled for 8/12/2022 5:00 PM.

Writing and Publishing Serialized Fiction, scheduled for 8/12/2022 8:30 PM

8/13 (Sat)

How Can SF Franchises Help Suggest Environmental Solutions?, 8/13/2022 9:30 AM.

Microfarming, scheduled for 8/13/2022 11:00 AM.

Enterprising Individuals Live!: Star Trek: First Contact, scheduled for 8/13/2022 2:00 PM.

Things Cyberpunk Got Right, scheduled for 8/13/2022 3:30 PM.

Licensed RPGs, scheduled for 8/13/2022 5:00 PM.

Roleplaying Informing Writing, scheduled for 8/13/2022 8:30 PM.

8/14 (Sun)

Space Traffic, scheduled for 8/14/2022 9:30 AM.

Putting the “Punk” Back in *Punk Genres, scheduled for 8/14/2022 12:30 PM.

Science of Cooking/Baking, scheduled for 8/14/22 3:30 PM.

“You are a commodity, not a brand”

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Fellow told me that the other day. Part of a discussion on the interwebs about the different lifestyles that come with Indie Publishing.

First off, if anyone tells you that “you MUST” do X, feel free to ignore them. I’ll offer suggestions and hints, but I haven’t found the secret handshake that made me wealthy beyond all dreams of avarice.

Not that I would mind.

I can tell you what works for me. I can look at what worked for other folks.

I can quote you back some sage advice folks like Kristine Kathryn Rusch shared with me along the way. Considering how long she’s been in the business, I’m inclined to listen to her. Don’t always agree, but woman’s seen a lot.

Especially when she talks about folks that have a system. That have “you MUST” as part of their vocabulary. She also likes to circle back occasionally and note how many of them have vanished completely from the ecosystem that perhaps they once dominated.

Gone. Poof. They had a system. It worked for a while. Then other people started using the same system (maybe they started teaching classes or something). Or maybe the system took advantage of a quirk in a rules algorithm that got changed and broke things.

[I have a friend who works at Amazon who is only allowed to nod knowingly when I mention that. He has a full team dedicated to finding such things and breaking them with hammers. And maniacal laughter occasionally.]

So we talk about what works for us.

I’ve tried Kindle Unlimited. Put a series in. Saw the results. Pulled them out a year later.

Didn’t make much money. Didn’t generate many new fans.

Folks in KU are a different reader that those outside.

Folks in KU want all the books they can consume for that $10/month they pay. And it turns out to be a lot of books. Good for them. KU pays about $0.0045/page read, at least recently. Two hundred page book yields ninety cents, give or take.

If I sell that same book on Amazon, let’s assume it was for sale for $5.99 (most of my longer novels are). I’d make roughly $4.05 net.

Bit of a difference there from the same single event. I can make a living at four dollars a sale. Don’t need all that many such happenings per month. You should take your monthly income and divide it by four. That’s how many such novel sales you would need.

Not all that many, is it?

But us Indies are always looking for more money. To do that, we have the choice of being in KU or being wide. I talk occasionally about how I listened to country music in the 90s (don’t ask). Garth Brooks released an album that was only available at Walmart. Exclusive. Kinda like Kindle Unlimited. I stopped buying his music. Have no idea how many albums the man has released. Stopped being a fan of his. Never looked back.

I want to serve all my fans. That means my books are in Kobo and their subscription service, which does not require exclusivity. iTunes, or whatever it is this week. Barnes and Noble. The library (you can ask them to acquire copies for you to check out. Prices are good.) Plenty of other places.

I don’t want to be a commodity. I’ve done experiments where I dropped the prices of some of my books to free as a test. Every time, I see a burst of downloads. Then I look at book two in the series over the next three months.

I have never seen any change in sales from before the price drop.

Folks downloading free books aren’t reading them. They are collecting them. Obsessively. Or too cheap to buy the rest of the series when that costs them money.

Same goes with KU. Folks don’t want to spend money.

