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Marketing does not occur to me when I’m writing a story. If I followed the market, I’d be writing teenage vampire novels.
After writing several books, I review my titles and think: what kind of reader am I after in an audience? I have a family saga, a sophomoric comedy, and a technothriller. In the past, I perceived my audience as a legion of me, myself, and I. In other words, I assumed my readers would be just like me. This has not been the case, and simply shows my naivety in understanding the market. I doubt that I will find that uber-geek military mom out there who is into nanotechnology and farming.
But while I’m still enjoying the life of a writer, I will keep on doing what I have been, and that is this: a story occurs to me, urging itself to be written, and only once it . . . → Read More: My odd genre combination: technothrillers and family sagas
 As an author, I aspire to be like certain authors, and truth be told, I am always gazing toward Melville, Orwell, and Dostoyevsky. I am none of these three in terms of talent, but when I craft a novel, this trio always sits like a panel of judges in the back of my mind, simply because their works have struck me in the most powerful ways, thus I want to emulate them. So I’m a fanboy after all, just not for video games, but for literature.
When a work gets published, the world gets to define it in terms that live outside the author’s mind, popping the bubble the author lived inside while writing the story. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on what other books are name-dropped in the reviews. When the Financial Times reviewed . . . → Read More: The typecast curse: When a book review marries you to another author
When the topic of literary agents comes up in online writing groups, the conversation is much different today than it was ten years ago. A trend is emerging where authors are rejecting the pursuit of literary agents. The writers have their pitchforks and pikes raised and are bypassing the agents altogether on their way toward the new publishing models. Amazon has created a world-changing endeavor, and after travelling the road of tradition, I’m in the horde now, too.
I’m quick to criticize agents, since I know well the joy of rejection. I spent years querying agents, only to ultimately feel like I’d been to a casino, throwing postal money down a slot machine. I’ve killed a few trees in submitting sample chapters. But I will say this: for all the time my submissions spent in slush piles before getting tossed, that period of being marginalized did help me become . . . → Read More: Indie barbarians at the gate of literary agencies
 I’ve concluded my two month era of free giveaways for Accelerating Returns and Drill & Sanctimony. Overall, I’d say it was a success, since over 2,000 readers downloaded copies of the ebook. What did I learn from the experiment?
The Gamblers: Readers will definitely take a chance on reading indie authors when they can taste a free sample. This is a no-brainer, but I’ve read that authors should not offer free copies, since it makes the quality suspect. I disagree, since as an indie writer, finding readers amid the social network noise is difficult. The free offer exposes authors to readers that otherwise wouldn’t take the chance. Mysterious spikes in downloads: On certain days, I’d see spikes in the number of downloads, with my top giveaway day leaping to 250 downloads. The rapid rise and fall . . . → Read More: Reflecting on my free book giveaway experiment
Twitter feels like a noisy bar, Facebook a packed coffee shop, and LinkedIn a stock market floor. I now have a presence on all the big social media sites, and it’s overwhelming. Just keeping track of the updates and the friending/networking/following seems a full time job in itself. Amanda Hocking, poster girl for Indie publishing success, recently said, “I only want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.” I agree with the sentiment. What she said. Pile on to that the updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, et al, and the job of being yourself can push into 50 hours a week.
A saying I often hear in the Information Technology world is “drinking from the firehose.” The social media deluge of tweets, status updates, and group . . . → Read More: Wandering in the social media rainforest
The unknown. One of my favorite topics. For any good story, the writer must handle the unknown and even create it to keep readers turning pages. A while ago I came across a page that spelled out how the unknown is viewed in different types of storytelling. Credit is given to Nancy Lebovitz on the page. The answers may be short and sweet, but are good conversation starters or idea triggers for thinking about books you may have read, or for books you are trying to write:
Science fiction: The unknown is to be understood and thereby changed.
Fantasy: The unknown is to be loved for its strangeness.
Horror: The unknown is to be feared.
Disaster: The unknown is to be endured.
Naturalistic/memetic/realistic fiction: The unknown isn’t worth bothering with.
Image: Flickr – Arianna_M(away) – . . . → Read More: The Unknown: how it’s viewed in science fiction versus fantasy
 Writers always get asked the dreaded question: “What’s your book about?” For me, I instantly get lost in a “missing the forest for the trees” moment. Or maybe its a “trees for the forest” moment. I want to blurt, “It’s about…everything. It’s about where we are going, where we’ve been. It’s about the universals that tie us all together, the wedges that sow discord between people and nations. It’s about science and religion, technophilia and technophobia, youth and age, the rise and fall of empire, work and domesticity, betrayal and revenge, youth and old age, fathers and sons.”
As a writer, I’m so inside the story that it becomes difficult to say exactly what the book is about.
Then I try to back up and really consider what the book is about. I usually come up with ten different ways . . . → Read More: The dreaded question to authors: “What is your book about?”
Having now stood on both sides of the publishing fence, I can say that I really enjoy the process of self-publishing, but the marketing of the book…not so much. With A Town Called Immaculate, the publishing process was semi-painful, but the promotion was simple (since Macmillan took care of finding shelves for the book). I would just check my e-mail and be notified, “A blurb of your book will be in The Financial Times/Esquire/The Guardian.”
With independent publishing, the publishing process is a snap, but promotion is the millstone around my neck. Shameless self-promotion does not appeal to me. Yet, for indie authors, to be noticed one must douse himself in kerosene and threaten to light a match.
There is another way, but not a profitable one. Since I’ve never written for fame and riches, I am content to give my books away for free. I initially had . . . → Read More: Indie Publishing: To give away, or not to give away?
While I wait impatiently for the dawn of the laundry-bot and the dishwash-bot, information technology jumped ahead of my wants and produced the sports-writing bot. Having written sports articles in the past, I am not entirely shocked that this is possible, since when I was assembling the basic story for high school recaps, the construction of the article became a dull and repetitive formula. One advantage to having software write sports stories is that there’s no excuses for the writer’s bar tab, as in, “Seventy-five dollars at Hooters, eh?”
“I was hungry for wings, boss.”
“Where’s the itemized receipt?”
“Oh shoot, I grabbed the un-itemized one.”
“Of course you did.”
What sporty-bot cannot do, however, is find the theme of the game, the essence of the turning point. Sporty bot can’t see the grimaces of pain or exaltation of players. What sporty bot can do is put together the . . . → Read More: Sports Writing Bot can turn a box score into dry bones sports article
First, a definition of third-person limited narration: “The third-person limited is a narrative mode in which the reader experiences the story through the senses and thoughts of just one character.”
 The definition doesn’t sound all that sneaky, but in skilled hands, the skewed viewpoints of a single character can paint and weave a story that makes him or her appear heroic when he or she may actually be wreaking havoc on everyone else. After all, doesn’t everyone tell themselves little lies when viewing the world through their own eyes? This also happens when writing through the eyes of a single character. What’s sneaky about third-person limited is that it feels like the narrator has authority because the writer is not using I and me. In third person, the reader has to realize that the voice is coming from . . . → Read More: Behold the Power of “Third-Person Limited” Narration: Being a Sneaky Author
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