I’m always surprised that more people don’t know about the concept of the Mastermind Group, so I figured I’d take the time to put down my explanation here, as a way to generating some traffic on the concept and getting people engaged.

So let’s start with the Wikipedia definition (slightly edited for clarity here. emph mine):

“A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring concept used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members. The concept was coined in 1925 by author Napoleon Hill in his book The Law of Success, and described in more detail in his 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich. In his books, Hill discussed the idea of the Master Mind, which referred to two or more people coming together in harmony to solve problems.

Cooperation through the use of mastermind groups was one of the laws of success that Hill learned studying successful Americans including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles M. Schwab.

Several companies offer mastermind group environments to members.

Organization
There are two types of mastermind groups: one is focused on an individual’s success, and the other is focused on the success of everyone in the group. Research suggests that optimal groups limit their size to 8 to 10 participants that meet regularly with rotating leadership.”

You can download Think and Grow Rich here or google it for other free downloads, as the book is in the public domain and you’re only paying for someone’s cover at this point.

I’m in a couple of mastermind groups with other writers. The goal of such a thing is the peer-to-peer aspect. We’re using the latter model, where everyone is trying to share information freely within the group, with the goal that everyone is able to advance their own career into their own definition of success (whatever it might be, and it will be different for everyone).

You have to be genuinely invested in your compatriots for this thing to work. When you find something useful, you tell others. If you run across a lead that might benefit someone in your mastermind (or wider group) you tell them about it immediately and without reservation.

As an extension, you will frequently see me share all manner of strange and interesting business needs, offers, or calls from people and groups I know on social media, just in case someone else I know could make use of it. I’m not a musician anymore, but I’m friends with many, and signed up with folks who put out calls for acts for various gigs. I share those or tag people so they see it.

Their success is as important as mine. I truly believe in that.

In a mastermind, you meet regularly. I call in to a specific one that is nationwide about every four to six weeks, where we talk about the current state of indie publishing and try to figure out what’s next. At present, we’re on the last legs of what we classify as the 7th Revolution in Indie Press, so we’re identifying the schedule and events and technology that will make up #8, and in many cases #9 as well.

Closer to home, my wife and I are part of a regular Business Lunch that is held about once per month at the north end of Seattle. Not just writers, but artists, musicians, and photographers that get together and talk business. We’re not a critique circle, as we never read your work or ask you to read ours, but an ongoing discussion of marketing plans, publishing ideas, trends and shifts. Whatever might impact us as professional creatives.

(We’re had less success building one at the south end, but still working on it.)

Who do you talk business with?

I’m utterly blessed to have married my partner in life and crime. She’s the reason I write professionally, and can make a living at it. Most writers are doing good to have a supportive spouse, who goes to work and pays the bills while the writer commits art, but a supportive spouse doesn’t really get the art.

That’s why you mastermind. So you surround yourself with professionals who can teach you new things because each of them will bring their unique perspective to the table.

As an aside, these conversations frequently become the topics behind my Business For Breakfast books that my wife or I write. We’re up to #14, because we believe in helping others learn what we’ve found.

And it doesn’t have to be limited to your art. I regularly talk to screenwriters and producers. Graphic artists. Comic books creators (which is a field at least as big and complicated as something like writing science fiction). Even philosophers of science and technology.

“What comes next?” That is the question always on the table. What is the disruption that will fundamentally alter the way we do business? A little over a decade ago, Amazon deployed the first device and ecosystem to make ebooks easy to consume. (As usual, Sony had a generation’s head start, and managed to piss is all away and betamax ebooks, when they could have owned the field. Don’t be Sony.)

So if you are a creative, might I suggest that you set up a regular lunch or call with some others in the field, and talk nothing but business?  Don’t go in expecting that these people will make you money. They are your peers. You’ll share what you know. They’ll do the same.

(If they don’t, don’t keep them around. This only works as peers willing to share what they know. Doesn’t matter if they sell 10 books per month or 100,000. Sharing is the key, because that wheel will eventually turn.)

What are you doing to take advantage of the fact that technology is going to upend your world tomorrow? Who are you asking for help?

Woo-hoo!!!!

So, news update. Some of you have been paying attention to the new series getting ramped up over the rest of the fall and into the winter. Shadow of the Dominion. Fun stuff.

The old discussion in the genre of Science Fiction is whether a series is Space Opera or Space Adventure. Mostly, the distinction is scale. In the 8th Jessica Keller book Winterhome (spoilers, proceed with caution), we see the war taken to nearly impossible levels, as Moirrey and a few special friends take the war to Buran itself and end up slaying a god.

