Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Talking Writing and Publishing on Stark Reflections

Back in April I stayed awake until 1:00 AM and recorded an hour-long chat with for Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Reflections podcast. It went live last week, and over the course of the interview we tackle many writing and publishing topics, including my start as an RPG publisher in the pre-Kindle days of the early 2000s. One thing I dig about Stark Reflections is Mark’s habit of ending every interview by reflecting on the things he can take away and apply to his own practice as a writer/publisher. It’s possible one of my own reflections is “don’t do interviews at 1:00 AM”, because oh wow, I was getting a big loopy towards the end, but such is the curse of writing and publishing in a different time zone to the vast majority of your contemporaries. Check it out on the Stark Reflections website. Here’s the summary of what we cover:

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Indie Publishing and Business To Business Thinking

A general frustration I’m having with self-publishing/indy publishing circles right now Indies are, by and large, a business-to-business endeavour that primarily exist to provide ebooks to distributors and retailers who then sell them to the customer. Many of those distributors and retailers give an extraordinary level of control to the authors around pricing and promotion, convincing them they’re actually business-to-consumer. It’s become a foundational assumption in the rhetoric around indie publishing, even if it’s not true. So many people’s frustrations stem from this misunderstanding once they’re past the initial learning curve. The idea that you adjust some part of your product to make it appealing *to the business that actually sells it* is frequently met with all kids of denial, particularly when the suggestion involves increasing your prices beyond the just-barely-making-a-profit baseline. Indie authors have been trained to focus on the customer above all else, and have stuck to the strategy that undercutting traditional publishing’s prices is the only viable

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

POD, Publishing Mad Science, and White Mugs

Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished.  It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Routine Hacking and Emotional Triggers

When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around. Back in January, mornings were a struggle, and I slowly worked through the stuff that’s changed to find solutions. At first, I blamed the issues on new medication that left me groggy and prone to dozing off in the mornings (aided, in part, by the addition of a daily Wordle). Going to bed earlier and shifting the Wordle check-in until after 8 AM has helped, but it didn’t quite get me back into a writing frame of mind. So I started tracking where else my day was going astray and quickly realized a common point: sitting down to work on my desktop right after I drink my coffee. The desktop in

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Context Matters

I recently waxed nostalgic about the heady days of 2008 to 2009, when it felt like my fiction writing career tracked along with far more promise than it does today. I was focused on my writing career to the exclusion of everything else, a host of stories were published and opportunities offered, and things felt possible in a way they don’t right now. But a quick survey of the context in which I did all that work is pretty illuminating: I was younger, newly single, and looking for distraction. I was newly involved in the spec fic scene, and therefore a novelty. Social media was relatively new, and work gained attention because it was easier to reach one’s friends and communities with news. My father’s Parkinson’s disease was newly diagnosed, and hadn’t yet hit the point of physical and cognitive where I was increasingly conscious of both spending time with him and providing relief for my mum as his primary

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Subscription Models and the Indie Author

There’s nothing like teaching a workshop on something to both clarify your thinking and beliefs, then inspire new insights on a topic. Here’s a little something I puzzled through while writing my workshop for RWA last year. In indie publishing circles (and a lot of other marketing), you’ll often find people talking about sales funnels. The core idea here is moving COLD readers (who don’t know anything about you) through a funnel of information that WARMS them up (gets them excited about your work) and eventually gets them HOT enough to buy. It’s the kind of thing that you’ll find in 90% of indie seminars focused on making a living selling books, so it’s not particularly awe-inspiring or original. But I was revising the slides for this portion of the workshop right before I sat down to write up my case study for a good reader funnel, then tackling the inevitable question of “do I put my books into Kindle Unlimited’s

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Lead Generation and the Evergreen Backlist

Lead generation is basically marketing speak for “how will you initiate interest in your product or service.” It’s not something many writers are encouraged to think about — there is a mindset, more prevalent in other genres than here in the romance community — that once the book is done, it generates interest simply because it exists, and there’s a sense of frustration when the newly released book (or books) aren’t generating the kind of visibitiliy and sales they’d like. Truth is, all writers need to generate leads. We call it different things — running a newsletter, building a platform on social media, blogging, generating adds on Facebook or Amazon, newsletters swaps, and putting calls to action in the back of a book — but they’re all predicated on the same idea: get someone interested in you and your writing so you can further that relationship and build a sale. It may be horrible marketing speak, but I actually like

