More Ways to Get The Executive Lounge, and Some Thoughts on Sales Channels

I set up a Books2Read universal link for The Executive Lounge, so you can find it on a bunch of different stores with one click. If I add a new store in the future, the link will still work.

Get The Executive Lounge

Right now, links are live to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, 24Symbols, Angus & Robertson, and Mondadori, although the book isn't actually available on Scribd yet. Sometimes it takes a while for everything to percolate through. :/

If you haven't heard of 24Symbols -- I hadn't until I saw it as a B2R option -- it's a subscription service similar to Kindle Unlimited, but it doesn't require any kind of exclusivity crap. Unless Amazon changes its policy, you'll never see my books in KU, but 24Symbols doesn't make any outrageous demands, so I'm giving them a try.

I've never set up a Books2Read link before, but it was easy to do. The web site is well designed and the process is pretty intuitive. And if you distribute through Draft2Digital, which I am for some vendors, those vendors are automatically included in your B2R link, because B2R and D2D are linked sites. Setting all this up is free, so even if you only make a few sales through the less-popular-in-the-US vendors, it's still worth doing. And I've made one sale in Euros so far, so yay!

I've heard some writers say that they don't go wide because their wide sales are negligible, and it's not worth missing out on KU sales. I think this is short-sighted.

I figure, nobody in Europe, or India, or Australia, or anywhere else besides the US and maybe Canada knows who I am at this point. You build a fan base one reader at a time, and that applies to each sales channel. If you're not available in European stores, then you're probably not going to have any European fans. If you start publishing books in the European stores (or wherever,) you're there, and you'll eventually start building your fanbase there. It might well take a while, but as Kris Rusch always says, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Looking at this another way, it reminds me of the way some tradpubbed writers were experimenting with indie publishing a while back, indie pubbing one book and then looking at their first month or two of sales. When they didn't earn thousands or even hundreds per month right away, they declared the experiment a failure, and said it proved that indie publishing was an overhyped bubble. Heck, I remember one writer, known for SFF novels, who indie pubbed a contemporary short story, saw a small trickle of sales in the first couple of months, and declared the whole indie publishing business a clear failure, with a bit of snarky smirking. [huge freaking eyeroll] Well, no kidding! That's not the kind of book you're known for!

The folks who tried going wide for a month or three, then declared it a failure and scurried back to KU are making the same mistake, I think. (Okay, maybe not the exact same mistake as the Contemporary Short Story writer-person, but plenty of others did the same experiement with the kinds of books they were known for. It still takes time to build up indie sales, when that's not how your fans are used to buying your books.) Any time you're looking to expand into a new market, it's going to take time. You're not going to hit it big in any new sales channel right away, unless you win the lottery. And "Step 5: Win the Lottery" doesn't belong in anyone's business plan.

And I have to think back on how many times I've heard a collective howl go up from the Kindle Unlimited community, whenever Amazon makes some major change in policy, or changes how they distribute money, how they credit "reads," how they require books to be formatted. Whenever Amazon tries to plug a hole being exploited by scammers and cheats, huge crowds of folks who were legitimately publishing through KU (but often were riding the edge, gaming the system while staying just this side of the line) scream and cuss and complain that their sales have tanked because of the change. They're collateral damage, and since Amazon's primary concern is the experience of its customers, not its vendor-partners, they don't care what the indie publishers think.

(Which I believe is a good policy in the long term, from a hard-nosed business perspective. If you piss off your authors, there'll always be more where they came from [that's how New York publishing has stayed in business so long, with the horrible treatment they give their writers] but if you piss off your readers, the authors will suffer too and the whole thing will spiral.)

I know some folks who see KU for what it is -- a right-now cash cow, that could change or shrink or go away at any time. If you grab the money and run month-by-month, paying off existing bills or making one-time cash purchases or just socking the money away, that'll work and it comes with little risk. The people who scream loudest whenever Amazon pivots are the ones who were paying their mortgage and buying groceries with their KU money, which IMO isn't a great idea. Amazon could make another change next week that'll completely tank their sales, and then they're screwed.

Personally, I'd rather build a fanbase spread across as many vendors as possible, to insulate myself from the effect of changing conditions at any one vendor. It's doable -- I know writers for whom Amazon is less than half their income. It takes patience and a long-term view, and I'm willing to give it that.

Settling Down for the Holidays

There's less than two weeks left of the year, and it's time to look at wrapping things up. Jim and I are heading to Reno where my mom lives tomorrow evening, and I don't expect to get a lot of work done for the next few days.

That's okay. Christmas is coming -- I still have to run out tomorrow and ransack the shopping center looking for stocking stuffers -- and then New Year, and I think it's time to wind down and kick back, and look forward to setting new goals for 2019.

I didn't make all my 2018 goals, but I've done pretty well. I completed thirteen short stories and one novel this year, and while a few of them were stories I began some time ago and just wrapped up this year, most of them were completely written in the last eleven-and-a-half months. That's pretty good; I'll take it.

I've had a bunch of shorts in the pipeline for a while, just because of the vagaries of the publishing business. One came out earlier this month, two will be released in January and one in March, and it'll be great to see things appearing again.

I came this close to actually getting a book indie published, until I took another look at the cover and realized there's a word missing from the title. [headdesk] It was purchased for me from a cover artist I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I can fix it. I just have to dig out my notes from a class I took five and a half years ago and figure out how to get the .JPEG back into InDesign, and then do a patch job. It should work, and I thought I could get it done before the end of the year. I still might, but I've decided that stressing out about it at this point -- especially since that kind of stressing out makes it more likely that I'll get run-to-the-ER-level sick -- isn't worth it. If I trip over the how-to in the next week or so, then great. If not, January is a thing.

And I have a second book in the pipeline; I have art chosen and licensed for the cover (which I want to do myself, from scratch) and a slot booked with an editor I trust.

I wrote over 150K words this year, most of which came since early September, when I started using Habitica. The gamification strategy is working great for me, and I'm confident that I'll get a lot more done next year. If you've ever had a great time running around a dungeon or a forest or a derelict spaceship killing monsters, scooping up treasure and levelling your character, give Habitica a shot. :)

I joined Facebook this year, and have managed not to lose too much productive time to it. [crossed fingers] I've hooked up with a bunch of people I haven't been in contact with in a long time, and that's always cool. And there's some funny stuff going around Facebook; I've always loved good cartoons and fun videos. :)

I also have about a week and a half left of my diet hiatus. So little time to bake more cookies, eat more mac-and-cheese! And I still have to bake bread! Not till we get home, now, but definitely after that. On 1 January, I'll go back to eating ridiculously healthy, lose whatever I'll have gained by New Year, and hopefully lose a bit more; I usually do at that point. I'm still feeling great.

Usually, though, I'd be getting a bit frantic at this point in the year. So much to do, so many goals I'm still struggling toward, so little time to wrap things up. This year, I'm not worrying about it. I got a lot done, and I'm happy with that. Life goes on after 31 December, and my to-do list will still be there.

I hope you're all having a great holiday season, and are happy with your accomplishments for the year. Best wishes to everyone!

[wave/hugz]

Angie

Joanna Penn -- Retrospective and Resources

If you're a writer and you're not reading (or listening) to Joanna Penn, you're missing out. This post is a look back at her career, and her ten years of blogging and podcasting at The Creative Penn. She freely discusses what she did wrong and what she learned from it all, and flings links and resources in all directions. Check it out.

Angie

Habitica Update

So, it's been almost a month since I joined Habitica, the site that helps you build good habits, break bad ones, and get your to-do list done. Check out my first post about Habitica for a description. I figured the first day of a new month was a good time to report on how it's going.

It's going great! I wrote at least a few hundred words every day in September from the fifth on, and I wrote 34,280 in total -- a little over 30K on the novel I'm working on, plus a short story I wrote in the middle of the month. That's almost half my total for the year! Which is both depressing and exciting at the same time. [wry smile]

I've also been drinking more water, eating veggies more often, doing more Italian lessons, and replying to people's e-mails faster.

I'll admit I haven't been working on my to-dos as fast/much as I wanted, but the way I have it set up, just doing my dailies takes a while, and I've been doing well with most of my habits. To-dos are one-time projects, and I have clicked off on a bunch of them. I'm finding more free time as I go -- I only played one session on a computer game since starting Habitica, and that only for a little over an hour -- so I'll get to the rest of them eventually.

The important thing is that the shiny hasn't worn off yet. :) I'm still just as enthused as before, and it feels good to get so many things done, which makes me feel better about doing more, and around we go in a spiral of productivity.

Seriously, if you're any kind of a gamer geek, such that earning gold and experience, and levelling up your character is a strong motivator for you, give this a shot. :)

If you'd rather focus on writing (which you can totally do on Habitica, if you want; it's fully customizable) I've heard of another site called 4TheWords that's a game just for writers. I checked it out and it gives you points and such for the actual numbers of words you write. It seems to focus a lot on producing X number of words within Y time, though, sort of like a NaNoWriMo WordWar? I'm not into that -- IMO pushing to write faster than your brain wants to naturally produce story is how the whole "banging out crap" thing happens, and that doesn't work for me -- but if you are, give 4TheWords a look.

