Let me tell you about my ambitions, and why they don’t include Kickstarter (right now)

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Along with the release of the sales numbers of my self-published novel has come a flood of requests that I turn to Kickstarter to fund The Twisted Path (that’s the working title of the next Twenty Palaces book). Currently, I have no plans to do that, and I’m writing this post because I want to explain my reasoning to you guys and I want to have a post I can link to when people broach the subject. Because they do broach the subject. A lot.

I want to be a best-selling author.

What’s more, I want to do it on my own terms; I want to write the books I think are cool, and I want a hundred thousand readers to snap them off the shelves the first week they come out. I want to write thrillers with good characters and magic, along with A Few Things I Want To Say. I mean, not to jump up and proclaim that I want to be Stephen King, but I want to be Stephen King. It’s not about making a whole bunch of money, it’s about having my books in the hands of lots of readers from all over the world.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to copy Stephen King, or Nora Roberts or George R.R. Martin or Gillian Flynn. I wouldn’t even try. I intend to write books my own way because honestly believe the things I think are cool will be cool to bunches and bunches of readers.

Or maybe not. We’ll see. That’s what I’m shooting for, anyway.

How does this tie in to Twenty Palaces, a series that you, the person reading this post, quite possibly read and enjoyed? Well, 20P has dedicated fans, but not very many. As mentioned in the Twenty Palaces sales post, I sold over 3700 copies of my book, self-published. Couldn’t I sell at least that many if I self-published The Twisted Path? Or maybe even more if I turned to…

(dramatic pause)

Kickstarter?

Well, sure. Maybe. Maybe I could write two 20P books a year (or three in two years), and quite possibly the readers I have right now would be willing to pony up the cash I’d need for an editor, cover artist, copy editor, and the disreputable author himself (not to mention covering Uncle Sam’s and Kickstarter’s cuts). A Thousand True Fans, right?

Here’s the truth: I could do that. I could live on that money. I’d probably have to depend on 2.5K mostly-true-occasionally-false fans, but I’m still living on the advance money Random House started paying me in 2008, okay? I live cheap. I have no car, no cell phone, no new clothes, no new glasses…

Oh, wait, that part sucks. Anyway, I’m cheap as hell, I don’t need much money, and I could make that work, right?

Yes. Yes, I could. But you know what? That would be another year of not making my goal. That would be another year of working on a series that didn’t get me where I want to be. Every Twenty Palaces book I’ve written has sold fewer than the one before; do I want to keep going after fewer and fewer readers every year?

Several people have suggested that I could get new readers with a Kickstarter campaign, but I don’t consider that realistic. Take a look at these guys: their campaign has been fantastically successful. At the time I write this, they’re over 11,000% of their goal. However, they have fewer than 8,500 backers.

That’s huge for a Kickstarter but Circle of Enemies sold more copies than that and it’s considered a failure. When I look at fiction projects run by novelists, especially ones who are more successful than I am, the number of backers is usually in the low-three figures.

So no, a Kickstarter campaign won’t bring in new readers. It would sure please the readers I already have, though, and you know what? I want that. Wanting to be read by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world includes the people who already know and like my work. I’m grateful for everyone willing to buy a copy of my books or to recommend Ray Lilly to their friends.

But to stay with Twenty Palaces when I know the reading public at large–not just the ones who enjoy my work, but the wide audience–has rejected it would be to never move beyond my starting point. It would mean standing in this small safe place. I would be giving up the chance to grow and try something new.

If I were a different writer–someone who could put out 20,000 finished words a week–I’d write Ray Lilly books alongside whatever new things I came up with. I can’t do that. I’m not prolific. It has to be one thing at a time with me.

I just can’t get past the opportunity cost. Twenty Palaces novels are challenging: each one took me a year or more to write, and you know what? I’m not young. Look up at that third paragraph; did I say I wanted to be the next EL James or JK Rowling? Nope, it was “Stephen King.”

Because I’m old. Life is short, and I need to spend my years wisely.