And there’s still a 9th novel coming in December. Petron. And we’ll top everything that happens in Winterhome.

Space Opera. Epic Space Opera. Every novel escalates the crazy and risk and threat to another level.

Contrast that with Shadow of the Dominion. We start with the novel Longshot Hypothesis. I had a silly idea as a world-building exercise, which I’ll share with you here. (Some of you have already heard this, so just smile.)

Imagine if Darth Vader had a mid-life crisis, stripped off the armor (minus the cyborg bits and dueling scars, mind you), and replaced Chewbacca as the First Mate on the Millennium Falcon. And we just had adventures, instead of a rebel alliance, a death star, ancient religions, and freudian angst.

I had a LOT of fun writing these books. Got to practice aliens. There are no aliens in the Alexandria Station universe, with the notable exception of the Sentient warships. (And look how THAT turned out.)

Part of the fun of really big space stories (going beyond Earth and First Contact tales) is that you can create alien creatures. And I don’t mean humans with some body paint and a nasal prosthetic. I mean my friend Glaxu, who is best described as a Dire Ground Cuckoo. (Call him a roadrunner and watch the man open you up with a dewclaw.)

1.3 meters tall. Ground Cuckoo (of which the American Roadrunner is a type, but also a pejorative among his kind and he gets a little testy about that). Long legs. Short arms. Zygodactyl toes. Feathers. Beak. Really twisted sense of humor. Head crest.

How, exactly, does a Mondi’s body language go? Like I said, practicing aliens who are alien.

All this is on my mind this morning because I just logged onto the Amazons and “claimed” the third Shadow of the Dominion book: Outermost.

It’s not obvious to the rest of you yet, but all six of the titles in the series are actually ship names.

• Longshot Hypothesis
• Hard Bargain (Sept 10)
• Outermost (Oct 10)
• Dominion-427 (Nov 10)
• PETRON (Dec 10) – Last Jessica Keller Novel
• Phoenix (Jan 10, 2020)
• Princess Rualoh (Feb 10, 2020)

I have been hard at work, adjusting to some bubbles in the production schedule, but I just sent Princess Rualoh off to the copy-editor last night. And Outermost is up for pre-order as of yesterday.

Getting back to space adventure versus epic space opera. These six novels tell one long arc of a story, but the scope is personal. We’re not deciding the future shape of the galaxy or the human race here. Just Valentinian Tarasicodissa and his ongoing mission to keep his ship flying and himself out of jail.

Honestly, everything that happens is mostly the work of other people maneuvering him into progressively worse places and him using every bit of luck and cunning he’s got to wriggle off the hook.

Better, I was cheering, crying, and planning as I finished a slow-read through Princess Rualoh last night. Seriously emotional story (at least for me). Hopefully, you’ll feel the same way when we all get there in February.

I had so much fun. Seriously. All of book six is one on-going conspiracy as almost every player huddles with someone in the group to work out some deal separate from everyone else, in the middle of an on-going, running firefight, trapped in an abandoned catacomb, being hunted by sex-crazed cannibals. (Spare me your fantasies, please.)

I consciously forget novels after I’m done writing them. It helps with the editorial process, because I’m reading the words for the first time and only then remembering what I was doing, but it was obvious how much fun I was having, keeping all the plates spinning.

Best part, this one has legs. We haven’t saved the galaxy at the end, merely escaped the latest trap. That lets me write a new novel/trilogy/series sometime in the future if folks are that excited about what happens with the gang. And I’ve left a LOT of places they could go at the end of this one.

But that’s in the future. Right now, #1 is out, and #2 and #3 are available for pre-order. Also, my plan at present (this might change) is to send out some chunk of the rules of a new style of poker called Arcades. Had to invent the rules for Hard Bargain, and they became a running metaphor all the way to the very end.

Met a lovely lady the other day who is having a custom tarot deck made for her latest fantasy series, and that got me to thinking about Arcades. You cannot play the game with a standard Hoyle deck, because it requires 72 cards in six suits. (It’s Science Fiction, why the hell should I be limited to what dead people considered poker before we invented indoor plumbing?)

At the same time, you can apparently have custom card decks made in a “Print On Demand” model, meaning I supply the images and they’ll just spit out a deck when you order it.

If you think this sounds like fun, let me know. Until last week, I had no intention of actually turning Arcades into something the rest of you could do at home, but there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER why you could not.

It will cost me time and money to set up, however, so I have to be careful and not just chase that down the rabbit hole. Instead, I’ll take a tally of people interested, and if we ever get to a critical mass, I’ll hire me a graphic artist to do the design work.