Heading off to write (and kill some goblins),

Angie

Challenge Worth Watching

Dean Wesley Smith is starting a new challenge tomorrow, to write ten novels in a hundred days. That's pretty radical even for Dean, but if anyone can do it in this day and age, he can. :)

He's blogging about it as he goes, and the posts will eventually be collected into a book. (Assuming he succeeds.)

The challenge starts tomorrow, and the introductory post is up today.

Excerpt:

This is a book about the process of writing ten novels in one hundred days. Yup, that simple and that crazy.

This book will take its original shape in blogs on my website and I hope to add a bunch more to the book in the final form once the one hundred days are complete. But the origin will be on my blog as the one hundred days goes along.

And as I write this introduction, I have no idea at the outcome, if I will be able to write ten novels or not. I am writing this introduction the night before the first day. This is a challenge for me, one that actually worries me as I start into it.

But if you are actually reading this introduction in a book, you know I managed to do it.

So I hope you get the sense, as you read this, of the fun and the pressure of this challenge. I have no idea what books I will be writing. I will think about what the first book might be tomorrow, on the first day. I have done no outlines or any prep work beyond trying to get some business projects done and out of the way.

During the one hundred days, I have at least one trip planned, a full week of a workshop to teach, my birthday, a marathon to run, and Thanksgiving holidays. And I work a lot of hours each week as the CFO of WMG Publishing, plus teach online workshops. And I exercise at least three hours a day on top of that.

In other words, I am going to do this with my real life going on.

Working On Your To-Do List?

I found a great web site that helps you work on your to-do list, plus encourages you to build and maintain good habits and get over bad habits. Thanks to Jim Hines for the link a couple of days ago.

The site is called Habitica, and it's a gamification site. What that means is that it takes something in your life -- in this case, getting stuff done and building good habits -- and turns it into a game. Habitica has the form of a fantasy roleplaying game.

When you create an account, which is free, you become a character in the land of Habitica. You're a first level Warrior with basically no gear. The first step is to set up some things you want to do (or want to stop doing) in a fairly intuitive (sorta -- there is a learning curve, but there's also a very thorough wiki) Tasks page. I have a combination of personal and work tasks on mine, ranging from Write 1000 Words, to Walk 1000 Steps, to Eat a Piece of Fruit, to Call Mom, to Read a Chapter of a Writing Book. I have Eat Junk Food as a negative; if I do that, I click on the Junk Food button and my character takes some damage. :/ I haven't done that yet, but I suppose I will at some point.

You set up each task with a frequency (every day, week or month; three times a week, or just to keep tabs but with no set goal) and estimate about how hard the task is. You can set up a larger task with an internal checklist, so if your task is cleaning the kitchen, it could have a checklist that includes Load the Dishwasher, Clean the Stove, Wipe Down the Counters, and Put Away Leftovers. It's really very flexible once you get the hang of it, and the wiki is great help.

As you do tasks, you click to check them off, and the system gives you experience points and gold pieces for each one. Sometimes (after you hit Level 3) you get an item drop. You accumulate experience points and make levels. When you hit Level 10, you can change professions if you want and become a Mage, a Rogue or a Healer. You also get some skills, which are like special abilities, or spells if you're a Mage or a Healer. I haven't gotten there yet (I'm currently Level 4) but it looks like fun.

There are also guilds you can join. I joined The Wordsmiths, a writers' guild, and The Renaissance Man, which despite the sexism of its name, seems like an interesting guild with a broad base of interests.

Guilds can set Challenges, too. A Challenge is a collection of Tasks, usually around a theme and with a deadline. You click to join the Challenge, and the Tasks are added to your Task page. Usually there's some kind of a prize in gems at the end for a random person who worked on the Challenge. Gems are another (rarer) form of currency in the game; there are things you can only buy with gems. I don't have any yet.

You can also form a party. A party is a smaller group than a Guild, and Parties do quests together. I started a party all by myself, since I wanted to try the baby quest (I'm battling some rabid dust bunnies right now :D ) and didn't know anybody on the site. There are two kinds of quests, the Boss Battle quest and the Collection quest. The Dust Bunny quest is a boss battle quest, with some unknown (to me, at least) number of dust bunnies to be defeated. Every time I check off a task, I do some amount of damage to the current dust bunny I'm fighting. When you've killed them all, you win the quest, yay. If you're playing a collection quest, as you check off tasks, there's a chance you'll get an item drop that's a quest item. When your party has collected enough of each type of item, you've won the quest, yay. The whole party gets a reward when the quest is done.

As you accumulate gold, you can buy gear for your character. You also get some gear for checking in to the site a certain number of times. I have a cool set of Bardic Robes (which increase my Perception stat) that I got for checking in the second day I played. I also have a helm, a sword and a shield. Different pieces of gear increase different stats, and you can buy better gear as you move up. Your stats are taken into account as you "fight." For example, having a better weapon gives you more strength, so you do more damage to whatever you're fighting each time you check off a task.

Basically, if you're a gamer geek, this is an awesome way to motivate yourself to get stuff done. I've been amazingly productive the last couple of days. I even called to make a dentist appointment O_O which I'd usually have put off for weeks. [hides under keyboard] I'm sure some of the enthusiasm will wear off soon, but I'm hoping most of it lasts. :)

I highly recommend trying Habitica if you're at all into gaming. If you do, drop a note here and we can get together and go questing. :D

Angie

Expanding the Borders

I've decided to make a change in how I choose anthologies to list in my postings.

As you might know, these lists started out as a list on my hard drive, for my own reference. It included anthologies I thought might be interesting to write for; I noted down the vital info, so I could find it easily. I eventually started sharing the lists each month.

The list has grown from its origin in some ways -- I post anthos with all genres of fiction, rather than just genres I write in myself -- but not in others. I don't post poetry anthologies because I haven't written poetry in decades and know nothing about current markets. I don't post flash fiction anthologies because I don't write flash, and besides there are a bajillion flash anthos and they'd be better off collected in a place of their own, by someone who's into flash.

But I've also posted only books that I qualified to write for, unless specifically asked. I've had a few editors write to ask if I'd post some limited-demographic books, and if they otherwise qualified, I've been happy to do so, but I haven't gone looking for those books on my own.
I do come across them, though. And so I've decided that as I find anthologies open only to a limited demographic, if they otherwise qualify, I'll go ahead and post them. The complete post that $5 patrons get has one of these this month, with a December deadline, and I'm sure there'll be more in the future.

To clarify, I'll post info for books that are limited by the age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or ability status of the writer.

I still won't post books limited to writers who are members of a particular organization, or students of a particular school. I figure if you're a member of an organization or a student at a school that's putting an anthology together, you'll hear about it through your org/school's web site or newsletter or whatever.

I'm considering geographical limitations. On the one hand, I can see the utility in posting anthologies only open to Canadians, for example. There are a lot of Canadian writers who wander around the English-speaking writerverse online where my Patreon and my blogs are found. And there are a number of Canadian publishers who receive subsidies from their government, and who are partially or completely limited to publishing Canadian writers because of that, so the question does come up at least once or twice a year. I'm pretty sure there are at least a few Canadians reading this, so those posts would be useful to at least some people.

Would it be useful, though, to post anthologies only open to, say, current citizens or current/past residents of a non-English-speaking country? I see those very occasionally, so they're out there, and they advertise in English. I'm thinking they must have their own places they hang out online, though, where they'd get that kind of news, so there wouldn't be much point in my posting them. On the other hand, there are minority populations who could probably use the signal boost. What do you all think?

And just looking at numbers, I'm wondering whether it'd be worthwhile to post calls for anthologies open only to residents of a particular state of the US. I've seen a few of those around over the years, they do exist, but would it be useful to post those? Would you all like to see them?

I'd love to hear what you think about the geographically limited books in particular, and anything else you'd like to comment on.

Thanks,

Angie

Estate Planning for Authors by M.L. Buchman

Estate Planning for Authors by M.L. Buchman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Matt Buchman is one of the most organized, business-oriented writers I know. He was one of the instructors at the Publishing Master Class I took last October, and he talked a bit then about estate planning for writers. He was working on this book at the time, and I eagerly preordered a copy. It came out just a few days ago, and it's got me adding line items to my to-do list like crazy.

If you're a writer, or in any other profession where you're creating and holding the rights to IP, you need to read this book. The full title is Estate Planning for Authors: Your Final Letter (and why you need to write it now). It's not just about how you need a will (although you do), but rather it's about how to organize your business so someone else can pick it up when you're gone, and how to write a letter to your heir(s) so they can find what they need, learn what they need to know, and manage your IP estate without cussing you out, or giving up in disgust and letting your IP go dormant and fade from the public eye because straightening out the tangle is (in their opinion) more work than it's worth. Seriously, your heirs will be delighted if you read this book, and leave them a copy along with your will, your final letter, and all your files.

CONTENTS:

PART I: Getting Started
PART II: IMPORTANT TERMS
PART III: Managing the IP
PART IV: Where's the Money?
PART V: Organizing It All
PART VI: The Final Letter
THE FINAL LETTER
PART VII: A Plan of Action
PART VIII: Suggested Reading (for the author, not so much for the heir)

One of the first pages, right after the dedication, is a section called, "Purpose of this book." It says:

Your Will states who gets what.

Your Final Letter tells them what they can, and should, do with it once they have it.

This book is about the second bit. It suggests a method to write a "Final Letter" that will organize your literary estate and educate your heirs. Or, if the creator behind the estate didn't write one, this book can act as a guide for their heirs to understand what options exist to manage a literary estate.