So here’s my plan: I have already written a book in The Auntie Mame Files which needs to be revised. I’ve also written about 200K of The Great Way, which is the series name for my epic fantasy. Everything I’ve written so far has been aimed at publication through New York. Yeah, I know it’s possible (maybe not likely, but possible) to make more money by publishing books myself, but more money isn’t enough. I want more readers, too.

If I Kickstart or self-publish a new novel, it will be one of those books.

I won’t be returning to the Twenty Palaces setting until I’m honest-to-god successful. It’s only when I have, say, 100,000 eager readers buying my books that I’ll reintroduce 20P to see if the series can find new life.

So that’s it: the final word. I could self-publish or Kickstart The Twisted Path, but it’s not going to happen until after I succeed with something else. If you liked the Twenty Palaces books, I hope you’ll like the next thing I write. If not, that’s cool, too.

But please don’t argue with me about continuing the series, or try to explain to me what Kickstarter is, or insist that yes, in fact, truly, it would be the right move for me to write The Twisted Path next. The series is dead. It was starved of sales and died. I won’t be trying to revive it anytime soon.

Sorry if you’re disappointed by that–believe me when I say it hurts me even more–but that’s how it’s gotta be.

Added: As if he used his powers as SFWA president to read this unfinished blog post, John Scalzi put up a terrific post about writing for a living. It’s not just an art, it’s a job, too, and we all have to make realistic choices.

Plus, I’m convinced the dude has installed spyware on my computer or used a time machine to read this post in the future and then come back and pre-empt it. Hmf.

I recommend reading his thoughts on the matter, plus the comments from other pros in the comments. As an addendum: keep in mind that, looking at the numbers in this post, where he’s talking about the sales figures of Redshirts, John Scalzi, as successful as he is, has not yet reached the threshold I set myself for returning to 20P. Just sayin’

Randomness for 1/24

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1) Dr. Seuss books retitled according to their subtexts.

2) A Minecraft wedding.

3) 25 words that don’t exist in English.

4) Most popular dog names in New York, by neighborhood.

5) Ten of the most unusual houses in the world. These are absurd and/or gorgeous.

6) REM’s Losing My Religion digitally remastered to turn all the minor scales into major scales. Video. They’ve given the same treatment to “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors.

7) Finally, a runway model with good reason to look pissed.

Teaching Writers to be Talented

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As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I’m pretty iffy on the subject of “talent.” People say “That writer is SOOO TALENTED!” based on the work they produce, and there’s really no way to know where the work–not to mention the expertise that created it–came from. Multiple revisions? Strong editorial hand? A childhood spent ear-deep in books? Years of study?

This blog is mirrored on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, where people can leave comments. On DW, David Hines started a conversation about how we learned to recognize the things that need to be revised.

As I said before, if it feels wrong, I revise it[1]. The question is: how did I learn to recognize good from bad? I mean, it’s easy to talk about teaching the rules of grammar or plot cliches, but those are intellectual lessons. For me, I know it’s wrong before I really understand why. It’s the feeling that makes me give it a second look.

So how do we train writers to have this instinctive response to things that suck in their own work?

Here’s how I understand it works:

1. Make sure they’re exposed to good work.
1a. Make sure they understand what makes it good.
2. Make sure they’re exposed to terrible work.
2a. Make sure they understand what makes it terrible.
3. Tease out the good from the bad in problematic works.
(None of this is exactly revelatory, is it?)
4. Expect writers to explain for themselves why they respond the way they do.

It’s number 4 that matters most, I think. It’s important for mentors, peers, and teachers to point out not just good from bad but good from great, but it’s even more important for writers to acknowledge and analyze their own responses to work. What they feel, not what they ought to feel.

Eleven-plus years ago, when my wife and I were expecting, we did a lot of research on proper parenting techniques. Let me just say, there’s a lot of bullshit out in the world about raising your kids. Most of it is about discipline and far too much is faddish, but we were happy with John Gottman’s teaching. (Yes, this is a digression. I’ll bring it back to the topic at hand soon, I promise.) Actually, we borrowed a DVD from the library featuring a lecture he gave on “emotion coaching.”

