It’s late October and I’m coming up on the end of the year. Time to sit down and determine how things went and are going.

Yesterday, I finished the second novel in the Air Pirates of Cyrenaica series. That’s number 18 for the year and number 40 overall. (Sped way up this year on a goal of 20 novels in one year. Will hit.)

For October, I’m at 97k words. For the year 1.15m. The goal is always at least 100,000 words in a month, and as much as 120k. This blog post won’t get me there, but I’ll be close.

There will, however, be fewer blog posts going forward.

Coming out of NINC this year, the general consensus was to send out two newsletters per month instead of one. In my case, that would mean three, because I’m about to start a whole other newsletter dedicated to publishing. “Blaze Ward’s Indie Publishing Corner” or something like that. Place for me to share what I’ve learned from all the people I talk to and learn from. Almost nothing to do with my writing.

In addition, I have my Patreon, where I post a weekly “what did I write this week” post on Mondays, as well as the various fiction I send out to my fans to read long before anyone else does.

So that right there is four things. Five, with the quarterly newsletters I send out for Boundary Shock Quarterly, but I don’t really count that, except that I need to write one this week.

So this blog will get a little less attention. Not enough to go stale, but…

We took a drive yesterday, me and Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm), to talk about communication channels. (We take long drives in order to reinvent publishing and come up with new Business For Breakfast books to write. Got two more on my schedule right now to write in early 2020.)

She has her chatty newsletter and her publishing newsletter. In my old newsletter I talk about what’s already come out, what’s coming, and farm news. (I have silly critters out here.)

Going forward, I wanted to split things into two pieces. Radically separate in order to keep them interesting for me, especially with as many different channels as I need to fill as the world fragments.

So, what do y’all think of this idea?

1. the publishing newsletter. Same as before.
2. the anti-stodgy campaign newsletter.

So there is scientific proof that most people get their personal tastes in damned near everything LOCKED in between 14 and 26. Same food. Same music. Same clothes.

Everything.

Yuck.

The Missus read that study a decade ago and said “Fuck that.”

Every month, she tries something new. A new restaurant. A new toothpaste (when the was the last time you changed toothpaste?). A new way to drive home. She just got a package with new clothing style. (An asymmetric, plaid tunic that’s really cool.)

Something.

So my spare newsletter will talk about the new things I’ve done. Last night, we cooked sunflower chokes (root ball) for dinner as a side. Think sweet potato when you dice them and bake with oil and salt. Really nice. Completely new for both of us.

One downside we discovered later is that it gives you gas. I mean loud farts. It was a silly evening, but we’re fine today. But we tried something new. Doesn’t always have to work, but it keeps the brain sharp.

Plus, I’ll talk recipes. She’s always been allergic to grains (wheat, corn, rice, soy, barley. anything derived from grass) so I have a number of recipes I altered for her to eat. Healthy stuff made of stuff instead of chemical additives. Later, we discovered dairy was an issue (coconut milk and non-soy butter), and she got badly sensitive to eggs (hives level problem).

But I still have all these recipes. Stuff from in between, when just replacing grains, as well as more recent, where I try to adapt anything I come across to be able for her to eat. Let me tell you, making breads without eggs or dairy is an adventure.

And not all those experiments work either, but that doesn’t stop me. Made Nanaimo bars the other day, with coconut milk and gelatin for the filling. Walnut, shredded coconut, and maple syrup for the crust.

That sort of thing.

So sometime soon, I’ll send out the usual newsletter. Probably Nov 15 after I get back from OryCon in Portland, OR. Then maybe Dec 1 we’ll start getting a little sillier.

I won’t be offended if folks don’t like the anti-stodgy. But you read the newsletter for the authentic me, and I can promise to be a little too authentic at times.

If you just want the publisher news stuff, send me your email and I’ll add you to the current list. It’s probably coming in January, after some other things get sorted out.

And welcome to the crazy.

🙂

At least that’s as far as I’m willing to commit to at present.

Crazy summer is over (theoretically). Got one part of the fence project left to finish partway on Monday and then hang the deer netting after that and call it done.

Recovering from NINC. Mostly. Got a lot of homework in front of me, including writing everything up from the conference so I know what I need to do going forward. Several weeks of homework ahead.

One of the things I plan to do will be to start direct-selling some of my short fiction directly off my website. Short stuff only, not novels. Stuff I won’t put up anywhere else, so everyone will have to get into the habit of coming here to get it. This is not an accident. The extra 60 cents I mightmake isn’t all that impressive, but it puts things better in my control.

Found out the other day from a fellow writer (or writer fellow) that if I don’t see more than X in sales for any given state, I don’t have to collect taxes for that state. And some of them are $10,000, while others are serious amounts of money. If I’m making that level I’ve traded up for other problems, and I can deal with that.

The thought right now is put them up for like $0.49 for a week or maybe the month. Then raise them to $0.99. Or maybe even a whole dollar. I know, big-time spender.