That's the point of this book -- helping your heirs figure out what this whole writing/publishing thing is about, what they've just inherited, where it all is, and what to do with it. The book addresses different situations, from an average writer passing their books and stories down directly to their kid, to a much busier writer who owns multiple corporations and sets up a charitable trust.

You won't find step-by-step details in how to do something like set up a trust, but you'll find basic info on what the options are, why you might want to make a particular choice, and what kind of professional (CPA, IP attorney, that sort of person) to consult about it.

There are also examples of what happened in various real life cases, such as how Elvis Presley left a soon-to-be bankrupt estate and what his ex, Priscilla, did to turn that around. Or how Jane Austen's heirs sold all the copyrights to her novels for the price of 250 hardcover copies of her books, because they had no clue what they had or what it was worth.

I particularly like the story of Lucia Berlin, a short story writer who never made much money while she was alive. After her death, her heirs put together a collection of her short stories, which was published and hit the New York Times Bestseller List.

How many of you reading this are writers who think your work isn't worth much, financially? Lucia Berlin probably thought the same thing. Luckily her heirs were smart enough to manage her IP well and not only make some money from it, but get Ms. Berlin's stories in front of a huge new audience.

Getting organized and preparing your IP and your business to be handed over to your heirs, with enough information for them to hit the ground running, will make it much more likely that they'll pick up your work and keep it in print, keep it refreshed, look for new markets, new formats, new opportunities. Matt talks about organizing your computer files, including back-ups and off-site storage, managing your passwords and safely passing them down to your heirs, and keeping your contracts and tax paperwork organized and filed and findable. There's a lot of very practical info here. And a nice bonus is that once things are organized enough for your heirs to step right in and find everything, it'll also be organized enough for you to always be able to lay hands on whatever you want, right when you want it. Not that I ever have that problem [cough] but you know, in case anyone out there reading does. [wry smile]

While talking about multiple options, Matt centers his examples on his own estate planning, how he's organized his business, and prepared information and files and passwords and accounts for his heirs to take over. Matt is a very busy writer who has set up corporations for tax purposes, and has decided to create a living trust for his heirs. All the research he's done -- all along, for the business structures, and recently when planning his estate -- has filtered into this book.

Part VI contains his actual Final Letter, with specifics like [the names of actual banks and lawyers and accountants] noted out. You could absolutely take this letter as an example, pretty much verbatim, and tweak it to apply to your own IP and estate decisions. He's also included, in Part V, a link to a page on his web site with a downloadable Excel starter file. This is a skeleton copy of the master file he uses to track his own books and stories. It's a great organizational tool for your own use, aside from how wonderfully useful it would be for your heirs.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty enthusiastic about this book. It's short, it's clear, and it's a gold mine of valuable info and resources. If you've ever published anything, if you own any IP, you should read this book. And get a copy for each of your heirs; if you get hit by a bus before you can write your Final Letter, at least it'll give them a leg up on figuring out what the heck it is you've left them and what they should do with it.

Kris Rusch on Marketing Your Books

Actually, this is part of a longer series -- Kris writes a blog post on the business of writing and publishing every Thursday, and it's absolutely worth a read -- but this particular post has some especially shiny gold in it.

She talks about how to use the alsoboughts on your books' sales pages to figure out who's reading your books and what they like about them, which helps you make marketing decisions and decide where to spend your limited time and money.

There's more too. Check it out.

Angie

Six Month Check-In -- Can't Believe It's July

Seriously, half the year is gone already??

The only reason I have a half decent (seriously, half decent -- just short of 95K) wordcount so far is because of the two workshops I attended, one in late February and early March, and the other in April. They both required writing, and I work best (unfortunately) with an external deadline. I need to learn to work to my own deadlines, which is proving to be kind of tough.

I had so much enthusiasm and such great hopes at the beginning of the year. My weight-loss-and-fitness thing was and is under control, and I was pretty sure I had enough spare focus to turn some of it back to writing. Guess not. Or maybe I do but I've been spending that resource improperly.

So, its July 1st. Right now, I'm renewing my determination to do more writing this year. I can still make my goal for the year if I buckle down and do the work, and I'm declaring, here in public, that I'm going to do it. I have a book about building habits and writing every day (which I'll review here after I've put it to use and seen how it works for me) and hope to get back to being productive.

It's not all bad -- I have accomplished some things, like starting up my Patreon, and my writing/publishing review series. The most important thing to a writer is writing, though, and I need to get back to that. So I'm going to stop blathering and do so.

How's everyone else doing, half way through the year?

Angie

Business Plans: The Writer's Busines Plan by Tonya Price and Business Planning For Professional Publishers by Leah Cutter

The Writer's Business Plan by Tonya Price

My rating: 4 of 5 stars for more business-oriented writers




Business Planning For Professional Publishers by Leah Cutter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars for less business-oriented writers






I'm doing something different this week. I've read two books about business plans for writers. Both are good books for the right audience. And in actuality, I think every writer should read both books once. You'll probably be drawn more to one, and want to revisit it periodically, but I think the other will give you some insights and things to think about.

Tonya Price is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She publishes her own work, and also has an MBA and considerable experience in business beyond her writing and publishing. She approaches the creation of a business plan from the point of view of someone with that background and degree.

A Writer's Business Plan is a thorough explanation of how to produce a business plan, without any extraneous clutter. Some "business plan" books for writers only discuss the marketing plan, which is only part of an actual business plan. Or they go into great step-by-step detail about how to go about indie publishing a book (how to format, how to create a cover, how to upload the book, etc.), which is outside the bounds of an actual business plan. Tonya gives you what you need and only what you need.

Tonya's book is organized as follows:

Chapter One: Every Quest Has a Mission
Chapter Two: Plotting Your Writing Success
Chapter Three: Market Analysis
Chapter Four: Marketing Plan
Chapter Five: Your Financial Plan
Chapter Six: Your Business Strategy
Chapter Seven: Your Business Plan

Each chapter comes with one or more worksheets, which make it that much easier to get your ideas down and organized. She talks about mission statements, business organization, insurance, and why you need a lawyer and an accountant. She also discusses financing your business.

She explains how to set goals. Many people have goals which aren't actually goals -- they're too vague, the win condition isn't defined well enough, they aren't achievable by the person who set the goal through their own efforts, etc. Tonya describes the SMART system, devising goals to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timeframe Defined. This is a good system, and will keep you from writing, "Have a bestselling novel out before I'm thirty-five" on your Goals List, and then spinning your wheels for years before you figure out you can't control whether your novel is a bestseller. (Yes, I've heard a lot of writers say they have that kind of goal. That's a wish or a dream, not a goal.)

There's a lot of valuable information here, including commentary about when things aren't necessary. You don't need to go whole hog when you're just starting out, and probably can't afford to do so. Figuring out what you absolutely need, and what it's going to cost, is a valuable skill, and Tonya talks about separating the wants from the needs.

This book is set up so you can work on your business plan for a couple of hours a day, filling in the worksheets, thinking about the questions and finding answers a bit at a time, and end up with a business plan that a modern businessperson would recognize. And she says right up front that a business plan is not a static document; it's expected that the plan will change over time, as you spot problems, fix mistakes, discover more efficient processes, grow (or shrink) your business, or reach a point where you can now afford some of those nice-to-haves that you couldn't justify when you started out. A business plan isn't a trap or a permanent committment; it's a way of noting down what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, so you can figure out later on whether you're on track.

Even if you're not terribly business-minded, I recommend you read this book through once. I don't come from a serious business background, and although I want to conduct my writing and publishing in a businesslike way, this is maybe a bit of overkill for me. But while reading the book, I had a lot of little "Huh," moments -- things I hadn't thought of, things I didn't know to think about or plan for, things that don't apply to my business right now but might in the future. These are good to know about.

For example, I don't remember ever hearing about someone who was indie publishing doing a market analysis. That was a major, "Wait, what?" moment for me while I was reading. It won't change what I decide to write, but it's good foundation data for marketing efforts. Which I also won't be doing much of for a while, but it's something to keep in mind for the future, something I hadn't thought of before now. Unless you have a business degree yourself, you'll probably find at least a few similar "Huh," moments that make this book worthwhile.

[Note: I rated this book four stars instead of five because my copy is frankly riddled with typos and similar small glitches. They're easy enough to read around, and they don't affect the usefulness of the information, but they're distracting. A decent copyeditor could've done some good here.]

Leah Cutter is a writer and publisher. She owns a publishing business, which many writers can say these days. But Leah publishes other people as well as herself, which means she has complexities to deal with that your average indie-publishing writer doesn't have, and she's done them very well for some time. Leah is an excellent businessperson, but her background isn't in business per se.

Business Planning For Professional Publishers is written from the point of view of a writer/publisher who's read books like Tonya's, and wanted to swear and beat her head against a wall. Blaze Ward says in the Editor's Note:

What artists need is a book that breaks the MBA-blather down into terms an artist can understand, because, frankly, they are two entirely unrelated languages that both share English as a common tongue.