Essentially what he explains is that it isn’t enough to love your kids or to be warm to them. It’s also important to teach them about their emotions. You set boundaries for proper behavior. You pay attention to those times your kids are feeling angry, frustrated, sad, etc. You don’t try to change their moods to something else with jokes or play or tickling. Instead, you teach the child an age-appropriate name for what they’re feeling and make sure they understand that it’s okay to be sad or angry or whatever.

And so on. The important thing is, when the child understands and trusts their own feelings, they get a host of benefits not the least of which is to trust the little feeling of alarm you get when you meet someone sketchy and manipulative.

To bring this back to writing, there are a lot of responses that people have to narrative and language that, left unexamined, lead them to make really shitty story choices. They may know what will evoke a particular response in a general sense, but can they predict the response accurately? Do they understand their own responses, and have they developed the empathy to incorporate the responses they’ve learned to expect from other people?

Because that sort of accuracy is what people call “talent.”

You can tell I think that previous sentence is important because it’s got its own paragraph. Here it is again in bold: Talent = Accuracy. If you can evoke a response from the reader[2] that you intended to get, that’s what people call talent. If you can do it while avoiding cliches like beautiful-but-klutzy-heroines or villains-shoot-the-hero’s-dog, people will think you’re even more talented. If you can make the reader feel something compelling but unusual, coming out of a narrative they can not find anywhere else, they’ll think you’re extraordinarily talented.

It doesn’t have to be something you’re born with. It doesn’t have to be something that makes itself known before you turn 18. It can come from hard work and close study and long sessions spent gabbing with other writers. No one can really tell, because the only thing they can see is the finished work.

That’s why I think that creating a talented writer is a pretty straightforward process, if the writer is willing to do the work: Examine their own responses. Understand how and why others respond as they do. Practice getting the responses you want. Become lauded as “a talented writer.”

The best(worst) thing about it is that people will see the end result of all that hard work and declare that it must have come from something innate within you, and they could never manage it themselves.

[1] Having already spent too much of my day on this post, I’m going to throw it onto the blog as a vomit draft. No revision! I fully expect to regret this at some later point.

[2] “The Reader” = Not every reader everywhere but a fair proportion of them.

Twenty Palaces sales: the first year

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A few weeks ago, the November 2012 sales numbers for self-published books became available to the people who published them. Since I first published the Twenty Palaces prequel (cleverly title Twenty Palaces) in November of 2011, I thought it would be a good idea to post the sales figures. Why not?

Looking at this, you might be tempted to look at the price I’m charging and try to work out how much I’ve made. That won’t work. For one thing, not all of these sales came at Amazon’s 30% sales commission (I refuse to call them royalties; Amazon isn’t my publisher). Despite setting the price above $2.99, they charged me 65% on a surprisingly high number of them.

Which sucks, but that’s the price of doing business with a company like Amazon. So, if you think you can figure out what I earned, it’s actually quite a bit less than that.

Also, the first month’s sales were small because I posted it just in time for the last week. December was the first full month.

Anyway, the Smashwords sales cover Kobo, iBooks on Apple, Sony Reader, and Smashwords themselves, and since I didn’t start them until months later than Amazon and B&N, I didn’t break them out by month. I would have had to break out each seller and that was too much work. They’ve been small players for me anyway.

Here’s the table:

Month Amazon US Amazon non-US B&N Smashwords Group Total All
11-Nov 83 6 0
11-Dec 902 27 54
12-Jan 430 25 55
12-Feb 281 19 40
12-Mar 211 13 42
12-Apr 182 2 20
12-May 131 16 31
12-Jun 126 14 32
12-Jul 98 8 27
12-Aug 96 11 27
12-Sep 71 8 17
12-Oct 62 5 14
12-Nov 44 0 11
 Total 2717 154 370 170 3411

Christmas! The Christmas season is worth a few sales, and that’s a fact. Checking the numbers for Giftmas ’12, there was another small bump not reflected above.