These will not be stories that get put up later on Amazon or anywhere else. Best you’d see is if I got around to doing another Beyond The Mirror Collection or six, depending on theme. Input from the peanut gallery will be taken under advisement.

At $0.99 on Amazon, I make 28-29 cents net. Everyone else is pretty similar. So I’m making more money at $0.49. And you’re saving money. Win/win.

The narrowcasting is coming. (More in a moment.)

I’ll be down at OryCon in November. I do not know what my schedule is, because they are behind on posting it. (I knew I was in trouble when one of the ConComm folks reached out personally to let me know that I would be on panels, but they were still filling things in. News to follow. Yikes.)

But after Orycon, I know a few people who are simply going to shut down their FB accounts and walk away. And I understand their logic. It can be a cesspool. Just this week, I had a friend of a friend post some armchair racism on my wall. That got deleted. She got banned. FB actually slapped me for my response, which may have been a bit overboard, but I like to remind folks that when they defend white supremicists, I will simply assume that they need to be tarred with the same brush. There is no equivalence there, as I have many friends who aren’t WASPs, and your racism offends me. If you can’t shut the hell up then go away.

But without something like FB, you will suddenly have ten thousand channels for communication. Unsocial media, as it were, where everyone goes off to their own fragment of the internet and loses track of everyone else.

Not talking. Probably worse than talking, even when I have to risk idiots explaining the importance of fourteen words to me. (That’s a good way to get yourself punched, by the way. You have been warned.)

But I’m also going to contribute in my own way.  Won’t stop the social media, but will be spending less time there. Will be blogging a little less  as well.

Instead, I will be moving up to doing a twice-a-month newsletter, probably starting with the new year. Chat about life and projects and the farm and whatever, plus talk about the book just come out, or the one coming.

Also, I will be starting an entirely separate newsletter. New signup, new process, new everything. This second one will be called “Blaze Ward’s Publishing Corner” or something equally memorable and will talk about what I know or have learned related to Indie publishing. Won’t be anything useful for TradPut writers, or folks who still have the delusional hope that they’ll get a agent or a deal in this lifetime. Won’t be much useful for folks in KU, because I’m wide and it is an entirely different ecosystem with different rules.

If you want on the mailing list, make sure I have your email by sending it to me and expressing direct interest. There will be a button for it at some point, but again, probably end of the year, once I write up all my NINC notes.

So far, we have broken Indie down into five separate categories. I hesitate to call them levels, because you can get from one to another without crossing some. When you sign up, I will send you the document (not quite done yet) as part of the on-boarding, so we all share a vocabulary.

Each newsletter will have stuff I have learned, broken out by the groups most likely to be able to take advantage of that information. It’s all good stuff to know, but a lot of Indie involves training wheels all over the place, only removed when you get comfortable. Myself included, even where I’m at in my career.

Folks joining us for our monthly writers lunch have complained (good-naturedly) that it can be a fire hose of information, and you just have to survive for a while until you start to get a grip and figure out what your path to the top of the mountain will look like.

There was some talk about putting it on my Patreon, but I’d rather folks just buy my books and those from the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm). Those come out after the fact, but will also help catch you up some.

Indie Press moves. My favorite two sayings, looking each direction: “That’s so three days ago.” and “The galaxy has changed.”

What worked for you as recently as three years ago is hopelessly out of date now. Sometimes, three months ago. Occasionally, as we learn things, three days ago.

You have to adjust your mindset. Part of that adjustment is that you have to reevaluate things on a weekly basis. Something will have changed. New tools. New services. New gimmicks suddenly not working anymore and causing people’s careers to implode while they thrash about hopelessly because Amazon got tired of chiselers.

Change.

If you want to play in the big leagues, adapt. I am not a big shark. Frequently, I am the smallest dogfish in the room, but the Babe and I punch well above our weight because we are willing to abandon things that don’t work and try new things. I get invited to meet with interesting people under NDAs because I have ideas, and want everyone to succeed by sharing with others.

As some of those NDAs expire, you’ll see useful bits in the newsletter, which is why the writer/publishers out there should consider it.

Fans are always welcome as well, but you gotta be nerdy to want to actually see the sausage being made. I know a few of you are, so feel free to jump in the boat with us.

Nobody knows where the river’s headed.

But it is going to be one hell of a fun ride.

[From last week’s NINC conference, written in real time and then stored to be sent out a week later.]

Saturday. Actually managed to sleep some last night. The hotel has a set temperature at all times, and it gets warm in the room. Or rather, I let my house get cold at night (66 in summer and 64 in the winter) so I’m not used to sleeping in hot. And so I woke up every night confused and overheated. Finally figured it out, but I’ve been ON for several days, so processing non-NINC things is occasionally difficult.

The background music and whine of the noise and AC does not help, so my head has basically been ringing for five days now. Hopefully, a few days of quiet next week will grind some of the jagged edges off my mind. (As you are reading this, hopefully everything is better. Will try to remember to put in a note, but it’s 9/28 right now, midafternoon. EDIT: OMG better after sleeping in my own bed at 64 F at night, when it’s 36F outside in the dawn.)