I enjoyed this read. It's a very voicey book, and Leah's personality shines through on every page. It's much more casual than Tonya's book, less "businesslike." And her frustration and anger at how poorly that sort of book fits the personality of so many writers is clear throughout. (After I read this book, I saw Leah and did the "Hey, loved the book!" thing, and we talked about it for a minute. As soon as I brought it up, she got very intense and I saw a reflection of those emotions I'd felt through her writing. I think her eyes started glowing with wrathful flames, just a tiny bit.) But seriously, there's some swearing in this book. If that offends you, well, read it anyway, but grit your teeth.

Leah's main realizations here are that 1) you can create a business plan for whatever period of time makes sense to you, and 2) a business plan is (mostly) "just a big f@#$%g to-do list."

Everything else builds on that, thus:

Chapter One:
-- The Differences
-- The Meat Of The Plan
-- The Pieces
Chapter Two:
-- Problems Planning
-- Beyond Merely Writing Shit Down
-- Control
Chapter Three:
-- Goals
-- Editorial Goals
-- Living Documents
Chapter Four:
-- NOTE ON THE WORD GOAL
-- Production Goals
-- Publishing Goals
-- Business Goals
Chapter Five:
-- Marketing -- What Is It?
-- Passive Marketing Goals -- The Beginning
-- More Passive Marketing Goal Planning
-- Passive Marketing -- Learning Sales Copy
-- Passive Marketing -- Reader Samples
-- Passive Marketing -- Pricing
Chapter Six:
-- Active Marketing -- The Beginning
-- Active Marketing -- Next Steps
-- Yet Another Caution
-- Choosing A Marketing Strategy
-- Succeeding Regardless
Chapter Seven:
-- Conducting Sales
-- Perma-Free? Or Not?
-- Bundles
Chapter Eight:
-- Patreon
-- Online Ads
-- Bigger Goals
-- Cooperative Marketing
-- Merchandising
Chapter Nine:
-- It's All About The Money
-- Publisher Mission Statement
-- The Vision
-- What To Do With Your Mission And Vision Statements

As you can see, this is more detailed in some ways than Tonya's book. It's not just a book about how to write a business plan, because Leah's not really into business plans per se. It is a book on how to look at what you're doing, figure out where you are, make plans for the future (however far in the future you're comfortable projecting) and make to-do lists to help keep your business on track. Which is basically what a business plan is for.

One point Leah brings up is that formal business plans are largely produced to be shown to other people. If you want to start a business, or want to expand your existing business, and you want a bank or other institution to loan you money, if you want to attract investors, if you want to persuade someone who has skills or resources your business needs to go into partnership with you, the first thing you do is give them a copy of your business plan. Having a good, thorough, well organized business plan with all the right topics and terminology in it helps convince other business people that you're at least worth listening to for five minutes. You speak their language, you've done your homework, you have some business expertise to bring to the party.

Indie publishing writers don't need any of that. We rarely seek loans, we don't want formal investors, and anyone we'd want to work with probably thinks like we do, not like the MBAs do. To a writer, your business plan is purely for you, something to help you figure out what you're doing, what you want to do in the future, and how to get there. It's something to help keep yourself on track. It doesn't have to be structured like the plan a marketing or electronics entrepreneur would come up with, and it doesn't have to be written in formal business language. You'll probably never show it to anyone, so it can be written and structured in whatever way suits you.

If all you want is a big f@#$%g to-do list, then that's all it has to be.

To someone who does have a business background, I imagine the thought of being this loose and disorganized is pretty appalling. If you're comfortable with spreadsheets, and making detailed plans for the future makes you feel like you have a firm handle on your business, then you'll probably like Tonya's book a lot. But read Leah's book anyway; she has a lot of great ideas for staying organized on a day-to-day level that even someone who prefers a more formal business plan might find useful.

These are both great books. Which you'll prefer depends on your background and your preferences for how to plan and operate. Leah's book speaks to me more, and I've been using a big f@#$%g to-do list ever since I first read it, but I'm glad I read Tonya's. Try them both, and see which one resonates with you.

The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

1. Habits
2. The Importance of Routines
3. Churning It Out
4. Getting By
5. Following the Crowd
6. Indispensable
7. Beginner's Luck
8. One Phone Call From Our Knees
9. Controlling the Creatives
10. Believe in Yourself
11. Out! All of You!
12. The Writer You Want to Be

Kris Rusch has worn pretty much every hat in writing and publishing. She writes fiction and nonfiction, at all lengths, and has won awards and been a bestseller in multiple genres. She's edited short fiction, both anthologies and magazines (including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), and is, in fact, the only person on the planet to win the Hugo Award for both writing and editing short fiction. She's been an owner, with her husband Dean Wesley Smith, of two publishing companies (they currently own WMG Publishing) and several retail stores. She was a low-level employee at a publishing company she didn't own when she was young, and worked as a radio journalist and news editor for some years. She's made her living off of writing and publishing, without having a separate day job, for about three decades. She takes the long view, which separates her from a lot of the folks who've had some success in the last year or five or ten, and give advice based on what they've done short term. Which is useful, up to a point, but if you want a long-term career, the best advice comes from someone who's had one, and is still going strong.

Kris herself is the first to say that every writer is different, and that you should examine any advice you get to see if it will work for you, or how you can make it your own in a way that'll be useful. But basically, when she talks about writing or publishing, I listen, and I usually agree with her.

This book is a collection of essays originally posted on her blog over a period of some years, all on the topic of how a writer's attitude will affect their success.

Writing and publishing is an area where about 90% of success seems to come from just doing it, over and over, year after year after decade. It's easy to kill your own career -- or strangle it in the crib -- by having the wrong attitude, looking at things from the wrong perspective, buying into myths, thinking short-term instead of long-term... so many ways of wandering off the path. Kris talks about some of the trickiest detours into the underbrush, the ones lit up in neon and advertising themselves as shortcuts or expressways or well-lit, well-trodden paths to Success! which are actually no such thing.

She starts by looking at your habits and routines, which are two different things, in the first two essays. Developing good habits and routines can make you more productive by offloading a lot of the thinking and planning. Habits are how you do things, while routines are how you organize your day. So Kris is in the habit of, whenever she cooks, cooking enough to freeze leftovers so she doesn't have to cook all the time. Going to cook? then cook a lot, is a habit. Drinking some water before a writing session, then sipping tea while writing, is another habit; it forces her to get up and move around about once every hour, to keep her from getting crippled up from spending too much time sitting and typing. Sitting down to type? Drink some water and make a mug of tea.

She gives her routine as well, from getting up to going to bed, including several writing sessions per day, and also talks about when she has to deviate from it, and how she gets back to it as soon as possible. I appreciate that she shows the bumps in the road and how to recover from them -- much more useful than pretending to be Superwriter, or urging her readers to be.

The third essay talks about the damage that comes from internalizing the idea that writing fast is bad. There's a strong meme going around the larger society, and particularly pushed by English teachers and book reviewers and agents and many tradpub editors, that anything written quickly has to be crap. It was churned out, cranked out, dashed off -- clearly it can't be any good. That's a poisonous idea that doesn't belong anywhere near your writer brain, and Kris does a good job shooting that myth and burying the corpse.

The fourth essay is about people who do just enough to get by, and how that hurts them if they're a writer. I'll admit I was one of those people in high school. High school contained little that I was interested in and less that was actually useful. I learned some things, sure, but that was a minority of what was presented, and I learned a lot more on my own. Ignoring homework to read or write might not have been great for my GPA, but I think it was the right choice in the long run, even if I didn't make that choice for such great reasons at the time. It's easy to get into the habit of doing as little as possible, though, and feel good about getting away with that. Maybe that's not so bad if you're a minimum-wage slave, but when you're doing something you really want to do, and transition to working for yourself (as all freelance writers do, essentially) then the cliche about "You're only cheating yourself" becomes very true. This essay made me think about my own habits, how they've changed over the years and how they haven't. In some ways, I bust my butt when I'm working for someone else (and always have, even with that first minimum wage retail job) but in others I'm good at doing as little as possible so I can get on to the good/fun/interesting stuff. Being conscious of that means I'm applying my highly developed "efficiency" skills where they'll actually do the most good, rather than applying them reflexively.

Number five is about following the crowd, something I've never been very good at, even if I wanted to. Probably just as well, but this is another area where I'd prefer to be able to do some "crowd following" type things -- consciously and with forethought, of course. I'm probably better off with my inner writer being stubbornly unable to, though. If you find yourself thinking, "I'd better write this, or I should write like that, because that's selling," this essay is for you.

The sixth essay talks about how writers become indispensable to their genre or subgenre, and what Kris means by that. This is one of those things you can't just do -- it's not like finishing a novel, or taking a class in how to design covers. Kris gives seven tips you can follow to give yourself the best possible chance of being one of the indispensable writers in your genre, but like success itself, all you can do is prepare, and make sure that when it starts raining soup, you're standing outside with a pair of goggles and a big bucket.

Number seven is about how fast and early success can hurt you. Not something I have to worry about :) but it's an interesting read. Having great success right off the bat sounds like a great upside risk to have to deal with, but it is a risk, and thinking about how to handle it is worth some cogitation time. And I think a lot of this applies to great success no matter when it comes; it's easy to fall into the traps she discusses, no matter when that sudden boost comes.