Anyway, the numbers aren’t terrible but they aren’t fabulous either. I’m certainly not going to be touring Europe by rail on this novel, and it doesn’t inspire me to Kickstart The Twisted Path, which would have been book number next. Still, for a book I’d already written, I’m happy enough with the results and grateful to everyone who bought a copy.

If you haven’t bought a copy, I put some handy links into the table above. Knock yourself out.

Finally, I know some authors post their numbers every year, but this was sort of a pain to do. I’m not seeing it becoming a tradition.

Revision

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Twitter user @UOJim asked me to write a post about revision, and I realized I have never done a systemic evaluation of the way I revise. Writing this will be a way to organize my thoughts on the subject, all of which I will probably forget once it’s time to go back over EPIC SEQUEL WITH NO DULL PARTS next spring when the first draft is finished.

(See how hopeful I am? Finished draft in the spring. It’s like a magic spell: I write it to make it happen.)

The way I figure it, there are two basic kinds of revisions: story-level and text-level. Continue reading

Negative Amazon reviews fail to keep a book out of the #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list

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Film at 11.

Authors, don’t fret those bad reviews. They mean less than you think.

Plot Without Conflict, a non-Western view

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Via Kelly Sue DeConnick, a discussion of non-Western plot structures that do not involve conflict.

I don’t have a lot to say about it, because I’d need to read much more in-depth to feel knowledgeable for that, but it is interesting.

Chainmail Bikinis *ARE* My Business!

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Oh, hell, would you look at the fabulous 200th issue of SFWA’s Bulletin:

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Let’s see, we have a wintry mountain scene complete with icicles, a dead giant with monster-teeth, and…

And a woman in a chainmail bikini.

You know what this cover says to me? It says: “I have nothing of value to say to you.” It says: “The only thing I have to offer is more of the drek you’ve been trying to distance yourself from.” It says: “We provide garbage because we don’t think garbage is what everyone likes.”

Apparently, there’s more WTFery inside, but I’ll have to take people’s word on it because I’m not interested. I used to read The Bulletin cover to cover but lately it just makes me feel embarrassed to see it drop into my mailbox.

SFWA, you’re an organization of professionals. If you want to pander to me, treat me like a savvy customer, not a mouth-breathing lowest-common-denominator soft-pron fantasy fan. I do not need paintings of swimsuit models on the covers of the professional magazines you send me; that’s what the internet is for.

Have some damn pride.

How to purchase your own Hugo Award

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Blastr has posted a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) list demonstrating how much it would cost to buy yourself a Hugo nomination and/or a Hugo Award.

Now, I’m not going to replicate their numbers here, you’ll have to click through to see them. They’re based on last year’s numbers. Since folks can nominate and vote just by paying for a membership in the convention, how many memberships would you have to buy (for friends, ‘natch) to put yourself into consideration. It seems like the cheapest options would be $850 to be nominated and $8800 to win for short fiction.

That’s 17 pals to make the bottom of the list, assuming this year’s numbers are like last year’s. You might want to round up to an even grand just to make sure. My question would be this: Would it be worth it?

Never mind the bragging rights to having the statue, or to putting “Hugo-nominated author” into your email sig file. Would it get you better contracts, more sales, more reviews, or anything at all? Would it ever pay off?

From everything I’ve heard, it never would.

A chance to do some good in the world

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Wing-it Productions makes a habit of helping at-risk, homeless, and incarcerated youth, and now they’re asking for help. To stay afloat and continue their weekly teaching sessions for kids inside the King County Juvenile Detention Facility and also homeless kids–not to mention their performances at kids burn centers and cancer society camps, plus their regular theater shows–they’re holding a fund drive.

They need $5,500 in donations by Jan 31st to collect their money, at which point their board will put up matching funds. They’re at 76% as I write this.

Their company, which includes Jet City Improv, is over twenty years old, but things have been tough for theater groups over the last couple, and it would be a shame if they were unable to continue their work. And yeah, the founders are friends of mine.

So please, even if you’re not a Seattle local, consider making a small donation.