Category: On Writing

A New Gage Book Coming Soon, Plus Some Thoughts on the Merging of My Two Careers

wickedrain_ebookcover_1Finally, a bit of book publishing news!  I’m putting the final touches on the next Garrison Gage book, The Lovely Wicked Rain.  That’s the cover on the right, though the final version might undergo a bit of tweaking. After copy editing, manuscript layout, and other publishing-related tasks, both the ebook and the trade paperback edition should be out in the world in early June.  June 9 is the official publication date, but my guess is it will be available before then.  My usual process is to let my “New Release” email list know first when it’s actually available, then post the news on the website and other places. If you want to be one of the first to know, sign up on the right.  I send no more than a handful of emails a year, if that.  

This is the third Gage book, and the first to be published exclusively under my own name and not under my pen name, Jack Nolte.  If you’re curious why I decided to let go of the pen name, read this post.  I’ll have a book description and other information up before too long.

It’s been two years since the last Gage book, far too long. In fact, by the time The Lovely Wicked Rain actually gets published, it will have been a year since my last book came out, Ghost Detective.  I’m not the most prolific writer in the world, but that’s still pretty slow by my standards.  I have my excuses, of course, but that’s all they are, excuses.

That, and some other changes I’ll mention in a minute, forced me to take a hard look at how productive I really am as a writer, which in turn got me to start getting up early again.  And it’s worked wonders.*  I shifted my schedule a bit at the university, started getting up early, and now get two hours of writing in most days before I leave the house.  This isn’t so much about trying to take the publishing world by storm as it is about feeding my soul the proper amount of creative time to keep me balanced.  You would have thought I would have realized how often I was letting the writing slip just based on how cranky I was, but no. Sometimes I have to get hit with a mental sledgehammer.

I’ve also gone back to graduate school.  What’s that, you say, graduate school?  Yep.  Since some changes at the university had me transferred to the library, my day job as an instructional technologist and my writing/publishing life have started to merge, something I never would have predicted even five years ago but makes complete sense now.  In fact, at the encouragement of the dean of the library here, I started to look into the direction libraries are moving in the digital era, and realized that libraries, especially academic libraries, will eventually become not just repositories of information — but the place where information is created and distributed, which means publishing.

I am speaking of publishing in its broadest sense, which means to make public.  This could be a website, a digital video, or, yes, a book (whether ebook or print-on-demand).  Since this is the direction my job has been moving, I decided about six months ago to head back to graduate school to get a Master of Library and Information Science, with as much emphasis in my studies on the publishing/distribution side of the field.  Whether the degree pays off at this university, or another place, I’ll have to wait to see, but I just decided to jump in with both feet — and I’m really enjoying the ride so far.

With the writing, the work at the university, graduate school, and all the craziness that comes from having an active eleven-year-old and eight-year-old, I’m busier than ever.  Funny thing, though, once I started getting my writing time in early, I’m more productive not just overall, but in each area of my life.  I guess it proves the old maxim that if you want to get something done, give it to a busy man.

These recent changes have also allowed me to finally put to rest a bit of schizophrenia I had about my two careers.  On one hand, I treat my writing very seriously, and always labored under the assumption that I’d eventually become a full-time writer one day. On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed the work I do at the university — plus it has to be said, as someone who has been self-employed before, that a steady paycheck and good benefits are nice things to have!  But with the merging of these two careers, I no longer struggle with this issue. They’re all just part of the same pie.

As Walt Whitman says, I contain multitudes.  And it’s just the way I like it.

You may have noticed some additional blogging around these parts.  That will continue.  I noticed that my web traffic has jumped by about 50%, so I guess some people are appreciating it. I’m also back on social media, at least Facebook and Twitter so far, not to promote my work, because I hate being spammed as much as you do, but to connect with like-minded folks.  (In fact, rather than add a comment section, I’m experimenting by just using Facebook.  So friend me or follow me and become part of the conversation!)  I might start doing a few more conferences, workshops, and other speaking engagements, but that will be a slow change, considering how crazy busy I am right now. I’ve gotten a few invitations lately, and I’m carefully considering them.

Anyway, that’s the state of play in Scott-land.  Busy, tired, but a lot more productive and at peace, so life is good.

*Speaking of writing productivity, I’m well into the sequel to Ghost Detective.  Expect news about that before too long.

Getting Someone to Buy a Book Is Only a Writer’s First Hurdle

This survey over at Book Riot is not at all scientific, but it does match what I’ve been hearing from lots of people.  In the digital age, our “to be read” piles are growing at an exponential rate:

In our latest TBR poll, we got nosy and asked you to reveal how many books are on your TBR. The first thing that became clear is that everyone has their own definition of TBR. We didn’t want to lock you down or limit you, so we just asked for your number and where you keep your TBR, whatever TBR happens to mean to you. As usual, we’ve broken down the numbers, and we’ll leave most of the interpretation up to you.

[Read the rest at BookRiot.com.]

Which raises the additional point:  Getting someone to buy your book is only a writer’s first hurdle, especially today, with an explosion of available books.  Getting them to actually read the book — that’s the next challenge.  My own Kindle has at least a hundred books on it waiting to be read, and that’s to say nothing of the print books weighing down my nightstand or my desk. I doubt I’ll ever get to all of them. It’s also why the initial sales results that writers get using promotional tools like Bookbub.com, while nice if they fatten your bank account, aren’t as significant as the sales that follow in the days, weeks, and months to come — at least if you’re interested in gaining readers, not just buyers.  And that is more about the writing itself then your snappy cover or your catchy blurb, which, while difficult to do right all by themselves, and necessary now just to get a book to the starting line, are very easy when compared to offering your reader a story so engaging they not only read the book immediately, they come back for more.  