So done, more or less. Thu-Sat, with some meetings outside of the NINC structure itself on Wednesday, trying to map out the future of publishing so we can get ahead of the curve and either position ourselves to take advantage of it, or build mitigation plans to protect ourselves against it. Some of the things we envision are kinda scary, but most of them are black swans over the next 12-18 months, with probabilities growing ever greater over that period.

BEFORE I FORGET (again): Novelists, Inc. is an organization for “professional” writers. The annual conference is in St. Pete Beach in September. This is my second.

Membership requirements (as of now), taken from their website:

• If they’re traditionally published, you’ve earned at least $2,000 each from an advance or royalties in any consecutive twelve-month period following publication, and as long as one of those titles has been published within the last 5 years.
• If you’ve published at least two novels—each at least 30,000 words, and neither is a box set or collection of shorts.
• If they’re self-published, you’ve earned at least $5,000 each in any consecutive twelve-month period following publication, and as long as one of those titles has been published within the last 5 years.

As you can see, a little heavily tilted still towards trad, since a $2,000 advance is most medium-sized publishers for mid-list authors, whereas royalties above $10,000 in a year is pretty good work for the indies.

What happens is that the Indies like me that are here tend to be doing pretty good, and the tradpub writers who do attend tend to be either on the backside of their careers, or have lost their NY contracts and are frantically making the transition to Indie.

Additionally, the organization originally split from RWA, so romance writers are extremely over-represented in membership, but Thriller is catching up. I’m rather lonesome, just writing SF. (Not Romance SF, mind you. Lots of those folks, making good money.)

But the convention is to network and learn from others. Make contacts you take outside the week and continue to work with later.

Additionally, a lot of useful Vendors attend and make presentations. Folks like BookFunnel, Reedsy, Draft2Digital, Findaway Voices, and Book Brush have all done presentations and impressed me. The big book distributors (B, A, A, K) usually have a presence, but rarely send high-powered folks to this con, which always strikes me as kinda stupid.

One of them did a presentation that started off explaining how to create an author account and publish ebooks. And did you know you could even do print books? Seriously, it wasn’t even junior varsity sort of stuff, because everyone in that room is either making a full-time living as a writer, or has a plan to get there. Up your games, people. These are the sharks, not the tuna.

That’s where those earlier vendors I mentioned looked good. They came in and looked sharp, understood the level of knowledge in the room, and the amount of hunger. They want your money, and are willing to work their asses off to get it. And establish relationships that will last you over your career.

Money. Folks I’m going to be emailing even as you read these things, just because they have side conversations I want to follow up on, and options available to NINC people. Plus, really nice people. That’s why the names and the links. They are folks you need to know about if you don’t already. Poke me for introductions if you need them.

One of the themes of conversation here was trying to list out all the things that writers need, from the moment they have the books files ready to upload. One of the presenters referred to the “value chain” of publication and that became our shorthand. We need folks to hand things off to, like uploading files to all the vendors manually, which takes hours. Additionally, marketing help.  Financial analysis. Estate planning. There’s a whole list we’re putting together to send off to our friends, so they can start carving them off, once they realized just how much money they are leaving on the table. (Hint: a LOT that they never even realized, but that’s why they come, and work so hard to talk directly with writers, so we’ll tell them our pain points and they can solve them. And they will. And we’ll all get rich in the process.)

So you’ll see me start listing out some things you can do to help jump-start your career here or elsewhere. I won’t put most of it in my newsletters, because that’s for readers and fans, but maybe I’ll continue blogging on the business aspects, and writing Business For Breakfast books boiling it all down.

I have considered creating a second, “artist-only” newsletter where I talk business topics, rather than characters, worlds, or sales. If you think that sounds like a good idea, send me a note and I’ll add you, so we can share out some of these ideas.

(Edit: On the flight home, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I decided to do a newsletter dedicated to publishing. “Publisher’s Corner” sort of thing. Contact me if you want to be added to list. Already got several dozen names and I’m still figuring out how to talk about it all.)

The world is about to change again, and every gimmick you had that worked last week will fail tomorrow. One of the tomorrows. You need to build up some of your fundamental strengths to be ready to ride that storm out when it comes.

Maybe more tomorrow (Edit: Yeah, no.) when I’m at the airport and have some time to kill, but maybe not, as I’ll need to write up all my notes and boil them down into action lists and stack ranks.

But there is a lot you could be doing, if anybody had ever taken the time to share what they knew. Tune in.

-b-

[From last week’s NINC conference, written in real time and then stored to be sent out a week later.]

Blogging for the shy

Had lunch with several lovely folks today. The question I try to ask everyone this year is “What thing did you learn that you think will completely overturn publishing next year?”

Not a lot of folks immediately jump on that, but it gets everyone to thinking, which is almost as good. From there, the conversation meandered around to the concept of audience engagement (and we were all even sober) and how to talk to your fans.