I know any number of folks who tried KU over the years. Maybe they built up a following and made decent money doing it. Can be done. Hell of a treadmill, though.

A number of them turned around later and tried to exit Kindle Unlimited. Tried to create that same success in the wider world to match what they’d had in the walled garden. (That was what they called AOL in the old days. About as successful, meaning great for a while, then tapered off and failed. I have my doubts about the long-term viability of KU)

I’m not sure I know anybody that has had success inside KU and then managed to turn around and manage it outside as well. Generally, that’s because you are a commodity.

Interchangeable with any of dozens of other folks in your niche genre. Readers are looking for the cheapest entertainment they can get. Amazon wants folks to keep putting books in, because that’s a nice, steady income for them each month.

Us commodities are not so successful, because we are not brands in there.

I am a brand. I work at being a brand. That’s more than just a sub-genre I write in, because I write in several. And I write in other genres. You know what to expect from a Blaze Ward book, because I try to be consistent in my themes, tones, and stylistic choices.

I want to entertain you. I need you to come back and buy more books if I intend to live a lifestyle that doesn’t involve a job. I need your help. So I need to provide you with value.

On the flip side, those folks that just want free books don’t help me. They don’t really care what the book is, as long as they don’t have to actually pay full price for it.

I’m wide. As wide as I can get. That’s on purpose. I can back up my choices with logic and evidence.

For you, if you are in KU, I’d ask why. You might make it work. I know folks that do. Not many, and it gets harder every week, but some do.

As you build out your career, where do you think you are more likely to find fans and build up a llifestyle? What is your roadmap?

Do you have a roadmap? Do you have a long-term goal?

Or are you throwing wet spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks? (Granted, we all do that, so I’m not about to kink-shame you for it, but even then, I have plans and measures of success or failure to pursue.)

Are you going to be a commodity, or a brand?

Fanboy Report – 20220502

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I got to fanboy yesterday. Phil Kosnett (the now-former Ambassador) and his lovely wife Alison have been on a west coast swing, visiting their daughter in LA and then their son in Portland, OR. And they were gracious enough to carve out time for me and Fabulous Publisher Babe™ to have dinner with them last night.

Drove down Monday morning to see one of my step-daughters for the first time since before the plague (medical issues have kept her isolated from any possible infection) and we got to have lunch and hang out with her all afternoon. That included a trip to a hydroponics shop south of downtown where I got to watch the Babe nerd out entirely with the guys that worked there and buy bulk supplies for the hydroponics facility just off my kitchen in the main house.

Then the three of us sat in Rose City Coffee off Milwaukee and talked until nearly 6pm.

I love collecting interesting people. It makes life so much better when you can sit and lose hours jabbering about all sorts of things.

Then dinner. German place on East Division. Olympia Provisions Public House. Great food. Great staff. Fabulous dinner.

Went in expecting Phil and Alison. Also got to meet Alex and Nik (up from Los Angeles) and talk to everyone for several hours over meat and coffee. Four more interesting people to sit and listen to. All of them lead interesting lives. Interesting people. Lotsa fun.

Best part was when I got to ambush Phil. Brought along my Dad’s old briefcase that I stole from him some thirty-five years ago, because it was big enough and had the hard sides I needed.

I had brought along all seven Kosnett books currently available in print. Phil got a chance to read the whole series in Advanced Reader Ebook Copies last fall, because I wanted him to know the whole story while he still had Redshirts to taunt at the US Embassy. And I’ll ship him two sets of copies of 5 & 6 in the fall. One set I’ve signed and one for him to sign and ship back to complete my set.

After dinner, I got him to sign all seven.

Best part, however was having him sign my copy of the original Star Fleet Battles rules from 1983. Gonna scan the actual rules pages and put them back in the folder, because I’m framing this one for my brag wall.

And you can see the genesis of the whole CS-405 trilogy right there in Historical Scenario SH1.0 – Sabotage.