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Every Book Is Evergreen

One of the most useful parts of Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is the breakdown of the five modes of capital used in the publishing industry and its adjacent fields. I’ve used these to build a publishing company, guide my writing career, and solve all manner of problems. But I also see a gap, born of Thompson’s focus. He specifically calls out Financial Capital as a key form of leverage, encapsulating all the cash-on-hand resources as well as the ability to generate credit, financing, and investment. It’s a key part of any artistic organisation, as very little happens without it.  The missing element — based on my experience — is probably time, which doesn’t appear anywhere else on his list. Traditional publishers default to the velocity models, focusing on a short, hot burn with sales — they generate interest, release the bulk of their stock into the world, and expect to sell the most copies in the first month. Failure to

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Lessons We Learn From the Smiley Face

The yellow smiley face was first designed in 1963. State Mutual Life Insurance hired the designer, Harvey Ball, to create the logo attached to a company-wide “make friends” campaign after a merger decimated morale. They paid him $45 for the creation of two eyes, a smile, and a yellow circle. Nobody trademarked the smiley face, although plenty of found ways to copyright specific expressions of it. In 1970 the Spain brothers, Murray and Bernard, appended the words “Have a Happy Day” underneath and made a killing selling merchandise with the ubiquitous symbol. Contemporary operating systems all agree that the smiley face is a useful icon or emoji, now represented by the ascii digits of a colon and a closing bracket — 🙂 — but each system has its own expression of those emojis when the OS interprets the characters and translates them into graphics. As you might expect, the smiley face is a copyright nightmare once you dig into its

Stuff

Narrative Poetics Dances A Tango With Publishing Technology

The narrative poetics of comic books are driven by the stories relationship with the physical page. Everything must be in a particular page-count, with each scene allotted a certain number of panels and pages, and certain narrative beats work better at the bottom right of a two-page spread just before we flip the page. Prose seems like the writing process exists oustide the demands of the page, but that’s a function of distance and changing technology. Consider the description of writing a ten cent library, 20,000 word “nickel novel” from John Milton Edwards’ The Fiction Factory: The libraries, as they were written by Edwards, were typed on paper 8-1/2″ by 13″, the marginal stops so placed that a typewritten line approximated the same line when printed. Eighty of these sheets completed a story, and five pages were regularly allowed to each chapter. Thus there were always sixteen chapters in every story. (Edwards, John Milton. The Fiction Factory) Edwards is one

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Back Cover Synopsis in the Backlist-driven world

We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your primary relationship was with the book, the bookseller, and the story, not the person who wrote it. Then blogs came along, and then Facebook, and then Twitter. YouTube and TikTok and Tumblr and Snapchat and Patreon and gods know how many others that I’m ignoring in that list. Find an author and like their work? Odds are you’ll be following them on one platform or another, the first step in a long-term relationship. Which raises an interesting question for marketing books: do we now sell readers on the author and the contents of the book? Make them sound like the kind of author that needs

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Choke Points in the Entertainment Business (and Wrestling)

One of the recurring refrains in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative is the importance of unnecessary creating or back-burner creating. The creative work that you do that’s not on spec or on demand, but something that’s done because you’re curious, refining new skills, or simply interested in the subject. My accidental creating often revolves pro-wrestling, where I’ve done the occasional fanfic project for the Total Extreme Wrestling game and take deep dives into the mechanics and business of wrestling storytelling. This has often spawned insights here on the blog, the occasional paid writing gig, and countless ideas that have informed my practice as both an author and a publisher. This week, I listened to one of my favourite wrestling storytellers, Paul Heyman, being interviewed by the 90s pro-wrestling cultural phenomenon known as Stone Cold Steve Austin. A huge part of the interview revolved around why Heyman’s 90s wrestling project, Extreme Championship Wrestling, ultimately folded and got bought out by the