Number eight is about major life rolls -- some catastrophic event, like a major illness, a death in the family, a house fire, a divorce, things that happen that feel like a knife in the gut -- and how they affect your writing (along with the rest of your life.) You might not recognize that what happening is affecting you until later. Kris gives an example of how this happened to her and she didn't recognize it until months later. It happened to me in 2012, when my husband's retina tore. He needed two surgeries, months apart, and his doctor couldn't say whether his vision would go back to what it was before, or whether the surgeries would just keep it from getting any worse. Jim is legally blind and doesn't have any excess vision to play with, and I was a quiet wreck for most of that year. I was more than halfway through the year when I realized exactly why my writing had gone to hell, and accepted that it probably wasn't going to get any better until the crisis was over with. It was hard to come to that conclusion -- I had plenty of spare time, there seemed to be no logical reason why I couldn't write. I just... couldn't. Deciding not to beat myself up about it anymore (which just added to my stress) was the best decision I could've made. Good essay.

The ninth essay is about how letting the battles and bad attitudes of your fellow creatives suck you in and take up real estate in your brain can hurt you. From the sheer time lost following online flamewars (and I'll admit this is me, depending on the subject of the fight), to the slams and sneering and flaming echoing in your head and preventing you from writing what you want to write, your fellow writers can really poison the well.

Number ten is about believing in yourself and your work, and sticking up for yourself and for a book or story or series, for a genre or subgenre you want to write, for a style of writing that feels right to you, no matter who is telling you you're wrong. Kris gives some great examples -- The Phantom Tollbooth, The Cat in the Hat, and Starship Troopers, of books that would've never been published if the writers had listened to their agents or editors, books that went on to become genre-changing classics.

Number eleven is related to number ten -- it's more about sticking up for yourself, but specifically about clearing people who are actively obstructing you out of your life and work. Kris talks about the example of Sally Field, who'd had success on TV playing Gidget, a vapid airhead, and similar roles like The Flying Nun. Now she wanted to move into movies, but her agents, her business manager and her husband all told her that she wasn't pretty enough and wasn't good enough.

Field's response? "You're fired."

You're fired.

She didn't bow her cute little head and listen to their advice. She didn't let them bully her. She left her agents, her manager, and her husband (who agreed with them). She ends the anecdote with this:

[That time] was like 'Out! All of you!'

Four very important words.

Out! All of you!

All of you who don't believe, who offer bad advice under the cloak of good advice. Who recommend that something innovative get tossed because it's unusual. Better to blend in, better to be like everyone else. All of you who are afraid of risks. You--out!

There's more. This is one of my favorite of Kris's essays.

The last essay is about figuring out what kind of writer you are, what kind you want to be. It can take some time, and our early guesses can easily be wrong. Or we might change somewhere along the line. This is about exploring the territory, trying things on for size, tasting what the field has to offer rather than just deciding that the one thing we've been munching on all along is our favorite by default. I've known a lot of writers who seem to be so paranoid that they might be falling behind that they dash as fast as they can down the first road they hit -- the first genre or even subgenre they start writing, or the first one they have some success with -- that they don't even look at all the other possible paths, much less explore any of them. "Oh, no, I'll just keep doing what I do best!" is, in my opinion, one of the saddest things a writer can ever say. Also, as Kris says:

If you look at what you're doing bit by bit, piece by piece, you'll probably end up with the same kind ofhybrid that I have. A bit of traditional here, some indie there, a little self-publishing in the middle. You might end up with a preference ... and that preference might remain the same for the rest of your career.

Or it might not.

The message I get is to stay aware. Aware of what's out there, and aware of what you're doing -- all of it. It's easy to dismiss or overlook that little side project, or that "not really published" stuff you do on your blog for six years, or non-fiction that doesn't really count because... why again?

And aware of what's going on in your own head. That's really what this whole book is about -- being awake and aware of what you think and what you believe, and how it affects what you do and how you do it. There's a lot of good stuff here, enough to reward several readings at intervals. Highly recommended.

Patreon Follow-Up

I've figured out how I want to schedule anthology posts, juggling posts here along with the various Patreon levels, two of which get posts a week early. I did the April post yesterday and put it up on my Patreon account, for folks getting the regular listing a week early, and folks getting my full listing, which also goes up a week early. Nobody's signed up for those levels yet, but if anyone does, they're there. :)

I have the post for here on the blog ready to go in drafts, and I'll release it on the 15th. Changing the lock on the April Patreon post from $3 to $1 will let those supporters see it. (I did a test, and $1 supporters do get an e-mail when a $3 post has its lock changed, so that works, yay.)

It's interesting (and sometimes frustrating) to actually dive into a completely new system and figure out how it works, what doesn't work the way I thought it would, and what the most efficient workflow will be each month.

One thing I didn't know when I started this is that Patreon won't accept HTML code in its posts. :/ At all. The completely unhelpful Help topic discussing this says it's because they haven't been able to get HTML to work in their mobile apps. Which isn't my problem, and doesn't make me any happier with this.

I hand code my posts here -- I've been online since before HTML was a thing, and while I'm not any kind of a wizard at it, the sort of coding that's useful for a basic blog post is pretty automatic for me -- and I just assumed I could do a copy/paste to put things onto Patreon. Well, not so much. [headdesk]

Patreon has its own system for formatting posts and inserting links, and once you see how it works, it's very easy to use. Which doesn't change the fact that it took me about an hour and a half to convert my post (keeping in mind that I was doing my full file, not just the two months' worth I post each month) and get everything looking more or less the way I wanted. It wasn't hard, (yay, HTML!) there was just a lot of it. :P

Since I'm still posting on my blogs, I can't just convert over to Patreon's system; I have to maintain two formats for the listings. I'm hoping that, now that I've reformatted my whole file, maintaining two differently formatted files in parallel won't be such a hassle. I usually find a few new markets per month, depending on the season, so I won't have to redo the whole thing again. I'll just double format each new entry and insert it into its master file. Hopefully that'll work. [crossed fingers] I keep my files in Word documents, and in the past I've had trouble saving something to Word, then re-opening the file and posting it into a different system. Not often, but occasionally, something will go Sproing! at that point and it's time to start headdesking again. Hopefully that won't happen this time. [more crossed fingers]

After a night's sleep, I'm feeling a bit better about this. I'm sure I'll figure out a decent workflow, although I won't know until next month. We'll see.

I do think my problem is probably particular to me. What I'm putting up on Patreon is pretty unusual; most other creators whose pages I've browsed are offering art, music, video, that sort of thing. The writers are (unlike me) generally focusing on their fiction creation, and they post downloadable files of stories, or short videos, podcasts or blog posts talking about their creating, their experiences, their characters and worlds, answering questions, etc. Also cat pictures. [wry smile] Writing right into the Patreon form isn't difficult; I'm probably one of very few people trying to paste huge swathes of HTMLed text into Patreon, so I doubt anyone's working behind the scenes to make HTML work on that system.

At any rate, it does seem to be working. Onward....

Angie

Patreon

Okay, I got a bunch of responses to my question about a Patreon last month, mostly in e-mail, and all of them were positive. So I've set up a Patreon page, yay. :)

Now that I've poked with the system a bit and seen how things actually work, I've made some changes in how I've set it up, versus what I came up with when I was thinking with my keyboard before.

First, I've set it up for a monthly donation, rather than per work. I originally wanted it to be per work, so if I missed a month (which I've only done twice in the eight years [wow, eight years, really?!?] that I've been doing the anthology listings) it wouldn't be a huge deal and no one would get charged. But Patreon won't let you do a "paid" post that only charges a subset of your patrons -- I don't know why not, but there you go.

So, I want to offer an option to get my whole list (which means all the anthologies I know about at the time, rather than just the two months' worth I post here) as a premium reward. But there's no way to only charge the $5/month people for that one, while only charging the $1-3/month people for the shorter listing. If I posted them both, it'd charge everyone twice a month, and that wouldn't work. Charging everyone once a month seems to be the way to go; I'll do my best to maintain my low rate of missed months.

Also, I originally thought about doing PDFs of the listing to e-mail people, as a sort of slightly fancier way of distributing things. But half the usefulness of the listings, now that I've thought more about it, comes from the links to the editor/publishers' web sites. They very often have more info than I include in the listings, and I always recommend a writer click through and check out the site before submitting something. That's tough to do from a PDF. Scratch that idea.

So I'll be posting the listings to my Patreon page, and patrons will get an automatic e-mail.

If you use the listings, if you find them helpful, any support would be appreciated. If you can't afford to contribute right now, that's fine; I totally get that times are tough for a lot of people. And I'll still be posting the listings here; I'm not cutting off anyone who can't afford to support my Patreon.

Here we go -- let's see how this works. :)

Thanks!

Angie

The Writer's Table

Scott William Carter, the guy who came up with the WIBBOW test (Would I Be Better Off Writing?) did a post about a metaphor he created, looking at writing/publishing activities as a table. The four legs are four activities you do as a writer, or actually any kind of creator, if you substitute art or music or whatever for writing:

Leg 1: What you write
Leg 2: How much you write
Leg 3: How much you learn
Leg 4: How you market

It's not complicated, but it's an interesting, and I think useful, way of thinking about what you want to do, how to focus, and how to balance your writing-related activities. Scott discusses each leg, how they support your work, and how it fits together. Check it out. (Scroll down a bit once you get to the page, about half way. Start at the paragraph right above the table diagram.)

Angie

Starting Over

So, it's January first again -- a new beginning. To a lot of writers, it's a time to heave a sigh of relief and reset your counters to zero. That's exactly what I'm doing, and it feels pretty good.