While on a special mission during Y161, the Federation cruiser Kongo was suddenly confronted by a Klingon Battlecruiser. Fearing possible interference with his mission, Captain Phillip Kosnett ordered the warp engines brought to full power and discovered that they had been sabotaged! The First Officer and Chief engineer began frantic repairs as the enemy cruiser closed for the kill.

Sounds an awful lot like a broken JumpSail behind enemy lines, doesn’t it? And his daughter laughed that this misspelled his first name back then. (Only one L, like Alison.)

And it turned out that I was wrong on where he found me. I thought he had a Google Alert, like many of the folks I know famous enough to pay attention to that. Nope, he had a subscription to Scrib’d and typed his name in to see if he got any hits. Boy, was he surprised. At the same time, he is the subject of various fiction from the Star Trek/Star Fleet universes, and even has his own Star Trek action figure. (I’m too cheap for action figures right now, unless someone knows a way to do them for less than like $500 plus printing costs for design, et al.)

He found Queen Anne’s Revenge, and had to read it. And reach out. ’cause he’s awesome.

Finally, we headed out and got several pics of everyone. I cropped this one to only show me, Phil, and the Babe, because it’s too early in the day to check with the other three that its okay to show them as well.

From there, the long drive home. Left the house Monday morning at 9am. Got home about 11:15pm. Grumptacular kittie only partly mollified by sitting on someone’s lap and purring as we unwound. I’d had coffee in the afternoon and with dinner, which I don’t normally do, because I knew I’d need to stay sharp. It had been monsoon all the way down, but the drive back was lovely dry.

And I got to fanboy all over Phil. Better, he took it graciously, because he’s such an awesome person.

Right now, he and A live on the east coast in a Carolina vacation home they’ve kept while being assigned all over the damned world doing things for the State Department. As both of the kids are on the west coast, possibly permanently, I’m hoping they maybe decide to live close enough that I get to see them occasionally.

They both have such interesting stories to tell. This is a picture of Alison holding an M203 (M-16 with underbarrel grenade launcher) while in Iraq, apparently as a joke with the troops guarding her while she was in the field.

To counter it, I also have a meme pic that has Phil in it, originally produced by his friends at State. He’s even putting that image on the cover of a book of essays he is editing right now.

 

This is why I like them so much. And look forward to hearing more of their stories. Fantastically interesting people.

Better, now that he’s no longer a formal government employee, he’s allowed to have his own opinions. And part of that might be writing some of the science fiction he’s been such a nerd for for so long. He suggested at one point a story that was basically Murder On The Orient Express, but told as a formal diplomatic cable, by someone who’s an expert in such language.

Y’all should lean on him to do it, because even set in space on a luxury liner or transport of some sort, it sounds like something utterly unique and really fun. The Babe looked him dead in the eye and said “You write it, and we’ll build an anthology around it.”

Snicker. Not like I haven’t already done that four times between Blaze Ward Presents and the Special Editions.

So that’s my show and tell this stupendous Tuesday morning. And my utterly amazing roadtrip ADVENTURE on Monday.

Sorry that I’m taunting you over leading such mundane lines but I got to have WAY TOO MUCH FUN yesterday, after too long cooped up in the house hiding from other weirdos. And then to hang out with two sets of fun folks I could talk to for hours.

What are you doing to make your world a more interesting place, and yourself the sort of dinner guest that people can’t wait to invite over?

Shade and sweet water

b

West of the Mountains, WA

Anti-Stodgy and Muppet Flailing

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I’ve talked elsewhere about Fabulous Publisher Babe™’s Anti-Stodgy campaign. It arises from research showing that between about ages 14 and 24, your tastes tend to lock down.

Same food. Same music. Same clothing. Same routine.

Humans are creatures of pattern, so they get into something and stay. That’s how mid-life crises come about, when someone wakes up one morning wondering what the hell they’ve been doing with their life for the last twenty years.

Or, to quote one of my favoritist characters recently (Kohahu Kugosu): Comfortable kills.

I try to keep myself uncomfortable. Simple as that.