I’m fairly personable and garrulous with my blog, but folks paying attention at home will realize that I rarely ever put personal details up here. Happy to talk about my writing, my characters, my business, or even my farm and the critters, but you won’t learn much about me as a person.

This is not accidental.

But one of the women at the table was horrified at the concept of talking via a blog of any sort. She’s not a fast writer like me, but a serious SEO expert, which means she know marketing and those sorts of things. For her, she prefers to do big and wide advertising campaigns to draw in readers, without necessarily ever “engaging” them.

So we talked engagement, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and me, trying to offer some ideas she could use to get past the moment of panic that people might want her to write about herself. The lessons apply elsewhere, so I figured I’d write them here and hopefully some other folks might find that thing that helps them.

I don’t set down to write on a topic. More frequently, something pops up and either irritates me or inspires me, so that becomes the source of a new blog post. (If you want to know how the writing is going, you’ll have to follow my Patreon. Don’t have to give me money, but I put that stuff over there, rather than here. This is public.)

Write what makes you emotional. Don’t write because the calendar says you have to write a blog post on Wednesday. That’s the fastest way to make it work and turn it into something you hate so much that you’ll fight yourself not to have to do it.

My wife has her chatty newsletter, where she just talks about whatever exciting thing came along. Or a new link so something she read somewhere. Or art.

Her goal is frequently to put a smile on other faces, because she already has one.

It’s okay to blog about your cats. People who want to know about the cats will follow you for that. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ also has her release newsletter, which just mentions the most recent and next.

Don’t talk about your cats in your author bio. That’s the one to make you look professional. But blogs is blogs. Readers want the authentic you.

That also means don’t hire someone to write your blog, because they’ll never get your voice right and will eventually end up turning of your very fans that you worked so hard to accumulate in the first place.

Instead, write out the words, and then you can have a personal assistant who you email it to, and that person can add pictures, links, whatever.

But your words. Always your words. That “you” is why people want to keep up with you. Talk about your characters. I assign birthdays to people who will not be born for thousands of years in the future, and then have the small birthday celebration for them. (Suvi will be born March 19, 7426 CE, by the way.)

And it does not have to be long. Some quick idea, or question. Maybe something that you might have put into a tweet. Or sent out as a tweet later. Maybe as much or little as 500 words. You don’t have to assign yourself a word count.

THERE ARE NO RULES HERE.

However, if you do blog, count those word. To date, I’m over 65,000 words of blogs and newsletters and whatever else is publicly consumed, because I figure all that is marketing ad copy.

If you write a few hundred words ever week, that adds up. More if you’re chatty on social media, where you write it on your website and then feed it out.

Always remember that the goal is to drive casual interest back to your website, where you can turn them into fans. Eventually, some will even be friends, but settle for fans.

Every person you can engage that way is likely to turn into someone that buys all your books.

We’re in the business to make money here, so use your words effectively. Be a storyteller, and not a writer. Writing is a business. Storytelling is pure art. Let the artist side of you write the blog, rather than the businesswoman.

But have fun.

Always have fun being you, and the fans will come along and celebrate.

Day three – ps

We’re in Florida. And at the end of the summer. Everywhere I go, I’m surrounded by tiny little lizards (of type unknown to this Pacific Northwesterner). About 2-5 inches long. Casually sunning themselves on the brickwork next to the paths, so they can skitter quickly back into the undergrowth as soon as someone gets too close.

Plus, it’s been hot every day, so I’ve been staying indoors with the air conditioning. Fun watching all the women dressed hard in many layers and cardigan sweaters, looking at me and most of the men like we’re aliens in shorts and light t-shirts.

Gulf has been fantastic. Last year, every afternoon it started a thunderstorm off shore. Sometimes they can in, sometimes it was just alien sf light show a few miles away.

So far, nothing but sun and stars.

Tradewinds on St. Pete Beach. Awesome place.

Also 1200 Chophouse. Oh My God amazing steaks, just a quick walk down the street and across. If you have the chance, eat there. Munching on leftover ribeye while I type this.

[From last week’s NINC conference, written in real time and then stored to be sent out a week later.]

There is no backlist

The term backlist came up yesterday in conversation. A woman previous tradpubbed talking about how to rejuvenate her backlist. At the time, I wasn’t sure why the term offended me, but last night over dinner, I finally figured it out.

I don’t have a backlist. I have a catalog.

For her, the backlist is every book except the one she is in the process of working on: about to publish, building a launch, or marketing it as new to all her fans.

That was how New York used to work. They had the book currently going through the pipeline, and ignored everything else as irrelevant. If they were selling well, you might get a new edition a few years later, with an updated cover, but in the old days, a book usually just went out of print, never to be seen again.

Those were the old days.

Ebooks never go out of print. If your tradpub contract contains language about rights reversions when something is out of print, you will never get them back. The ebook is “in print” in a catalog somewhere, forever. Or POD.