One or two of you might've noticed I stopped updating my wordcount counter several months ago. My writing crashed, and I never got it back, despite trying a few times. My real 2014 wordcount is a few thousand greater than my counter was showing yesterday, but not enough to sweat over. I made a little over 200K words last year, when my goal was 300K. That's a pretty huge failure.

Back in 2012, my year-end total was a little over 80K words. I considered that to be a huge failure too. And coming into the last month and the last week of the year, I felt about the same in 2012 as I felt in 2014 -- depressed at failing, and eager for a new start. The difference this year is that my horrible, huge failure in 2014 produced about 2.5 times as many words as my horrible, huge failure in 2012. That's a pretty great failure, if you think about it.

Aim high, miss high.

I have a goal of 300K new words of fiction again for 2015. Hopefully I'll make it this time. With luck, I'll pass it. But even if I fail, so long as the failure is up in the six digits, I'll have done a decent chunk of writing. I'm good with that.

I finished eleven stories in 2014, and no novels. I'm going to shoot for a goal of an even dozen shorts and at least one novel in 2015.

I have stories coming out in four anthologies this year. I'll finally have a significant (relatively [cough]) number of publications on the SF/F side, and that'll be cool. I'd like to have at least as many next year, but that's just a wish; I can't force someone to publish one of my stories, so all I can do is keep writing and submitting. Putting myself into a position where editors and publishers can decide to accept my work is all I can do on the tradpub side.

I also want to indie pub at least six short stories this year. It's not a lot, but I've been wanting to get into the indie side for a while now. It's time to take some action, so those six indie shorts are a goal. If I can do more, great.

I'll be starting up the Anthology Market posts again this month. I apologize for going on hiatus for December; I should've announced that. I've noticed that a lot of publishers take a vacation in December too, though, and a lot of writers back off to do holiday things. Hopefully we didn't miss much, and everyone's ready to dive back into the pool this month.

I started a new blog for Angela Penrose, my SF/F writer persona, at http://angelapenrosewriter.blogspot.com/. It's meant to be a resource point for readers, rather than a place for writers to chat. The Anthology Market posts are not cross-posted over there, and I'm keeping that blog very low traffic. That's where I'm talking about new SF/F releases, and similar things readers might be interested in. I'll probably mention major milestones here as well, but I wanted an uncluttered place where a reader could find my work without having to take a machete to a lot of writer talk and general blathering.

[Yes, I have a Gmail account for that name. I don't check it very often. If you need to get ahold of me, angiepen at gmail dot com is still the best general address, or angiebenedetti at gmail dot com if it's for something romance-specific.]

I had a decent holiday, with some ups and downs. I got a lot of books for Christmas, which is always a good thing. :) I hope everyone else had a great holiday too, and is ready to get back to work.

Angie

Great Kickstarter Advice

A band called the Doubleclicks ran a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign in February (over $80K funded of an $18K goal) and wrote up a great -- if long, but long is good for this sort of thing -- article on how to do it. Good stuff, go read it. Thanks to John Scalzi for the link.

One thing I've always wondered about was the stretch goal thing. You know, how we're asking for $20K, but if we reach $25K we'll send everyone who backs us a free T-shirt or something? So you've basically got $5K to spend on T-shirts. That sounds like a lot, but what if you have a lot of people each making small contributions, rather than a smaller number of people each giving more? That's the same amount of money but more shirts owed. What about postage? What about packaging? What if you actually take in $100K, which sounds awesome but if that's another 10K people you have to send T-shirts to, plus whatever higher-level stretch goal premiums you promised...?

Clearly there's a way of making this work -- the whole cost + packaging + shipping thing probably explains why things like wallpapers are so popular as stretch goal premiums -- but just as clearly some people don't think about the details when they design their campaign. The Doubleclicks suggest very thoroughly spreadsheeting everything before you take step one of putting your campaign up. Smart advice; everyone should do it.

Another interesting point was that you need to look at how many active fans you have -- people who already know you, like your work, and who are regularly in touch through a newsletter or your web site or Twitter or whatever you use. That number is a key factor in how much money you can realistically ask for. People who are already popular will be able to raise more money. People who are just starting out and have no friends outside their mother and their office mate at the day job will have a much harder time. Again, it makes sense, but some people seem to think Kickstarter is a magic pot of money that they just have to reach out and take. The Doubleclicks talk about how to analyze the size of your existing network, compare it with successful campaigns run by people in your business and the size of their networks at the time their campaign started, and figure out about how much you can realistically hope to get. Math is good when you're dealing with money.

There's a lot of great info here -- if you've ever thought of doing a crowdfunding campaign, or might some day, go check it out.

Angie

Getting Your Book into the Anthology Listing

Some people have been writing to me, asking if I'd include this or that anthology in my monthly listing. I love hearing about new anthologies, but I often have to decline to list someone's book, so I thought it'd help if I talked about how I choose anthologies to list.

This list started out as a file on my computer, just for me. I'd run across an interesting anthology, but I'd forget about it, or not remember until after the deadline had passed, or not remember the name of the book and not be able to find it again, so I started copying down relevant info, and listed them by due date. Then I figured that if the list was useful for me, it might be useful for others, so I might as well share it, and I started posting it.

Because of this origin, the listing is still based on what I'm interested in, with one or two grandfathered points, and one or two expansion points based on the interests of people I know who read my blogs. So frex., I started out subbing to semi-pro markets, as well as pro, and I still list (some of) them, even though I don't sub there myself anymore. And I started out only listing anthos in genres and subgenres I write in myself, but then I started listing Cthulu-based books for Charles, and I put in a Wu-Xia book for Winnie, etc., and finally opened it up to all fiction genres. So here's what I have now:

1. Pay rate. In order to be included on my listing, an anthology has to pay more than a penny per word, which is the rock-bottom semi-pro rate. For anthos that offer a flat payment, some significant percentage of the wordcount range has to work out to more than a penny per word. I don't write for peanut shells, and don't want to encourage my friends to do so either, so I don't list markets that pay peanut shells, or nothing at all. Note that if you don't state your pay rate on your guidelines, I'll assume you're paying nothing. I don't list royalty-split books, because with an anthology (especially by an unknown editor who can only afford to pay a royalty split) that usually means the editor sends everyone a check for a dollar-twelve every six months, which isn't worth anyone's time. I'll occasionally make an exception to the No Non-Paying Books rule for a charity anthology if I like the charity, but not often. This requirement is the number one reason why I've had to turn down requests to list.

2. Demographic restrictions. Some markets have restrictions on who can submit. For example, a lot of Canadian markets which receive subsidies from their government have to publish all or mostly Canadian writers. That's fair, but I'm not Canadian, so I don't list these markets. Some anthologies recently have only been open to women; I'm a woman, so if it's otherwise interesting and the pay is decent, I'll list those. I've seen some where they only want stories from Asian writers, or Black woman writers; I don't qualify for those, so I don't list them. Note that if an editor wrote me and asked if I'd list their book, which is open to only, say, gay Latino writers, if it otherwise qualified then I'd probably list it. I won't list it on my own if I don't qualify to write for it, but if you ask, I'll add it.

3. Professionalism. If a book's guidelines or web site has what I consider red flags, I won't list it. If the editor falls all over themself to reassure everyone that they're Not Charging A Fee! to publish your story, that tells me they're a newbie at this, and coming from the wrong end of the business to boot; I'm not going to recommend writers submit to that book. If they want exclusive rights for an unreasonable amount of time, or subsidiary rights they don't need (seriously, movie rights? [eyeroll]) then I won't list that book. If the web site is riddled with copyedit errors, or the text is dark red on a black background, or the artwork is hideous, I'll assume that's what the finished anthology is going to look like too, and won't list the book.

4. General skeeviness. If, in my sole determination, the book sounds like it's going to be something I'd be ashamed to have my name in for reasons of skeeviness, then I won't list it. Frex., I ran across an anthology a while back whose primary theme seemed to be based on resurrecting the old pulp era trend of fetishizing, exoticizing or otherwise twisting non-European cultures for purposes of pointing and staring and maybe some sneering. The pay was good, but in the 21st century we really should be beyond that crap, so I didn't list it.

5. The hassle factor. Does the editor/publisher make it easy to find info about the anthology? If there's no one page that I can link to where all the info can be found (or maybe two if the book sounds otherwise stellar); if the editor/publisher didn't put up a page at all, just sent a note around to a few friends so they could post it on their blogs, but there's no official site for the anthology itself; if it's going to take too long to scrape together all the info from various sites and pages, I just won't bother. Seriously, if an editor/publisher can't get organized enough to put all the vital stats in one place and post it online, are they organized enough to put a book together, get it published, handle the marketing, and pay everyone on time? If you want folks to submit, get all your ducks in a row and then put them on one web/blog page.

6. Up to date info. This applies mainly to books that will remain open to submissions until they're filled, rather than having a firm deadline. I'll list an Until Filled book for a maximum of one year, at which point I'll take it off the list. I check the guidelines page each month to make sure it's still open before I post it in that month's listing. Note that I am not going to go on an Easter egg hunt through the editor or publisher's web site, looking for recent news. Everyone who bookmarks that page or publicizes the antho with a link to that page is going to be looking at that page. There should be an update posted prominently on that page if the book closes, or is cancelled, or acquires a firm deadline, or if anything else a writer needs to know changes, even if it's just a "NEW INFO!" note with a link to the page where the lengthier update is posted.