Stay out of the rut.

A good chunk of that gets wrapped up in my own Anti-Stodgy campaign.

In answering “Yes” to new experiences when something comes up. Done some stupid shit. Made some mistakes. Learned some amazing new things.

Until recently, I did two monthly newsletters. One dedicated to Publishing news, and the other the infamous Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter. Combination of new experiences I’ve tried and new recipes I’ve come across. (Redneck Chef is now exclusive to my Patreon for folks at the $1+ level but still happens monthly.)

Same food? Nope. Want to try new things. Might not all work. Not get added to the repertoire.

New.

About eighteen months ago, I got interviewed by the local newspaper in Enumclaw, WA. Gave my usual spiel about “Do you want to be famous or rich?” by talking about Bernie Taupin.

Nobody knows who Bernie is, except fans. Man’s got more money than he knows what to do with, though.

Usual spiel. Given it dozens of times. I’d rather be rich.

Weirdly, though, I got an email right after that. Fellow in Enumclaw who was a composer. Asked if I wanted to be his Bernie.

We call him Elton, because he’s absolutely nothing like the original. (It works, just run with it.)

So he and I started collaborating on music. I’d never written lyrics, but I’ve written poetry, drama, non-fiction, and make a living at fiction.

Shit, yes. Let’s do it.

So I taught myself what lyrics looked like. How they worked. Not an expert. Not even the instant expert that writers can do.

But wrote a series of lyrics for Elton. He turned one of them into a song.

Then he looks at me one day and says “We need a singer. You sing?”

Well, technically yes. Have been known to crank the CDs to stupid and sing along. Used to be pretty good, once upon about forty years ago when last I had formal training.

So I recorded all the vocals. He played all the instruments. We’ve gone back and forth for a while getting the sound right because this is all new to me, and a new genre and art form for him.

He usually writes music samples that get picked up for television shows or movies. Incidental or introductory music. Nothing where you’d know his name unless you were the Music Director of the project who heard his stuff and decided that it fit what they needed.

Until now.

This last Friday, he pushed the launch button.

Ward & Rogers are in the process of releasing our first single. “Left It All Behind.”

Lyrics by B. Ward. Composition PJ Rogers. Vocals by B. Ward.

Sometime in the coming week, it will get out everywhere and I’ll share a link to Amazon and iTunes (along with a lot of muppet flailing, because muppet flailing) so folks can see what we’ve been up to. LIsten along. Even buy it and help me expand into my new multi-media empire.

First song. Already working on a second, as well as writing more and teaching myself how to use the MuseScore software in order to get down the melodies I hear so he can turn them into awesomeness faster.

And (this is the utterly cool part), I will have a Freddie Mercury Number of TWO. Somewhere, on some project that might never get released, the lead singer of Queen took some of PJ’s music and did something with it. And did it officially so that you see both their names when you look in the right database.

How awesome is that?

Worse, I’m already talking to some folks to see if PJ and I can create something like our own Alan Parsons Project, where I’m not necessarily always singing. (Got a couple of things that work far better with a female voice, so I’ve talked to at least one friend to see if I can blackmail her into playing along. TBD).

Anti-Stodgy.

Doing something new, for the sake of newness, rather than spending the rest of your life in the same chair, eating the same food, watching the same tv shows every night after a job you hate, but not enough to strike out and try something entirely new.

For me, it has included making music, weird as that should sound to anyone who knows me.

But it’s happening.

What have you done to introduce newness into your life?

Why aren’t you smiling more and occasionally muppet flailing?

You are the brand

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Writers, you are a brand. You get that, right? When a reader sees your name on a cover, they will hopefully have a good idea what sort of story to expect. We’re beyond good art, good font, and good blurb here. Your name.

Your brand.

So what are you selling them?

This came up for me recently because I’m generally known for space opera kinds of actiony science fiction. At the same time, I write other stuff. Most of it falls into SF, but I also have the occasional sword and sorcery fantasy piece, some from the early days and some from ongoing efforts when the muse bites me on the ass.

