Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Logic Behind Pulling Apart My Assumptions

On her Wednesday blog post, The Trainwreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch laid out her vision for just how bad COVID will get for traditional publishing and the next steps she recommends for authors working with that business model. Her prognosis is fairly dire: traditional publishing is in grave danger, and likely won’t really understand how grave for months after the pandemic is over. It’s also touched with a longstanding, negative around agents and traditional publishing practices that runs through Rusch’s non-fiction work. Not necessarily a reason to avoid reading it, but something to be aware of before you go in and maybe treat this is as a useful data point rather than a gospel advice for what to do next. I don’t know that I see quite the level of gloom that Rusch does for traditional publishing, but I do see an awful lot of bad coming down the pipe. More importantly, I see a space where lots of business assumptions

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

No Ellipsis Publishing

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, Poetics

There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as the brands attached rose to prominence. Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability. As a young comic fan, I preserved thousands of individual issues in longboxes, each comic wrapped in a mylar sleeve with a backing board to ensure they weren’t creased. A collection that provided a sense of pride, a bourgeoning curatorial instinct sending me through back issue bins to find issues I might have missed. As an adult, I prefer the issues collected in a different way, reading comics once the individual issues are bound up into trades and graphic novels, or

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Shivering Sands, Warren Ellis, and The Long Tail

Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition. Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions. As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.” I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt. Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Poetics, Conventions, and Physical Objects

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Scratchpad: Comic Books, Fiction, Publishing, Poetics

The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over. I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there. Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Playing it Smart and Calm

One question I keep coming back to right now is “what does it mean to approach the pandemic in a calm way, as an artist? How do we play it smart?” Because calm is going to be a valuable commodity for the next few months, as writers and artists of every stripe pivot and adapt. Everyone seemed to launch sales at the start of the pandemic, a knee jerk response to try and stimulate interest in the face of everyone getting hit with financial anxiety at the same time. But sales are a tactic, not a strategy, and they’ll only last so long. Especially when the sales are pitched as “the ass has just dropped out of our industry, so support us if you want this all to continue,” which is largely speaking to a) your existing fans who, b) want you to continue, and c) are likely to be motivated by a discounted price. The really interesting responses to

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing in the Age of Contagion

I’d like to talk a little about writing (and, really, just surviving) in the age of contagion we find ourselves in. This is a tricky subject because I loathe the impetus that capitalism puts on being productive at all costs, especially when you’re sick or stressed out. It’s the same impetus that makes COVID-19 so tricksy, because we’ve all spent far too long soldiering on at work while ill, and that’s seeped into the western mindset. On the flip side, writing’s important to me. It’s a big part of my self-identity and it’s the thing that keeps me calm. And, as I wrote in my newsletter today, a goodly part of the challenge in writing through the age of contagion isn’t working while sick, it’s working while the world is trying to scare the pants off you. The tactics that make it possible for me to write through the age of contagion largely coincides with the tactics I use to

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Discussing Serial Business vs. Serial Craft

A few months back, I went to see Garth Nix and John Birmingham in conversation at the local library, and Birmingham busted out a little bon mot that’s stuck with me: If we write something, and we do our jobs right, it’s going to get published. It’ll go to our publishers, and if they don’t want it, we can publish it ourselves and take home that sweet 70% self-pub royalty. This doesn’t imply that it’s going to be massively successful or make scads of money, of course, but it puts writers in a really interesting position. For the first time, publication is guaranteed if you start a project, and that frees you up to take chances you wouldn’t necessarily take in publishing environment focused on brick-and-mortar bookstores. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, because it feeds into the research I’ve been doing on writing series for my thesis. Series fiction has traditionally been one of those things

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Automation

Two years ago, when I kicked off Brain Jar Press, I dropped a bunch of cash on tools designed to streamline my processes. It started with a shiny new MacBook Air, breaking years of I-don’t-use-Macs ideology so I could run the mac-only Vellum software. That was something like two grand of expenses right there, coupled with an ongoing Adobe subscription and access to delivery tools like BookFunnel. I knew I’d struggle to earn back that money in the first year, and I was totally fine with that. The point wasn’t making the money back, it was making every project I took on a little cheaper to publish. For instance, there was software that did everything Vellum did, but it was a pay-per-project concern or an ongoing subscription. There are tools that could create covers instead of using Photoshop, but those tools aren’t as advanced or had a steep learning curve. I would be investing time and subscriptions fees to get

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Hanging at the Book of Face for a Stretch

For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books. This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things. As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

We’re all selling the ethanol buzz

When talking about the writing business with folks, one of my recurring refrains is that we don’t really sell stories to people–we sell a token of identity. It may be an aspirational identity, or one that the reader already identifies with, but even the use of the word reader in this context underlies my point. Over the weekend I was catching up on my blog reading and was intrigued by Fast Company’s article about the way our sewerage holds markers that can be used to identify our income. It caught me off-guard with its reminders that consumption is an act of cultural identity, but the researchers noted that: Surprisingly, (higher) income correlated with more alcohol and coffee consumption. Regarding coffee, researchers point to the intelligentsia institution that coffee has become, in which this choice of beverage is actually a statement about one’s self. You could easily say the same thing about wine, whiskey, or craft beer, too—all of which are

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Making Time, Picking Your Focus, and the ‘Fuck You’ Impulse

Earlier this year, I noticed this Tweet on my feed and flagged it as something I wanted to think about more: “Oh, I’d love to write a book but I just don’t have time!” Fuck. You. I wrote my first two novels during my lunch hours in a 9-5 job while also teaching and training kung fu every evening and weekend. You make time. — Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) March 10, 2019 I was intrigued by the tweet, for two reasons. On hand it, it’s because Alan is right about this–something that’s bourn out in the suite of writers that offer their own experiences making time to get work done in the early days. It’s a useful read, if you’re interested in being a writer. The kind of advice I’ve been talking about in writing classes for years, among the self-selecting people who show up to learn such things. But I found myself really irritated at the tweet when it first

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Building Pyramids and Focus

I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use of the anxiety-driven energy that set in. One of those projects involved sitting down and implementing the Pyramid Technique for figuring out where my writing-and-publishing priorities are currently sitting. This technique is borrowed from Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway, where he uses it to help clarify life priorities. This feels like a good time to do this, as I’m heading into the second half of the year with the distinct feeling that I’ve got a lot of planes in the air and nothing is really landing. PHASE ONE: THE INITIAL PYRAMID The process I’m using ran something like this: Grab a bunch of index cards