So, go get your pre-orders for the novels, and let me know about Arcades, once you’ve had a chance to play the game with Valentinian and the Sheriff of Bohrne Station. (And a few friends.)

• Longshot Hypothesis
• Hard Bargain (Sept 10)
• Outermost (Oct 10)
• Dominion-427 (Nov 10)
• PETRON (Dec 10) – Last Jessica Keller Novel
• Phoenix (Jan 10, 2020)
• Princess Rualoh (Feb 10, 2020)

y’all have fun.

b

So by now some of you have read the CS-405 spin-off trilogy that falls between St. Legier and Winterhome in the Jessica Keller series. Those are also referred to as the Kosnett Trilogy, because Command Centurion Phil Kosnett is the central axis around which everything rotates.

I originally got the name of the character from Star Fleet Battles, which I played a whole bunch of from the early 80’s to the mid 90’s. (Moved out of Los Angeles and lost my group. Never picked it up again after that for other reasons.) The Captains Logs for SFB each contained a short story, the scenario behind the story, and then a bunch of other scenarios you could run in addition.

For a game called Star Fleet Battles, not everything was combat. You could also do science missions, exploration, etc. This was before role playing games got sophisticated, and other companies had the RPG license for the original Star Trek Universe (and mind you, this game dates to the original series and the animated series.)

But there was a character in one of the stories named Phil Kosnett. He was a thinly-veiled version of a notable and famous Star Fleet Captain, without crossing any licensing lines. When I was building out Jessica’s new fleet for The Red Admiral, I grabbed Phil Kosnett on the fly. But I also added some backstory, because he was in a Corvette/Scout, the least armed vessel around, so he had to fly smart as well as dangerous. And become one hell of a successful pirate, as you’ve seen.

When it came time to break off CS-405 for their own adventure, I had a LOT of details about Command Centurion Phil Kosnett. But very few people knew the reference, because you have to have played the game at the time, which dates you pretty solidly to a particular age and demographic.

But I have challenged a few people to let me know if they recognized the name, because anybody who did would also recognize a lot of the technology I used in Jessica’s universe, just because I could. (Again, all the serial numbers filed off so I can can’t get sued, but if you knew, you saw it.)

Fast forward to over the weekend.

I got an email. And had to go total fangirl.

The person identified themselves as Phil Kosnett (as did the email and other info), and explained how he was connected to the gang back at Task Force Games (later Amarillo Design Bureau) and how Steve Cole used the name of a friend of his later as a bad-ass Star Fleet Captain, and later Admiral. Over time, the character has taken on a life beyond the original gentleman.

But this really was him, as you’ll see at the bottom of his own bio.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man who went on to be Admiral Phil Kosnett in the Star Fleet Universe. When you get a chance to read Petron in December (and there will be a contest earlier), you will also get to meet Fleet Centurion Phil Kosnett, as well as wonder at the future I have laid out for when he becomes First Centurion Kosnett. (And yes, now I kinda have to go ahead and write those stories one of these days.)

But right now, I’d like to sqeeeeee all over the fact that the original Phil Kosnett is the US Ambassador to Kosovo.

How freaking cool is that?

To me, it’s even better because Command Centurion Kosnett is known as “The Professor” and I had no idea how accurate that was for the man he was originally drawn from.

And what a small universe we live in.

Just had to share, because that’s just all sorts of awesome.

cheers,

b

So as I learn things about the business and craft of being a writer, I try to write a new Business For Breakfast book, so that others can take advantage of that. (And pay me some money along the way.) The goal is 2 of these each year, on a variety of topics, because the world keeps changing.

My latest B4B is Series and Continuity for Professional Writers, available for pre-order now and drops Aug 21 (next wednesday as I write this post.)

This grew out of a conversation last year at the Novelists, Inc. annual conference in Florida that I went to, where I was chatting with some folks who were trying to figure out how to make the leap from single novels and trilogies into longer arcs of story.

In the old days, a writer wrote a novel. It went to a publisher. They sold it. If the writer got lucky, fans would clamor for more books about these characters, so the writer would create more stories and novels. Arthur Conan Doyle and Leslie Charteris, for example. None of those were really series, however, so much as returning time and again to the same character. Even Ian Fleming didn’t really work up longer arcs of plot and story telling.

But the modern consumer is more sophisticated. They want those long arcs. They want a meta-story that spreads across seasons and novel series.