Forever. Set your clocks for the 35-year mark.

I have a catalog. We run ads on all our books in some sort of rotation. My old book ones continue to sell happily as I find new fans and they walk my entire catalog.

And there’s that term again. Catalog. I’m about halfway through novel #40 right now. The Science Officer isn’t even a novel, but we treat it as one. It and Auberon continue to make me money. At some point, we’ll refresh the covers, because every cover gets stale and dated, with a different timeline largely based on your genre. (Romance needs new covers ever few years, as tastes change. Science Fiction is a longer cycle, because you can just slap a spaceship on the cover and call it good.)

I have ads on a variety of books, without any particular emphasis on the latest.

Hell, I don’t really consider “the latest” to be all that interesting, especially as its #2 of 6, dropping over the winter. It’s not like I’ll only drop one book this year and need to put a big marketing push behind it.

I’m going to publish 14 novels this year. Met a woman yesterday who wrote and published 39 novels last year. (She’s kinda awesome, too.)  That’s part of what makes NINC so fun, to see the wide range and diversity of styles, especially among the Indies.

Backlist is old thinking. You don’t consider those books any good, except as teasers to get people to buy the current book, because you need to have a huge spike of sales in the course of one month, in order to get your “USA Today Bestselling Author” tag.

BTW: USA Today is supposedly about to drop a massive banhammer on some of the recent behavior people have been using to get that tag, based on rumors and side conversations floating around.

But I also don’t need that on my covers, because I’m not trying to be famous. I want to be rich. And Bernie Taupin.

Indie means that you think in new ways. All of your books are equally important. Or unimportant, as you need to market them all.

I don’t have to hit a one-week sales figure in order to get my next publishing contract from some ditz in Manhattan. I’ll just keep publishing. I don’t need to prove that I’m a big-time player with the ego trip of USA Today bestseller.

I understand that people feel that they can’t consider themselves a big-time author without it, but I met a women recently who listed it on her bio. When I went to look at her catalog on Amazon, she had a couple of short pieces, one or two novellas, and a novel that had been bundled up with 20 or 30 others and then pushed hard enough to score her a USA Today best seller status.

She was barely a writer in the first place. I’m pretty sure I made more money last month that she probably had this year, if not career to date. She had almost no catalog to speak of, but sure looks like she’d gamed the system effectively. Good for her, but she’s lost all my respect forever.

Hopefully, some reader newly discovering her isn’t as put off by her lack of output as I was.

But that’s one of the fault lines in the industry. Indie wants the money. There are folks I’ve sat in a room with who are quietly making seven figures every year, and nobody realizes it, because they quietly publish and work their catalog, without ever falling into the trap of thinking they have a backlist that they should ignore until they need to jump-start their career.

You’ll see more and more indies move away from some of the organizations that are entirely geared towards the tradpub lifestyle, because they simply don’t offer my anything.

SFWA is a prime example. Lovely organization. Useful. But they teach you how to get an agent and a book deal with a publisher. I know, because I regularly follow all their educational offerings, and realize that there is nothing they’ve got that would benefit me in any way.

Sad, but an accurate reflection of the thinking that divides the new world of Indie publishing from the dying world of Trad.

But, as always, do you want to be famous, or rich?

[From last week’s NINC conference, written in real time and then stored to be sent out a week later.]

So I’m actually writing this blog post on my computer and storing it for delivery next week, but I wanted to keep things sharp while they were fresh.

It is Wednesday, 9/25. I’m in Florida at the Novelists, Inc. conference.

NINC is an organization for professional novelists, as the name suggests. Membership can be achieved one of two ways, reflecting the origins of the organization itself as it strives to maintain relevance in the modern era. You can either have received an advance of a certain amount of money (I think $2,000 USD from a reputable-enough publisher), or have confirmed Indie sales of at least $5,000 USD on two separate novel-length books (30,000 words or more) in a 12 month period. (Like I said, they started TradPub, about 1990, give or take, and were partly an outgrowth of romance writer organizations.)

The organization doesn’t do enough advertising about itself, as I continually run into Indies who qualify, but don’t even know they exist. If that’s you, reach out and ask questions, or hit their website here (https://ninc.com/)

So I’m here for their national conference, held every year in late September at St. Pete’s Beach, on the Gulf shore of Florida not that far from Tampa/St. Petersburg. The organization has about 800-900 members, and something like 250 will attend. Over the next several days, there will be panels and break-outs with industry people and other experts. There will be lots of networking. Hopefully I will get a better idea of the shape of the publishing industry over the next 1, 2, and 5 years.

The world is changing.

Every day, some new idea takes root. Some new technology comes out that will solve some nasty pain point causing Indie authors grief. A lot of what we identify are all those things that Publishers used to do in the old days, before they got gutted by their corporate overlords and turned into shells, husks of their former selves.

As Indie’s we don’t have marketing departments to rely on to plan and execute advertising plans across various platforms and services. We may not even know how to do some of these things, but the whole process of going Indie means taking over the entire value chain (today’s useful word from un-con meetings).