Taking all that into account, I'll list any anthology that looks interesting. I post about two months' worth at a time, based on deadline. So the post that goes up in August (somewhere between the 10th and 15th) will list books with deadlines between 31 August and 1 November. That limitation is to keep the list manageable. Most books with a firm deadline are on the list for two months, occasionally three depending on the exact due date. I figure two months is enough time for someone serious about subbing to write a story that fits.

If you're editing or publishing an anthology with open submissions, and you think your book will match my requirements, please do write me at angiepen at gmail dot com, with all the info and a link to your guidelines page, or even just a title and a link, and I'll be happy to help get the word out.

Angie

Workshop and Sales and Business

So the first chunk of the year was pretty hectic, and I'm just getting back to normal. I wrote six stories in six weeks starting in early January, for Dean and Kris's anthology workshop. The way this works is, there are six professional editors, each editing an anthology that'll be brought out as part of the Fiction River line. Writers who've signed up get guidelines (book title, length requirements, theme, sometimes more info depending on the editor) and deadlines. The deadlines were one per week for six weeks, each Sunday, midnight Pacific time, no late subs accepted, no excuses, period. A lot more students got all six stories in than any of the instructors expected, although considering how Dean pounds the pulpit of getting your butt in the seat and your hands on the keyboard and doing the work, about how writing faster means spending more time writing not just typing faster, of how to make it as a pro you need a good work ethic (see previous about spending more time writing), I'm not sure why they were surprised. :) Personally, I was kind of afraid to sub fewer than six stories and then show my face at the workshop, so I didn't. Anyway.

The workshop was pretty awesome, although hectic. We all read all the subbed stories, which totalled about 250. So between writing for six weeks, then frantically reading up to and through most of the workshop, I did very little else for the first two months and change of this year. Once we were all settled in Lincoln City and got rolling, the way it worked was that the editors sat up at the front of the room, with the students in rows, sort of like a college classroom, but with rectangular two-person tables instead of those awful little desk-chair things. Lots of laptops and notebooks for taking notes.

We did one book per day. All the editors commented on each story, with the editor who was actually editing the book going last. Other editors either pretended they were editing that particular anthology, or in Kris's case she pretended she was still editing F&SF, and in Dean's case he pretended he was still editing Pulphouse Magazine. They went through the stories one at a time, each editor saying whether they read all the way through and why or why not, whether the story hit any of their reader cookies or anti-cookies[1], and whether they'd buy it. The final (actual) editor did the same, but if they said "Buy" they actually were making an offer. Or sometimes they held a story to the end, then looked over all the held stories and made final buy/no-buy decisions while building their TOC on the white board in front of the class. That's always fun to watch, and instructive.

The point of having all the editors talking about all the stories is to show us that editors disagree. I think we all know this on an intellectual level, but still, there's a strong tendency in Writerland to assume that because a story gets a form rejection right off the bat, the story must suck. Some writers send a story out once or twice and never again, convinced it's garbage because it didn't get bought right away, or because it only got form rejections. (Kris, a bestselling writer, an award winner in multiple genres, got three form rejections just that week. Which is a pretty rude thing for an editor to do to a name writer, but still, it happens to everyone.)

Actually seeing the editors not only disagreeing but actively arguing with one another makes quite an impact, though. Three editors tried to convince Dean to buy the story I'd written for his book. They failed, but they all (including Dean) were pretty sure I'd sell it somewhere else. (It's sitting in an SF magazine editor's queue as I type.) Three editors tried to convince Kris to buy the story I wrote for her book. They failed, but again, everyone agreed it'd probably sell. (And it's sitting in a mystery magazine editor's queue.) People were still needling Dean about the story of mine that he'd passed up days later. Kris said they'd talked about it at home while they were reading submissions, but she couldn't convince him, and neither could all three professional editors when they ganged up on him in class.

Now, all this was a wonderful balm for my disappointment at not making this or that sale, but the point is that three professional editors would have bought that story if they were the one editing that particular anthology. We all know that different editors produce different anthologies, that two editors doing similar books with the same or similar themes will put together books that feel different, have a different subtheme or a different point of view, and therefore a different list of stories. We all know that. But seeing it playing out in front of you, sometimes with raised voices or pointed jokes or annoyed scowls or incredulous expressions? That makes you feel it, not just know it, and I think that after watching the editors arguing over stories one is less likely to think, Yeah, I know a lot of stories just had to find the right editor after fifty submissions, but MY story sucks.

Watching an editor narrow their holds down to the final roster is instructive as well. I imagine most of us have had the experience of being told in a rejection letter, "I had enough great stories for four books, but unfortunately I can only publish one," or something similar. It's easy to think, Yeah, but my story wasn't quite great enough, or maybe, The editor's just being nice, letting me down easy. But actually watching an editor agonize over the decisions makes it clear that this is hard. One of the editors, I thought she was about to start crying a number of times, and particularly when she was letting down people whose held stories didn't quite make it.

One difference I noticed from last year was that there weren't as many invites. Last year each book was at least half full by the time the workshop convened. Name writers were invited to submit, presumably to get some names on the covers that'd help sell the books. (How to Save the World, the book I sold a story to, has David Gerrold and Laura Resnick on the cover, among others.) That makes sense; anthologies are a tough sell anyway, and it's clear why Kris and Dean, as the series editors and owners of the publishing company behind Fiction River, would want to give their new anthology series the best launch possible. I was expecting the same thing this year, actually, but there were very few invites this time.

Which isn't to say there won't be any "names" in the books. Aside from Kris and Dean, who write stories for all the anthologies, Lisa Silverthorne and Ron Collins are regulars at the anthology workshop; their names regularly appear on the covers of SF magazines. And I spent the workshop week sitting next to Cat Rambo. (I managed not to ever fangirl her, because I am not a complete dork one hundred percent of the time. [cough]) But they reported that the series is doing better than they'd expected, reviews have been good, and they're gearing up for more publicity and some experimentation.

One of the experiments came about during one of the aforementioned sessions of agonizing over the final buy list on a book. There were three more stories Kevin Anderson, who's editing Pulse Pounders -- basically a collection of short thriller type stories -- wanted to buy, but he didn't have the budget. Mark LeFevre, the Kobo Writing Life guy, was also attending the workshop. He cornered Kevin, Kris and Dean during a break and made an offer on behalf of Kobo to help fund the three extra stories for a special expanded Kobo edition of the book. There'll be an expanded edition of Kris's book too, Past Crimes, a collection of historical mysteries. He was actually willing to do Kobo special editions of all the books, but Kris and Dean want to start slowly, with the two books that they think have the widest audience. The reasoning is that because this is something new, they want to give it the best chance to succeed. If they do special editions of all the books and some don't sell well, it might be taken as a failure of the expanded edition concept, rather than just the individual books selling slowly. They want to give the concept the best chance to succeed, so it can become a thing that other editors/publishers and other e-book vendors would consider doing.

Another new thing is that they're filling and scheduling books a lot farther out, so that they can get ARCs done and available in time to send them out to the major review sites the requisite 5-8 months in advance. For that reason, the two books I sold stories to won't be out until 2015.

Oh, right, I sold a couple of stories. :) John Helfers, who bought my story for How to Save the World last year, is editing a book called Recycled Pulp this year. It's a cool idea -- he created a bunch of ultra-pulpy sounding titles, and we had to write modern, non-pulpy stories that fit the titles. Each writer who wanted to sub for that book sent in three numbers between 1 and 250, and we got back three of the titles off the list. We could write to whichever title we wanted. My story is called "The Crypt of the Metal Ghouls," and it was a lot of fun to write.

Kerrie Hughes is editing Alchemy and Steam, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. Kerrie really likes alchemy -- it's one of her reader cookies -- and she wanted stories that were a blend of alchemy and steampunk. I wrote a story called "The Rites of Zosimos," with plot points based on some actual concepts a Greek alchemist named Zosimos of Panopolis wrote about. She liked it a lot and it'll be fun working with her. And I think I might get a series out of the setting/characters. [ponder]

Alchemy and Steam is scheduled for April of 2015, and Recycled Pulp is scheduled for December of 2015.

And I might have some work lined up for later this year -- more info 1) when/if it happens, and 2) when I can talk about it. There's awesome networking at these workshops, though.

Random notes from the workshop discussions, both during the week around stories and on the last day when we did break-out sessions with experts in various areas:

Kris told some stories about crazy-ass things writers do to get an editor's attention. Everyone's heard the story of the guy who sent his manuscript in a pizza box, with a pizza in it, right? With a note saying something like, "Thought you'd enjoy a snack while you read...?" I heard that online back in the 80s. Well, Kris had a better one. When she was editing F&SF, she'd head down to the Post Office regularly to pick up bins of mail, and she got a note to go pick something up at the window. The Postmaster came up holding an envelope dangling at arm's length. The envelope was black and covered with actual (not fake) cobwebs, and had actual dead spiders glued to it. O_O The Postmaster asked her, "Do you want this?" Kris sort of stared at it and said, "No." Postmaster said, "Good," and went to throw it away. Seriously, who thinks that kind of thing is a good idea?