But in 2022, I’m planning on dropping some books that fall into the Action/Adventure category. No magic or paranormal. Hardly any science fiction at all (less than any given James Bond movie, for comparison, with the sorts of technology you might have the Tuesday After Next).

I hope that my usual SF fans will come with me on a new adventure. Science fiction fans tend to be the most forgiving, by the way, when an author branches out. Mystery readers, on the other hand, tend to not come out of mystery as a rule. There will be exceptions, and most of those are brand related, when they love a particular author that much. Or the author happens to drift into a new category that is also one they like.

Buchman and I have been masterminding for a few years now. Trying to figure out how to glimpse the future and see where publishing is going over the next several years. Not all of those insights will help us make money, but more than a few of them have saved us time and effort. Opportunity costs.

Science fiction is going through one of those regular cycles where sales boom for a while, then slide down the waveform. In the last twenty-five years, we’ve seen YA Magic Academies become a major publishing event. Then YA Post-apocalyptic SF. Sparkly vampires, which was not quite horror like previous generations. Mostly Paranormal Romance, if you had to categorize it, but it resists being limited for a variety of reasons.

For each genre, there are expectations. When you build up a fan slowly, you will first do it by hitting enough of those expectations (not all of them) and providing entertainment value. Over time, they will come to know and like your brand. To form expectations about what your next book will be. To preorder your next book sight-unseen.

This is where cover art and font treatment come into play, because they form unconscious opinions about the story based purely on the art, in that first tenth of a second the (potential) reader see it. And those expectations shape everything, so if you are wrong, you lead them astray.

Blurbs help refine, but the cover art draws them in far enough to look at the blurb. Before then, they look for the author name.

Do they know you? Do the like you? Are they fans? Or do they have bad experiences because you maybe burned them in the past?

Lots to unpack here, but I’m going to focus on the brand part.

You know you are in a Blaze Ward story where someone is sticking it to the Man. Where you will have some manner of found family forming and enduring. I don’t do grand family arcs, because my personal history does not lend itself well to that sort of thing. Suffice it to say that there’s a reason I live in Seattle, which was about as far away as I could get from certain elements of family without crossing oceans or national borders.

My brand in SF is fast-paced, lean prose leaning heavily into my past as a poet. Stories that draw you in and hold you until you read the entire thing in one sitting if I’ve done it right. Smart characters. Competent women who are not defined by the man in their lives. Real people solving real problems, without any gods or deus ex machina involved. No Chosen One. No ancient prophesy.

I’ve talked in other places about why I will put such a (Chosen One) book down immediately. I don’t care what twist you’ve put on it or how cute you think it is. Not interested. Worse, if you’ve gotten me as far as reading a sample of your book when I find it is Chosen One, you can pretty much rest assured that I have now formed an opinion of your brand and marked you off of people I will have any interest in reading in the future.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is your brand? What ten, individual words could you write down the left margin of a page that summed up your writing style for someone that had never picked up one of your books before?

Who are you?

If you don’t know, that means that you have never considered yourself from the standpoint of the readers you want to entice into giving you money. They will have opinions. Probably already do. What will they think?

If you aren’t selling well, is it because someone picking up any of your books has no idea what to expect? What genre it might be, based on cover art and title font?

What are you selling?

Any one book is a product in and of itself. But when you have a catalog, you are selling something bigger. A brand.

What is your brand? What should it be, if we were to ask you and ten fans? How do you reconcile if those opinions are radically different?

I am a commercial artist. That’s a fancy way of saying that I care about the business side of things. Because this is a business. I am publishing books because I want folks to buy them and read them. To support me in a lifestyle that no longer involves pants.

To do that, I have to take into account commercial considerations. That does not involve writing to market, because I write in genres and sub-genres with large fan bases. I love SF, and can make money in it, because my first mission when I start a new piece is to entertain my fans.