Since I already think and write this way, I decided to take a hack at the topic. Jessica Keller will end at fourteen novels and novellas when Petron comes out in December. Javier Aritza has eight novellas published so far, with a ninth in the can and a tenth started. The Star Dragon is five novels and two (so-far) short stories. Shadow of the Dominion comes in at six novels in the first section. Plus several more series that I’ve written at least a book one, including an SF mystery, an urban fantasy, alternate history, and a bunch of space adventure and opera.

I grew up on comic books. My mother liked to shop in fabric stores, and learned that if she bought me two comic books and a 7-Up, I’d happily wait outside for an hour without complaint. (Had a massive collection before I finally gave it to a friend for his kids. That bastard turned around and sold them off for money and didn’t realize someone might tell me. But that’s a different story for another time.)

Comic books in the 70’s and 80’s didn’t do reboots and retcons every 3-8 months. There weren’t collector’s edition #1’s twice a year. Detective Comics was over issue 500. I have Captain America 300. Etc.

So I’m used to thinking in long story series.

You need to do a lot of planning up front. I’m not talking about the usual argument of plotter versus Pantser. (And I prefer Architect and Gardener, anyway.)

If you want to write a series like I do, you can’t just sit down with Lester Dent and a big cup of coffee. There are questions you have to ask yourself.

Will it be space adventure or space opera? (In my case, but every genre has equivalencies you need to pick ahead of time.) I won’t read Glen Cook anymore because he likes to play stupid games with the reader and not deliver a particularly enjoyable reading experience, regardless of how well he writes. (The ONLY Glen Cook books I still own are the Books of the North and The Dragon Never Sleeps. Gave the rest away because I got tired of his shit. Won’t pick up another.)

And there is a lesson there. Cook kept changing his mind about opera or adventure, and so the tone and themes of the books kept changing. And not in ways that brought me along with him. In the “throw the book across the room and sell it at Half-Price Books” way.

Next, you have to have a main character that the reader would want to invite over for a beer. And don’t tell me that this asshole man-child in book one eventually becomes a nice guy by book eight, because I won’t even make it to book two to find out. You need to make them someone a reader will want to spend an evening with, without gritting their teeth.

Plan what kind of story series you will tell. Not just the architecture of the story or the seeds you’ll plant. The meta-design. Adventure/opera. Three-man team or five-man band. Earth-centered or not (Star Trek vs. Star Wars, for example). Aliens or not?

Once you have those sorts of things sorted out, only then should you start your world-building and character notes. Because if this is a series, the goal is readers even more excited by the last novel than they were the first.

Another thing to consider: know when to stop. I know a guy who just dropped book 14 in his ongoing series and is complaining about declining sales. He had gotten bored with this series, and his writing has begun to suffer, I’m guessing. And his fans.

Jessica has 14, but only 9 at the core, with a side trilogy for Kosnett and two novellas to help set up Vo and Yan without detracting from the core novels. We’re still close to one million words of Jessica by now. The others will be shorter (8 novellas for Science Officer Season One, maybe 7-9 short novels for Season Two, but I’m not sure.)

So when you are ready to start writing series, there are a bunch of things you need to know and questions you must answer before you start, or you will pay a terrible price later.

And you need to consider series if you want to make money in the modern era. I know many fans won’t buy a book one until book three or four have come out. They’ve been burned by TradPub and lazy authors. They also want to binge, rather than wait for you to drop a novel every year or three. They might have forgotten about you by this time next year, ya know.

So Series and Continuity. This is a 201-level book. You’re past the “how do I write?” stage and working on your craft as a professional writer. Looking for a way to level yourself up to new heights so you can turn your hobby into a profession and quit the day job.

I did it. Feb 2018. Working for myself now and writing faster than ever before. And having more fun, because I get to tell all these stories, across all these universes.

Are you ready to up your game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That does things to a man.

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

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

So, yeah, no big thing, right?

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

BIG.

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

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

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

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

🙂

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

Money is lovely, don’t get me wrong.

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

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

The problem is that I want a bigger fan base.

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, I want to grow to that level.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now. In your hands. Reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it is not worth it to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or you?

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

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

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

Read that again, because it is a simple truth.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the power of the middleman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it got weird. Heh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eat healthy.

Yes, you.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no secret handshake.

Read the again.

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

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

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

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

“Sit down. Shut up. Write.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But publishing is the key. That supposed Secret Handshake.

Put in keyboard, fingers on keys.

Sit down. Shut up. Write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sit down. Shut up. Write.

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

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

Online Workshops

Craft Workshops

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

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

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

Then write.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

🙂

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

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

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

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

Warning: enter at your own risk.

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

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

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

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

But then I stopped and asked “Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I got friends like you.

thanks.

b

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from the book’s blurb:

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

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

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

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

🙂