We are expected to become experts on financial analysis, rights licensing, even estate planning, since our books will stay under copyright for 70 years after we’re dead. (I have a grandson who just started his freshman year in college this month. His eventual grandchildren might be earning income from my books, if I do it right.

If you are a writer, go buy Matt’s book (https://www.amazon.com/Estate-Planning-Authors-Strategies-Success-ebook/dp/B071JKPCLD)

I also get to be a very small shark in a room full of very big sharks. I earn a comfortable living right now, as I work out the things that might take me to the next level. For some of the people I get to hang around next to, they are trying to figure out how to sell their next 100,000 books after the ninety-day-cliff. Think of a witch’s hat or a garden gnome. That sudden spike, then it fall off. But that spite represents half a million dollars in sales, or something equally astonishing. Some of these sharks are making seven figures per year in income.

I wanna learn from them. In turn, some of what I learn needs to be shared with folks who haven’t yet gotten their careers to that point. (Not the parts that I deal in NDAs with, but that’s a small portion.)

We’ll talk marketing with some of the experts. There will be panels from David Gaughran and Mark Dawson. Some of that will be in a future blog. Meetings and chats with Draft2Digital and Findaway Voices. Reedsy is here, and we need to talk about all the things that they can do to help you find people who know things and can do things.

So, as the old saying goes: Get in, sit down, shut up, and hang on. I’m going to try to cover more than you ever wanted to know, because there is a firehose I’m trying to drink from, and you need to hear bits and pieces of it. Not all, because some of these things might actually damage your career, if you aren’t ready for them, but let’s position ourselves for that next big leap.

Assume success, plan for victory.

Had one of those conversations with another writer the other day. You know the ones. When they ask me about my writing goals and I tell them what I’m going to execute this year. The one where their eyes glaze over and fear begins to creep in.

Something about having already crossed one million words for 2019. Sixteen of the twenty novels I plan to write in the can, and today I’m 16,000 words in #17.

This is not a brag. It is a simple statement of fact. Steve Barnes calls me a publishing company, and he’s not wrong.

I write. Everything else comes second or later behind that. On days when I can’t write, like on a recent long drive to Lincoln City, OR from Seattle, I lost two days of words. You probably don’t grasp how irritated that made me.

It took away from my writing. For a DAMNED good reason, or I’d have never done it, but I’ve been behind on my internal goals for the last two weeks, and only now catching up.

Next year, I will set different goals. No idea what they were, but they’ll be just as crazy. And just as achievable.

“How do you do that?” the other writer asked, shocked and awed.

Mind you, this is someone who introduces himself as a writer, rather than one of those cafe dilettantes. You know the ones. Artistés (with a fwaaaaaa on the end).

How could I possibly sustain over 100,000 words written per month, when he might not have gotten that many this year? (Probably half that many this year, if I had to guess, but I don’t really care enough to find out.)

What was the secret handshake to success that made Pulp Speed Three sustainable?

He REALLY didn’t like my answer. (Hint: they never do.)

“Bread and Circuses,” I smiled at him.

It was a rude kind of smile.

I interact with him on social media from time to time. Listen as he argues with other folks about the minutiae of various shows that they all watch with the fervor of the newly-saved. A lot of shows.

“Bread and circuses?” he repeats, deeply confused now.

But he started it.

“Indeed,” I smile. “Huxley called it soma. There are other terms, but they all come down to the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“You are watching your shows and doing all these other things,” I remind him. “I’m writing. How many hours do you spend consuming media each week?”

“They say you have to read and watch,” he grows defensive. “Got to stay on top of things in order to write.”

“Well one, you aren’t writing,” I point out. “And two, I’m not writing to market, so I really don’t give a flying fuck about the latest trends in YA, post-apoc, dystopian Urban Fantasy. Nor about YA sparkly vampires before that. Or YA magic academies before that. I’m writing stories I want to read, because they aren’t those.”

“When was the last show you watched,” he asked, as the implications began to sink in.

That was a good question. I had to go look it up. (And I just did again, because I wanted to get the dates right.)

I never followed it in any great detail. It was on Sunday nights, and I tended to sit in bed while writing longhand, with the television on in the background to keep me company. I needed the company, because my first wife died of breast cancer in 2008 and I was living alone at that point.

The show was Legend of the Seeker. And it went off the air in early 2010. Stopped watching because I didn’t watch TV. Maybe played computer games some in those days, but single-player resource builders, and not first person shooters or MMORPGs.

The last professional sporting event I sat down and watched was the Superbowl before the local Seahawks won, so that would have been 47, I guess. 2014.

I don’t own a television. I watch the occasional movie on my laptop, especially when Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I snuggle up in bed, like we did for a recent LOTR three-night marathon.

But those things are rare.

I want to write. I don’t want to argue with fans about interpretations of some television show. Or have Korean gamers scream obscenities at me while shooting my gamerbody.

I got better things to do.