All the politics and ax-grinding is secondary, and largely hidden away inside the prose where you might absorb it without conscious thought. That’s also part of my brand.

I regularly hear about writers who just want to write. Who just want to put a story down on paper and have people fall in love with it. None of that icky, commercial crap. Lovely thought. Any story will have fans, but the weirder and more niche it is, the smaller that potential fan base.

What do you do when you’ve sold your book to all twelve fans of a sub-sub-sub-sub-slipstream-genre?

If you don’t want to work the commercial side of things, then I presume you are busy querying agents for a book deal. Best of luck, because those are rarer than hen’s teeth and pay hardly anything at all. But you don’t have to worry about anything except finding a home for your book, because the publisher will be on the hook for everything, which includes cover art, title font, and blurb. Maybe they’ll find a winning combination. Maybe not.

Either way, they will be forming your brand for you.

Read that again.

You have given up control of your brand, meaning that someone else gets to decide how the world of readers perceive you.

What are they going to see?

And is it worth it?

The January Man: A few thoughts

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The January Man.

One of my favorite movies, because it flips so many genre tropes on its head without ever breaking the fourth wall or mugging for the camera. Rich (read: Insane) characters in a fun setting, doing crazy shit. I often wonder if they just kind of handed the cast the rough outlines of a script and told them to run with it. It has that madcap feel.

If you haven’t seen it lately, you should go watch it. Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman, Harvey Keitel, Danny Aiello, and Rod Steiger. Best of all, the angst of a man just trying to find a decent espresso. (Movie came out in 1989. Before Starbucks was the thing it later became. When asking for espresso could be a running gag.)

The movie is on my mind this morning because it takes a most interesting path to telling a mystery. Breaks almost all the rules in the process.

The murderer is never a character in the story. Only hardly makes an appearance, at the beginning and end. I had to go look him up. Played by Greg Walker, who was the film’s Stunt Coordinator and has one hell of an impressive IMDB page as a stuntman, running from 1970 to 2001.

That is to say, there is no murderer character in the movie. Instead, you have an All-Star cast alternatively chewing the scenery and bouncing off each other at high speed. And I do mean high speed.

Oh, and trying to figure out a whole OTHER set of crimes. The ones that got Kevin’s character Nick kicked off the police force to the point he had to become a fireman instead.

I’ve always loved this movie, in spite of the shitty reviews it got at the time. Watched it not long ago and it still holds up (assuming you set your mind in 1989, which was a completely different world).

Partly that’s because the movie is told In Media Res (which is the theme and title of a new Business for Breakfast book that just came out). Starting the story in the middle, rather than the long build-up of character development that takes chapters of a book and long stretches of a movie.

There’s a serial killer. Nobody can stop him. The Mayor demands that Police Commissioner Harvey reinstate his disgraced brother (Kevin/Nick) to solve it. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ had never seen the film because she thought it was some taut, psychological thriller, instead of a comedy. And it is a comedy. Alan Rickman playing a Bohemian named Ed, nuff said?

As I thought about it this morning, I realized that Greyson Leigh, the star of the Hunter Bureau novels (with #3 and #4 both coming out shortly), was loosely based on Kevin Kline’s character, except played by Humphrey Bogart at his roughest in Maltese Falcon. (Writer-brain is weird, but that shouldn’t be news to you folks at this point.)

But what got me going this morning was the realization that I don’t often really have villains floating around in my stories. I might have people on the other side, but rarely are they dedicated to evil. Instead, they are just people. Sometimes, the villain is just a bad situation. Or a personal issue to be dealt with in the middle of some mad caper.

But I can get away with it because I like to tell stories like The January Man. Have all the folks on one side of the equation going up against a ghost and trying to outsmart somebody who is not even there.

All the while, they are dealing with their own personal issues and problems that predate the start of the story. (Betrayals, failed romances, balsamic vinegar.) We don’t see Nick getting fired and denounced. We first see him being a hero, a fireman rescuing a kid from a burning building. Ed and Bernadette are mostly innocent and pure as characters, while the entire rest of the cast are some level of sleazeball played with great verve and joy by some amazing actors.