It’s something I’ve been thinking quite a bit about lately. Why do I buy a book and read it now when I’ve already bought books that are gathering dust on my bookshelf (with ebooks, metaphorically speaking)?  What makes me read this book but not that one?  Certainly if I pay more for a book, I’m more likely to read it, but not always. I’ve bought books for 99 cents that I read right away. I’ve paid full price for books at Barnes and Noble that are still waiting to be read, years later.

How to Take All The Fun Out of Writing and End Up With Something Soulless and Soul-Crushing

Here’s an article over on The Book Designer that had me shaking my head today:

When you decide to write and publish a book, you want to be confident you will bring a book to market that has never before been written—or read—and that your target readers want and need.

To write that book, tell that tale or fill that hole, do some work before you start your manuscript. As part of your initial planning process, study other previously published books and use this research to help you develop the confidence to write and publish a singular book …

[Read the rest of “How to Fill a ‘Hole’ on the Bookstore Shelf’ at the TheBookDesigner.com]

A singular book? I don’t often link to articles on publishing that don’t resonate with me, simply because there’s too much stuff that does resonate for me to share with you those things that don’t (and there’s little objective truth in this business), but this one, wow . . . It so goes against what I’ve learned about the actual creative process that I can’t believe that people really write this way.  Does anyone?  

When I was at the Oregon Book Awards a couple weeks ago, a young writer asked me what I would tell her if I had only one piece of advice to give.  Essentially, I said this: “Write for you. Don’t worry about everybody else.  Write what makes you happy, or angry, or sad. Make yourself laugh or cry or cheer. If you can do that, there’s a good chance your manuscript will do the same for other people, because we’re all made from the same basic stuff. And at the end of the day, at least you’ll have that.”

And that’s what I believe.  I wouldn’t worry too much about being original.  I’d focus on being authentic.  If you’re authentic, as any kind of artist, whether you’re penning a song, writing a novel, or painting a water color, if what you’re writing comes from deep within you, then you won’t need to “fill a hole” on the bookstore shelf.  You’ll create your own space.  

That’s how art works.  There’s always room for another authentic voice.

About Luck and Goals

Yesterday on the way to work, I heard a great piece on NPR about the power of chance as it relates to success.  You can read the article, “Good Art Is Popular Because It’s Good. Right?” on NPR’s website, or even better, listen to the audio as I did.  Here’s the crux of it:

To test how much of success should be attributed to chance and how much to quality, Salganik created a website that randomly funneled the 30,000 teenagers he recruited online into nine identical worlds.

Each of these worlds exposed the teens to 48 songs from emerging artists — bands that hadn’t yet been signed so were totally unknown to the teens. The deal was that after listening to the songs, the teens could download the ones they liked best for free.

Now in one world — the control world — they couldn’t see which songs their peers were downloading so there was no social influence. But in the other eight, the teens could see which songs had been downloaded before, so they knew what other people thought was good.

“So we had the exact same 48 songs competing against each other, we had the exact same initial conditions, everything starts with zero downloads, and we have indistinguishable groups of participants, because they were randomly placed into the world,” Salganik says.

And what did he find?

Different songs become popular in different histories — and not in small ways, either.

[Read the rest.]

I’ve written about the power of luck in publishing before.  The truth is, I think indie publishing in the age of ebooks is much closer to a meritocracy than traditional publishing ever was, but it’s only closer. Like all forms of success, luck plays a big part.  All we can do is work harder and smarter, giving ourselves the best chance to find an audience.  Nobody is entitled to a huge audience and big bank accounts, and no matter how hard you work, you aren’t guaranteed it.  Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler have a great post up right now about this very subject, where they take on an anonymous “Big Bestseller” who challenges their claim that publishing is much more of a lottery than a meritocracy.  While I agree with them in substance, I don’t think a lottery, which is entirely about chance, is a very useful analogy.  How about poker?  Luck definitely plays a part in poker, but so does skill. And over time, as long as that poker player gives herself the best chances to succeed, by playing a lot and striving to get better, quality will play a bigger and bigger role in her success.

That’s the issue I have with Salganik’s experiment. As far as I can tell, the musician only had one song. The less you work at something, the less work you produce, the less you get better, and the more it’s like a lottery and less it’s like poker.

But chance is a huge influence and always will be.  That’s why the longer I’ve been writing, the more I’ve tried to stop focusing on goals that hinge in any fashion on luck.  I’ve always been a proponent of focusing on what you can control and not on the things you can’t — how well books sell, money, awards, reader response — but lately I’ve taken it farther.  This may sound a bit radical to those of you steeped in the Napoleon Hill way of looking at the world, as I once was, but I’ve tried to remove results from the equation at all.  Instead I focus entirely on  process. Not just a little, but entirely. I mean I’ve tried to remove all “destination goals” from my mind. It’s much closer to a Zen approach, taking a page from Ray Bradbury.  The crux of it is this: It is possible to be a writer who is driven by the work itself and not the world’s response to it.  It is possible to make your goals entirely about pages written, books read, other writers studied, etc, without attaching other destination goals to the back end– and yet still sit at the same poker table along with all the other players, because that is part of the process.  The actual results won’t change, but man, you’ll be a lot happier.

It’s a subtle but powerful shift in thinking I’ve had trouble explaining to people in person, and I’ll probably take another stab at it in this blog before too long, but really it boils down to making the process the goal.  In other words, the Zen archer is driven by shooting arrows as well as she can, not by hitting the target, even if in the end the former often leads to the latter.