Writers are usually wrong about what genre their story is. If you have something out in submission or indie pubbed that's not selling, and you're pretty sure it's a good, well-written story, that might be why. Have a few people read it cold, then ask them what genre they think it is. You might be sending it to the wrong editors, or have it tagged as the wrong genre/subgenre at the vendor sites. Genre is a marketing tool, so if you mess that up, everything else about your marketing of that story collapses.

Ever notice how SF in books and magazines is such a tiny genre compared with SF in movies and TV shows? SF is huge everywhere except in the books and magazines where it began. Originally, SF stories all had basically the same endings -- science triumphed and the good guys always won. Then in the seventies, SF sort of collectively decided to go all literary, and a story could have pretty much any ending, including negative or depressing or bleak ones. Genre readers like knowing approximately how the story is going to end, though, so SF has lost a lot of readers, both people deciding they didn't like the new stuff and leaving, and older readers dying without being replaced by new readers. (I can confirm that the attendees at SF conventions centered on book/magazine fiction are greying; I'm probably on the low end of average age at most of those cons, and I'm 50. Whereas media SF conventions and comic book conventions are full of kids in their teens and twenties.) Literary fans expect their endings to be variable, so they read literary and like it. Most SF fans, though, expect science to triumph and the good guys to win, and since the seventies, fewer stories delivered that. So most SF fans watch the movies and TV shows but don't read the books or magazines. Most fans of book/magazine SF don't consider the TV/movie fans to be "real" SF fans, but come on, seriously? [sigh] There are still stories with that kind of ending, but you're not guaranteed to find one if you pick an SF book at random off the shelf. In trying to be literary, SF is slowly strangling itself. (I've heard discussions on the convention side that in a generation or two, the traditional, fan-run convention for people who read SF will vanish as its attendees -- and the people running the conventions -- age and die. Same thing, from the readers' perspective instead of the writers'.) The take-away from this discussion, IMO, is that if you want to build a good fan base with your SF, and attract younger readers, write stories where science triumphs and the good guys win. Or if that's not what you're into, that's fine but be aware that your reader pool is shrinking.

Genre is moving toward being an author name rather than a traditional genre category. (Dean is pulling all his different genres, written under a pile of pseuds, most of whom nobody knows are him, back under his Dean Wesley Smith name.) You can make this work, especially going indie, but it'll take longer to build your reader base if you're writing all over the genre map. Although in reality, if you do want to write across various genres, it's going to take you a while anyway. It takes a certain number of books/stories -- individual titles -- to hit a tipping point where your discoverability starts fueling itself. This number, which seems to be between 25 and 50, depending on a lot of factors including luck, is per genre/name. So if you write SF/F, romance and thrillers, for example, it'll take 25-50 titles in each genre to get your sales and visibility in that genre to take off, if you're publishing under three names. It's looking like publishing three different genres all under one name doesn't change that very much; a lot of readers still read only one genre, although that's slowly changing.

(Related story -- I was talking to a writer friend who knew a third writer who was complaining that his career hadn't taken off, his sales were abysmal, he needed an agent because he had to have the career help. [sigh] I poked around and saw that he had three pen names, each with one book published. [headdesk] Well, no wonder he hadn't taken off! Three books under one name would still make him a newbie and almost invisible so far as the readers are concerned. The way he's been doing it, though, from the POV of the readers he's three newbie writers, each of whom has only one book out. No wonder readers hadn't noticed him. Same thing, though -- visibility is about volume, about having enough titles out there that readers have a chance of tripping over one and then finding the rest.)

Speaking about short fiction, once an editor starts buying your stuff, show some loyalty to that editor. If you sell an SF story to a magazine, send that magazine all your SF stories first, give that editor first refusal on your stuff. Particularly if you're writing a series, always send new stories in that series to the same editor who's been buying the series. Offering a series story first to someone else, a different magazine or an anthology, is rude and unprofessional.

When you set up your business account for your writing income (you did that, right? especially if you're indie pubbing?) refuse overdraft protection. If someone hacks your account and overdraws it by a few thousand, the bank will be happy to give them that money, then not only charge you that amount but also the overdraft fee.

Be careful about (book) contracts from British publishers, which are reportedly even worse than book contracts from American publishers.

John saw a contract which said that if the copyright laws changed in any way in the future, you automatically agree to it, in perpetuity. It's unenforcable, but would still be a pain to deal with.

Some setting details are what Kris calls phony setting. So frex., if you say your characters are in "a renovated church," each reader is going to have a different image in their head, which are all probably going to be different from the image in your head. Actually describe the setting so the picture in the reader's head is at least close to the one in your own. That prevents sudden jolts later on when you refer to something that doesn't at all match what the reader was imagining.

The Cricket magazines (which pay wonderfully well) have a horrible contract, but if you tell them you can't sign it, they'll send you the good one.

Hard fantasy is like hard SF, but the fantasy is the tech -- it's explained, works consistently, and has the nuts-and-bolts feel that hard SF has, if the world actually worked on magic. (I actually write a lot of hard fantasy and didn't know it. :) )

We talked some about how Audible was lowering its royalty from 50% to 40%. Dean says that's a good thing because their business model is sustainable now. Also, they're dropping the dollar per sale that they paid directly to the writers -- circumventing the publisher -- whenever an audiobook was sold. They did that to force the publishers to clean up their accounting. A writer who got $X whenever they sold X audiobooks knew that they'd better see X audiobook sales on their royalty statement from their publisher. I wish the e-book vendors would/could do something similar and force the publishers to clean up their e-book accounting the same way.

We talked some about manuscript formatting, and how italics has replaced underlining in modern manuscript formats. Although if a market still demands paper submissions, assume they're also old-fashioned in their formatting, and use underlines.

The choice to quit the day job and go completely freelance is usually made at a point of crisis -- a lost job, frex. -- rather than because a reasoned decision has been made. Start thinking about what you'd do and how you'd do it. What if you lose your job next month? And can't find another one in a month or two or six? Do you know how to gear up to get your writing paying more of the bills, or any of the bills? Having some idea of what to do and how to do it if you have to transition over to full time writing Right Now will make a horribly stressful life roll a little easier.

If/when you do go full time, cut expenses as much as you can. Protect your writing time; that's what pays the bills. If you're selling regularly, a cleaning lady can be a good investment. If you make $30/hour or $50/hour on your writing, it's totally worth it to pay someone $15-$20/hour to wash dishes and vacuum and do laundry. Also mowing the lawn, pruning the trees, cleaning the pool, whatever. Protect the writing, and spend that protected time writing.

Don't let the publishing overrun the writing; one suggestion is to set aside one day per week for doing your publishing work, formatting and covers and uploading and updating the accounting. The rest of the time, write. New words of fiction. Research isn't writing, outlining isn't writing, editing isn't writing. Marketing/promo is most definitely not writing. (One of the worst things you can do is write and publish one book and then spend the next year on marketing and promo. Don't do that. Write the next book. And the next and the next.)

One way to protect your writing time is to stay organized. Checklists are good. So are systems you can implement over and over again. Have a long-term plan so you know what you want to accomplish (including non-writing tasks, like learning to do covers, learning to format POD paperbacks, setting up and starting to collect sign-ups for a newsletter, learn/implement a more comprehensive business accounting system, take a class -- larger one-time goals you want to hit) and in what order you want to do them. That way, when you find you have time/money for a larger task, you can look on your list and see what's next, rather than have to dither around, doing "research" and making the decision over again every time it comes up. Your goals and ordered list can change, if there's a reason, but making that list in the first place is part of your long-term planning.

Have similar plans month-to-month. List deadlines for any trad-pub books or stories you're doing, plus goals for finishing writing on Book C, formatting on Book B, a cover for book A and uploading it to vendors P, Q and R. Monthly goals should be realistic, based on how much time and/or money you have to spend, but treating it like a business with goals and deadlines makes it that much more likely things will get done. (No, I'm not this organized yet myself.)

Schedule time to learn stuff. There's a lot to learn if you're going freelance, especially if you're indie pubbing. The learning is going to take time, so plan that into your schedule. Protect the writing, but make learning something that'll help your business a strong second priority.

You need at least 15-20 titles up, per pseudonym, before it's worthwhile to do any marketing. (Yes, there's a pattern here.)

Whew. That's just hilights from what I wrote down in a notes file. There was a lot more, and I absolutely got my money's worth. I felt the same last year when I only sold one story, and the year before when I sold none. This is an awesome workshop, and Dean is taking sign-ups for next year right now. The workshops on the coast are invitation only, but you can write to Dean and ask for an invitation. Explain your experience and your goals, and why you want to attend. I had no pro-level sales when I wrote and asked for an invite, and I got into the anthology workshop that year. It's doable, and it's absolutely worthwhile.

Angie, getting back into the groove

[1] A reader cookie is something you just love to see in a piece of fiction. If you're really into Cthulu stories, then that's a reader cookie for you. If you love stories about soldiers, or cyberpunk, or grumpy protagonists, those are reader cookies. Something you seriously dislike, bad enough that it might prevent you from enjoying a story, might even prevent you from reading the story, is an anti-cookie. If you really hate stories with a child protag, or a lot of car-mechanic-jargon-babble, or spiders, then that's an anti-cookie. Sending an editor a story full of that individual's anti-cookies means the story will probably be rejected, no matter how good it might otherwise be. Unless it's absolutely stupendously fabulous in every other way.