Mostly, I just like the In Media Res part of things. But you should know that about me. I like starting in the middle and just letting the characters fill in details as part of the conversation. (Seriously, the whole movie feels like some fantastic improv group trying to win a bet.) Telling, instead of showing, because that one throwaway line makes people stop and try to envision what really went down off-screen. (Sorry, Josh.)

I can tell a story at speed. Start in the middle, solve the mystery, save the girl, save the day. Never deal with how the characters got where they are.

That’s probably one of the reasons why the critics hated this movie. The other likely being that all the standard tropes get tossed on their heads. For me, I chalk that up to people expecting cops like the Police Commissioner and the Mayor to be heroic figures (obviously, they’ve never actually read the paper or seen the truth about most of those folks, especially NYC). Nick Starkey is more like a private detective here, and brings a PI’s sensibilities to the case. Turned that way, it fits exactly into the mold of those movies.

But there’s no real villain. Just a bad-ass Stunt Coordinator who engages in a fantastic chase sequence with Kevin Klein where they both fall down several flights of stairs.

“Who’s he?” somebody asks at the end as Nick has captured The January Man.

“He’s nobody,” Nick answers.

Because he really is. Nobody. Played by a Stunt Coordinator. And he is a completely different way to tell an old, tired story.

What have you done to turn tropes and expectations on their heads lately?

2021 in Books and things

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Because there is now way in hell to discuss the year in general and not offend your delicate sensibilities with my profanity. So we’ll stick with writing productivity.

For the year, I wrote fifteen novels. Five of those are the back of the First Centurion Kosnett books, of which Encounter at Vilahana and Consensus at Aditi are now out. Hegemony at Dalou and Princes at Ewin will come out in the spring, with Empire at Gloran and Domain at Yaumgan in the fall. This will generally wrap up the Republic of Aquitaine Navy books for a while, though I have notes on the next couple of sets that I want to write when I get back to it.

Two Hunter Bureau books: The Pleasure Model and Inhuman are Feb and March 2022. Bigger, badder, darker. Open-ended, so I can write more when the mood strikes.

The Fifth Handsome Rob Gig: Kinetic Solutions in May. I had WAY too much fun with this one, but this is me inverting most of the tropes of the secret agent action hero literature to do something more like what my research has suggested real spies do. Again, there will be more, because each of these is self-contained structurally.

Summer is a semi-cyberpunk trilogy called Captain Daring. I say semi-cyberpunk because they are not all that dark and gloomy. Mostly I rolled the world forward to 2104 and guestimated what things would look like. And presumed that not a lot of politics would really change.

My personal genesis for Captain Daring was reading Gail Carriger’s book on The Heroine’s Journey and working my way through a plot structure. If you split the difference between Carriger and the Harlequin movie, you’ve about got it.

Finally, the eleventh Science Officer: Buried Among The Stars. Thank you to everyone for the comments and the sales. I had a nice December and when all that money comes in around March I’ll get to do a little happy dance.

In addition to the fifteen novels, I wrote thirty-five other projects, for an accidental round fifty for the year.

Part of that is spinning up a new penname for the erotica. Cole Braddock, if you want to go enjoy some. I wrote the first half of the first Dirk Thruster series in 2020 and the remaining six this year. Additionally, the first eight Maddox stories, which will come out in the spring. Plus two Commander Machesky novellas.

Machesky and Dirk are both space opera erotica. You could pull out all the sex and still have a story. You could pull out all the plot and still have a pleasant interlude. Maddox is straight historical.

I’m having fun, and will continue to publish them.

Most of the short fiction went to my patreon folks. I say $5 will get you a short story every month, but more than once they’ve gotten two. Occasionally an unpublished novel. I actually had to write a new cyberpunkish short this week because I looked at all the unpublished fiction I have and realized that I only had three short pieces in all that they hadn’t seen. Might have to write more for January, just to get ahead.