Number one on that list is writing. I spend a lot of my hours making shit up. And having fun. And enjoying myself.

So much of the modern world is game of bread and circuses designed to keep the masses from realizing how hollow and pointless their lives are. (Ask Henry Ford about his early support for the NFL, sometime.)

I’m not out there to burn the world down, but I’m also no rotting my brain watching television for however many hours each week. I used to work with a guy that got home from work each night, put dinner on the trays, and watch television for the next four hours.

EVERY WEEK NIGHT.

Followed by about 8-12 hours of sporting events over the weekend, depending on the season.

Yeah, no.

I’m going to write.

Every hour I spend at the keyboard (with breaks thrown in) generates about 1,000 words. Four hours per day is 4,000 words, most of the time.

That’s 120,000 words per month, on average. Which is what I’m doing. I don’t have a day job, so the words happen first thing in the morning, and then I head into town to do stuff, which is what I’m going to do as soon as I publish this blog.

Got errands. Then later going to a friend’s for their birthday party. Still social, but if you spent just one hour per day writing, that would be 350,000 words done in a year. To put that in more interesting terms, that’s eight novels of at least 40,000 words length.

And that’s one hour per day, with two weeks off.

How bad to you really want to be a writer? And how much are you just enjoying bread and circuses?

So Amazon made an interesting change in how they handle pre-orders for ebooks sometime in the recent past. Not sure when exactly, but the news bubbled up to me in the last few weeks.

In the past, you could only put up a book for preorder something like ninety days out . That made sense, as it gave folks time to get organized. Now, the limit appears to be up to a year instead.

For me, this makes the organizing process a little more stressful at the front end, but better down the way. I try to write whole series now, instead of publishing something different every month, like I had been doing. Writing fast lets me do that, where I’m still on plan to write twenty novels in 2019. I was going to publish twelve, but things got a little weird, so I will most likely end up publishing fourteen. Not sure what the 2020 schedule looks like, but I want to produce twelve a year going forward, just so I can.

Still, that got me ahead of schedule. I could put out all five of the Star Dragon novels over the summer (three months instead of of four). Longshot Hypothesis and Hard Bargain are out now, and Outermost will be available on October 10. (That means November, January, February to finish this arc.)

What’s fun, is that Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ can now put the other three up for preorder, without having the final versions, as they are coming back from the copy editor slowly. But she has the covers done and I just took my first hack at all three of the remaining blurbs this week.

With the pre-order set on Amazon, she can go back into the book when she does the final formatting, and include the direct link at the back, to buy the next one as soon as you finish.

No more are you trapped, wandering around trying to find it. Just click the next link and let your kindle take you right to the order page, so you can keep reading in the dead of the night, instead of having to go to sleep.

For the writers out there, I might make one suggestion, though. I’ve known a few people who started the whole process too soon. As in, they had finished the book and sent it off for copy-editing and then set the publication date. And this was when you had only a ninety day window, so the copy editor had to turn it back pretty quickly, so that the comments could be folded in and a final version put up.

If you missed your date, Amazon tended to not let you put anything up for preorder again for a year, so you’d have to put it up directly for sale on a certain date, hoping that it got processed fast enough.

You also lost the ability to build up preorders, which cause the book to pop hard on launch day, going up the charts to hopefully be seen by other readers who maybe don’t know who you are.

(As an aside, I’ve also known people who put the cover up as a way to force themselves to actually write the book in question. Don’t do that. If you aren’t enjoying what you do, why are you doing it? Seriously. If writing is a chore, you won’t have fun and that will come through to your readers, who won’t understand why they don’t finish the book. Find your joy and then write.)

So for me, you will start seeing long lines of preorders available, hopefully going out a ways. The remaining three of the Shadow of the Dominion books. The ninth and final Jessica Keller novel, Petron, will go up shortly.

Hopefully, the Star Tribes books after that. (We’d be into March, 2020 to drop WinterStar/#1 and I’m shortly going to start SwiftStar/#4 of 5. Final would be something like July if I can math.)

My purpose is always to write in series. And to return to series as well. Writer-brain let me know what the next Dominion book might be after Princess Rualoh, but I’ve got a stack of things ahead of it first, so we’re just going to simmer and gumbo on it for now. Plus, got other series in some state of done and need to work on them.

By having a whole series (or major story arc) done ahead of time, like I try to do, we can do these preorders and all will be good.

Thanks for listening to me ramble. For the writers out there, you shouldreview how you publish on Amazon, which might lead to changing everything else. For the readers, you can just order the whole, damned series more or less at once, and then new cookies will show up on your nightstand like magic.

🙂

Counting down to live.

Hard Bargain will drop in a couple of days. If you haven’t already read Longshot Hypothesis, you should do so now. (And by the way, Outermost is available for pre-order most places, but doesn’t come out until October 10.)

So Hard Bargain was not supposed to turn out the way it did. But those of you paying attention also know that I frequently write into the darkness. The original series was supposed to be a set of one-off novels (and will be so again after 6) that just followed the crazy adventures of Valentinian Tarasicodissa and his ship, Longshot Hypothesis, as he adventures, with a new First Mate that has a shady past, and the entire Dominion coming after him. (Silly little things like being party to the assassination of the Dominator himself. Whoops.)

Hard Bargain starts with a poker game. A card game I invented from scratch, just because it is science fiction and I could. (Might publish the rules at some point. Might do a Print-On-Demand deck if enough folks ask. That’s on you, btw.)

It was just supposed to be a game to set up Butler Vidy-Wooders for some righteous payback, but something went a little sideways on me. (Yeah, I know. “You?”)

The card game turned out to be crooked. A set up, where the local sheriff is stacking cards against one of the other players, and Valentinian just happens to be there at the table.

As a result, he ends up literally winning a treasure map in a crooked card game. Honest.

And meeting some interesting people.

And, oh, by the way, Dave’s ex-wife shows up in a Dominion Assault Courier, with Kyriaki Apokapes in tow.

That’s as much as I’m going to tell you now. Y’all have to read it to see where we go.

But at the same time, I just want everyone to know that this stupid treasure map is the reason I ended up with six novels in one long arc, when it was supposed to be one novel at a time.

• Longshot Hypothesis
• Hard Bargain
• Outermost
• Dominion-427
• Phoenix
• Princess Rualoh

The arc from Hard Bargain to Prince Rualoh tells one long story with several stops and one utter cliffhanger. You’ll meet the salvager Bayjy Endon, and later Captain Redtip Windrunner Oedressa Farther Glaxu, who is my favorite Dire Ground Cuckoo of all time. And the deadliest.

So y’all lemme know if you want to know how Arcades is played. And maybe want your own deck, because it has six suits and seventy-two cards, rather than the 4/52 of a Hoyle Deck. I’d have to have one designed for Print-On-Demand, but you can do that these days.

And thanks again for all the support that just lets me write.

shade and sweet water

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

Some of you have been following along at home with the adventures in food around the farm. I’ve always been allergic to onions (didn’t realize that the symptoms were allergy and not intolerance until just recently) and then developed an allergy to mushrooms about ten years ago.

Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is allergic to anything derived from a grass: soy, wheat, oats, barley, corn, rice. In addition, nightshades (tomatoes and peppers) are bad except in small amounts. And eggs make her break out in hives.

So we tend to not eat anything with an ingredient list, especially something marked “natural flavors,” whatever that means.

Dead critter. Fresh veggies.

On top of that, I make a trough of stew every week and cut out a bowl for breakfast any morning except Sundays, when I go down to Krain. (If you’re in the mood for good food, join me sometime. 8am)

And then there is the anti-stodgy campaign, where we try to do something new every month. Music, food, places to shop, whatever. New for the sake of new.

So she and a friend took a cooking class on kombucha  and kvass last week. She has a jar of each on the counter across from me as I write this morning, slowly brewing. Or whatever they do.

The other night, we made offal sausage. It goes into the flavor packs that I use as a base for my stew. (Chicken thigh, duck confitt, pork skin, frozen shrimp in the most recent 4 I made).

But she’s decided to try making her own stews now, so we made a bunch of offal. And she doesn’t like hers with as much vinegar or tomato as I do, so they’ll be different flavor profiles and ingredient lists. We still start with offal sausage. Or whatever you want to call it.

I have a kitchen aid stand mixer that belonged to my first wife, Donna. Added a meat grinder years ago. Make sausage regularly around here, including Thanksgiving.

Most Americans do not eat enough offal (heart, liver, tongue, gizzard, etc.). They get meat (shoulder, belly, butt), but not the innards they need to be healthy, which is one of the reasons we’re so much less healthy than our great-grandparents were. (At least the rest of you.)

So we hit the store and loaded up. Ended up with about 6 pounds of stuff. Beef liver. Pork liver. Chicken livers. Chicken hearts. Pork heart. Chicken gizzards. Bacon ends from a pig we got last year.

All that got chopped up and put through the grinder, with a teaspoon of cayenne just on general principles. I grind everything twice through the smaller facing, with the spice being mixed in after the first pass so that we get a smooth flavor and texture.

Broke it into nine individual packs and froze them, so that I can just grab four with my ingredients next time I need to make breakfasts.

She kept back a pound overnight so she could make herself what she calls porcine crack. Liver pate, with one pound of the offal instead of just straight liver, and then another pound of the really fatty Beeler’s bacon, plus fresh herbs from the garden that she walked out and snipped. Instead of onions and butter, the fat from the bacon gets supplemented with coconut oil.

It ends up this lovely, yummy loaf of goodness when you pour it over parchment paper resting in a small bread pan. Cool until it firms. Chop into four chunks, three of which get tossed into the freezer and marked “crack” (she thought I was kidding until she went and looked.) The last one is in the fridge, where she only allows herself a spoonful at a time.

But damn, that’s good stuff.