My rule on Patreon is that any of those stories don’t come out for at least six months after they get it. Sometimes more than a year. Figure I should reward folks for supporting my crazy ventures.

So they got to meet Trevor and Night Butterfly. Roland. Quill. Otter Space. Nissa. Emily. Oleg. Senior Flight Officer Brannon. Wilson. And Harper. All of those are new universes, some of which will turn into novels and series at some point (Oleg, Brannon, and probably Wilson first).

This is your reminder that skipping a starbucks each month can get you some fun and imaginative fiction years before anybody else sees them. As a case in point, I’ll probably drop four collections of science fiction shorts this year, each about 65,000 words, give or take. You haven’t read at least half of it, and would have had to read every issue of Boundary Shock Quarterly, Blaze Ward Presents, and a couple of other places where I submitted stories, in order to be caught up.

See what you’re missing?

Boundary Shock Quarterly continues apace. I will be publishing Issue 017 in a week or so. Dieselpunk.

In 2021, we came out with Solarpunk, Space Marines, Cargo Wars, and Wandering Monsters.

2022 titles are Dieselpunk, Veterans, Sea Stories, and New Worlds, New Civilizations. That’s Year Five (Issues 017-020) so we’re still plugging along.

Blaze Ward Presents has gone from twice a year to annually, just because of the amount of work. This year we did “Crime And…” where the submitted story had to be a mystery with a one word title that finished the phrase. I got some fun and interesting stories, because BWP is always about letting writers swing for the fences. Far too often, editors put down multi-page specs about all the themes that they don’t want, then turn around and complain when all the stories that they get are identical. (I’ve actually sat in a coffee shop and listened to that exact bitch from somebody who should have known better.)

So now BWP is annual. Every year, I open the call on April 1. Close it April 30. Publish as close to June 1 as I can hit. Helps that most of the people involved are pros who give me quality stories and hit deadlines. (Plus a few of them I will tell the next theme well in advance, just so they can fit it into busy writing schedules. If you are a pro who can hit theme and want to play, hit me up via email.)

End of 2021-wise, I finished the year with 1,409,687 words. For much of the year, I was aiming to write about 5000 words per day, with Saturdays taken entirely off because I had started doing Tai Chi in the Park in Enumclaw, WA. Will get back to that.

Traditionally, 4,000/day means that I can take off a few days at the end of the month and just coast. 117,000 words for the month (or a little more) and done. This year, that mostly worked, except that August and September went sideways, and I struggled to hit 100,000 each of those months. Managed it, barely, but things were busy and I’m hoping that 2022 relaxes on that front.

I continue to be healthy. Vaxxed and Boosted and fuck all those people who refuse. Personally, the faster they can die off the sooner the civilized portions of humanity can get back to something like a normal life. I gave them two years of sympathy and empathy, but they can just die now and make the world a better place for the rest of us.

If you aren’t vaxxed and DON’T HAVE A MEDICAL reason (I have friends who nearly died from getting their first dose, so they are at risk and can’t get it), then I don’t want to know you. Period. Go away. Die in the underbrush and maybe feed the feral cats or something.

Yeah, lost too many people these last two years to listen to your whining.

I plan to live to be 100. Plan to die at my keyboard with a stack of novels for my great-great-great-whatevers to publish when I’m gone. I can’t do that if you people keep mutating new diseases because you have to stick it to the libs. I’m one of those libs. (Actually, a really hard pink these days, as the overton window slides off a fucking cliff.) I’m done with you. Whoever you are.

Nuff said? Clear?

Good.

Hope for the rest of you that your 2021 didn’t do more damage to your life than you can handle, and that ’22 is better. I’d like to see my friends in person again, instead of Zoom, Discord, or phone calls. I miss (a very compact number of) people. We can do this, but everyone has to act like a grownup.

I want to keep writing. Got a lot more stories to tell, and only forty-some years to get there.

Be safe and take care.

And smile.

Shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA