Archive for the ‘Speculative Fiction’ Category

Charles Tan: Leveraging Book Review Blogs and Interviews for Promotion

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Charles Tan  has posted a great essay on using book review blogs for pro­mo­tion. This is really well thought-​​out and rea­soned.  For example:

People in gen­eral (unless they’re your die-​​hard fans or you’re Oprah) don’t value your opin­ions about your own work. That’s why writ­ing a review of your own book is frowned upon. Or why the opin­ions of a hun­dred strangers in Amazon have more bear­ing than your own, no mat­ter how tal­ented or knowl­edge­able you might be com­pared to them. Or sim­ply why blurbs are used in pro­mo­tion, and why they don’t come from your­self or your mom.

This gen­er­al­iza­tion is what fuels book reviews and inter­views (whether print or online). It’s one thing to be fea­tured in your own site, it’s another to be fea­tured else­where. This also pre­vents most authors from con­duct­ing inter­views with them­selves (it’s not quite taboo and some have actu­ally done it but for the most part, it’s not practiced).

If you’re a nov­el­ist with a book you’re try­ing to pro­mote, I heartily sug­gest you give this arti­cle a read.

A Writing Observation from the Glee Pilot

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hulu has the pilot up for a new tele­vi­sion show, Glee, that I noticed some buzz about on Twitter. This past week, Sarah and I gave it a watch and really enjoyed it. Despite the fact that I’m not that inter­ested in musi­cals usu­ally, the show man­aged to grab me with its really unusual cast of characters.

Nearly every char­ac­ter has some­thing weird and unlik­able about them. No every­men or women in this show. Our teacher who restarts the Glee Club, osten­si­bly our main pro­tag­o­nist, is in a ter­ri­ble mar­riage, longs for the days when he was in Glee Club in high school, and in order to con­vince a teen to join the club, plants drugs in his locker and pre­tends to bust him, offer­ing him a choice of deten­tion or Glee Club. All of the teach­ers are sim­i­larly flawed, but with lik­able traits as well.

Some of the stu­dent cast are fairly two dimen­sional, but the two teen lead char­ac­ters are very mixed as well. The girl is lit­er­ally insane, but sym­pa­thetic for being picked on so badly by her class­mates (despite hav­ing accused the for­mer Glee Club teacher of being gay because he didn’t give her the part she wanted). The boy is a jock who par­tic­i­pates in tor­tur­ing the teens lower on the social hier­ar­chy of high school, includ­ing the other kids in the Glee Club.

As I watched the show, com­pletely riv­eted, I asked myself what was it about the show that had my atten­tion, and I decided it had to be these will­ing­ness to make its lead char­ac­ter com­plete ass­holes. Most sit­coms would never dare to make char­ac­ters so bor­der­line unlik­able. The last TV show I can remem­ber doing this well was Arrested Development. What is it about Fox that they’re will­ing to do this? Say what you will about these guys, but they gen­er­ally are will­ing to take risks on shows that none of the other net­works will?

I think it’s pos­si­ble that sim­ply unlik­able char­ac­ters would not be enough to get my atten­tion. It’s that com­bi­na­tion of sit­com with unlik­able char­ac­ters that seems to work here. The show plays with your expec­ta­tions about sit­com char­ac­ters, and while it’s obvi­ously not the first to do so, I thought it was inter­est­ing, and that I would share it with you all.

What do you think about this tech­nique? It seems like it would be much harder to pull off in a short story, where the pres­sure to have a sym­pa­thetic pro­tag­o­nist right away is fairly high. Do you know of any sto­ries or nov­els that suceeded with this tac­tic for you? Mentioning your own sto­ries if they’re pub­lished is cool too. I’d like to study the idea more.

I’ll be talk­ing quite a bit about writ­ing for the screen this week. Up later (no pun intended) will be some lessons about writ­ing that I’ve gleaned from watch­ing Pixar films, includ­ing the lat­est, er, Up. I con­sider Pixar to be some of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing in any medium, and I think they have a lot to teach us about telling broadly acces­si­ble sto­ries.  If you’re won­der­ing if you should go see Up, and you liked ear­lier films, don’t even hes­i­tate.  See the next show you can make time for.  It’s that good.

On Recreating the Shower Creativity Surge (minus water)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I know I am not the only writer who finds that inpira­tion oftens strikes in the bath. I’ve had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions with fel­low writ­ers about how strange it seems that some of our best ideas come to us at that moment. I can think of a cou­ple of the­o­ries as to why this happens:

  • The time of the day that you shower is par­tic­u­larly con­du­sive to cre­ative think­ing. I shower first thing in the morn­ing, and I know my cre­ative brain is a lit­tle bit stronger when the ana­lyt­i­cal brain is still swip­ing away the pre­vi­ous night’s cob­webs and puz­zling over what the hell those rab­bits on stilts were doing in that last dream.
  • The white noise sound gen­er­ated by the shower puts us into a par­tic­u­lar brain wave state or something.
  • The absence of dis­trac­tion from elec­tron­ics and media and every­thing allows us to actu­ally think freely. Personally, it is the only time in the day that I am not inter­act­ing with some kind of elec­tronic device. If I’m not on the com­puter, I’m watch­ing TV, or read­ing a book, and my iPhone is never more than a reach away. Basically, dis­trac­tions abound.

It is hard to say which of these three aspects are most directly respon­si­ble for that cre­ative burst, so I am going to try and recre­ate the expe­ri­ence with a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make it eas­ier to actu­ally cap­ture the ideas that come from it. One of the biggest prob­lems i have with hav­ing inspiri­a­tion then is that I can’t remem­ber it long enough to get it down on the com­puter or paper. Someone sug­gested putting in some kind of mark­ers or bath­room crayons in the tub so that you can write it out on the wall, but as I rent, I don’t want to deal with any poten­tial dis­as­ters there. So:

  1. Roll out of bed first thing and into the office. Turn on a white noise gen­er­at­ing pro­gram, or a long record­ing of rain.
  2. Turn off the inter­net con­nec­tion. Load up a full screen wordprocessor
  3. See what happens.

I will be attempt­ing this exper­i­ment in the next cou­ple of weeks, and will report back when I’ve gath­ered enough data to deter­mine whether it’s help­ful. If you want to join in, please do so. More peo­ple attempt­ing to do this could result in a bet­ter per­spec­tive on the phenomenon.

Photo by Flickr user Turyddu

Kristine Kathryn Rusch on Staying Positive

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I need to take a short break from writ­ing blog posts today so that I can fin­ish up my new busi­ness web­site and get things rolling on it.  Instead, today, I offer you this link from Rusch:

Remaining pos­i­tive sounds like such a minor thing. Yet it is the key to every­thing. Oddly enough, suc­cess­ful free­lancers are the most cyn­i­cal, hard-​​bitten opti­mists in the entire world.

We have to be. Who would believe in us if we didn’t believe in ourselves?

No one dis­cusses remain­ing pos­i­tive at a day job, unless it is a require­ment of that day job. When I worked as a wait­ress, I had to smile at the cus­tomers and be nice. It was in the job descrip­tion. The same rules applied, per­haps more strin­gently, at my very first retail job. We had to be so incred­i­bly nice at that store that we were required (again, as part of the job descrip­tion) to wish each and every cus­tomer a very nice day.

It’s a great post, and I highly rec­om­mend you head over and read it.

5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There are two schools of thought on mar­ket­ing and writ­ing.  Some think that mar­ket­ing can lead to great suc­cess, or that mar­ket­ing alone is respon­si­ble for the suc­cess.   Dan Brown is some­one I hear this accu­sa­tion levied at from time to time.  Others will argue that no amount of mar­ket­ing will make a bad story good.  Bad in this case gen­er­ally being bland and bor­ing. I waf­fle back and forth between these opin­ions depend­ing on the writer and how jeal­ous I feel, but ulti­mately, I ascribe to a syn­the­sis of the two.

Talent and genius are not all that is required to suc­ceed in writ­ing.  Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time.  But there’s a prob­lem that doesn’t have any­thing to do with how good you are.

There are a lot of other tal­ented peo­ple out there doing work just as good, if not bet­ter.  And they’re all vying for the atten­tion of the same peo­ple you are.  Sure, you can seg­ment the mar­ket a bit, and nar­row your niche, but ulti­mately, we’re all look­ing for read­ers, and there are only so many (and appar­ently grow­ing fewer by the year).  Forget the national deficit, we’re run­ning one hell of an atten­tion deficit these days.   Luckily, there’s no short­age of appetite for good sto­ries.  Human being are vora­cious con­sumers of the stuff.  But each per­son is pre­sented with a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good.  It’s  such a big buf­fet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casse­role and the can­died yams.  They may fill up on bread.

Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.

Writers don’t want to be sales­peo­ple.  If we wanted to be sales­peo­ple, we wouldn’t be writ­ing. There are no short­age of jobs for sales­peo­ple.  Maybe you’ll win the pub­lisher jack­pot and get a great mar­ket­ing deal with your three book con­tract.  Or maybe your publisher’s inter­nal process will hic­cup and the book sell­ers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time push­ing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival.   Or, maybe you’ll pub­lish in high qual­ity, but some­what obscure mar­kets that not nearly as many peo­ple read as you might wish.

A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to mar­ket them­selves and their work.  You’ll have help along the way, from the edi­tors and pub­lish­ers who buy your work, but not always.  Then you need to step in, and mar­ket yourself.

It’s a bad word though, isn’t it?  I feel slimy just for even say­ing it.  I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy any more so much as it is a form of mar­ket­ing.  I have the neg­a­tive stigma attached the idea as well.   But I’ve come to know some excel­lent and effort­less self-​​marketers in the writ­ing world, and it’s con­vinced me of the over­all value.   They had the tal­ent first, but even tal­ent can use some help.

I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/​blog to mar­ket your­self.  I’d like to dis­cuss some alter­na­tive meth­ods, or at least tan­gen­tial ones.  So with­out fur­ther wind-​​up, here are a few more off-​​the-​​wall mar­ket­ing ideas for writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  Use at your own risk.

  1. Get Em Young

    Volunteer as a speaker for your local school sys­tem.  This will prob­a­bly go over best when you’ve got some cred­its to your name that you can show to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion.  Offer your ser­vices, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writ­ing.  Bring along age-​​appropriate free sam­ples (ARCs, mag­a­zine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids.    Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing your­self a bit of a favor, and help­ing kids, you’re also increas­ing the expo­sure of the genre as a whole.   So it’s good mar­ket­ing and it’s just good karma too.

  2. Twitter Away

    You already know about Twitter, right?  I’ve blath­ered on about it enough.  Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-​​marketeers, mar­ket­ing gurus, and all man­ner of social snake-​​oil sales­folk.  The Twitterati can smell a mar­keter from a mil­lion miles away.  I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basi­cally cre­ated a Twitter account to blare about their work, or prod­uct, or what­ever.  They’re not sub­tle.  You need to be sub­tle, and you do this by not being an ass­hole. Twitter’s for social­iz­ing.  This means you talk to other peo­ple, you lis­ten, you par­tic­i­pate.  You don’t use it as a broad­cast medium.   It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really.  But retweet stuff too.  Answer replies.  Tell peo­ple how cool they are.  Be a gen­uine human being. And stay the hell away from any­one telling you that they have the sure-​​fire method of gain­ing you 16,000 fol­low­ers in 24 hours.  That stuff has to be bogus.

  3. Become an Expert (or share your exist­ing expertise)

    This goes back to some­thing I wrote about yes­ter­day, which is that I believe writ­ers should have pas­sions out­side of writ­ing itself.  Few of us make a liv­ing at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like.  So, make your­self an expert on your pas­sion, and share it with oth­ers through online media.  An audi­ence mem­ber is an audi­ence mem­ber, and no, I don’t have any hard fig­ures to sup­port the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less per­son who has never heard of you.

    Call it becom­ing an expert, or estab­lish­ing author­ity.  Either way,  you do so by offer­ing some­thing of use­ful­ness to other peo­ple.  Like I have been so des­per­ately attempt­ing to do with this blog for the past sev­eral weeks.  You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-​​an-​​expert sites.  Join a com­mu­nity around the sub­ject and be help­ful to oth­ers.  Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.

  4. Manufacture a Controversy

    Tension sells in fic­tion and it sells in real life too.   And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actu­ally work some­times.  Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity.  Manufacturing a con­tro­versy, even if your out­rage is true and heart­felt, can back­fire.  Controversies inher­ently bring emo­tions to the table, and dis­cus­sions can turn into flame wars in a sec­ond when emo­tions are at the table.    I’ll be hon­est.  I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some peo­ple would take excep­tion to them, to the degree that they would be com­pelled to write a reac­tion.  That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time.  But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writ­ing was that some peo­ple would dis­agree with me.

    In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blog­ging tech­nique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my posi­tion.  Nick took me down yes­ter­day in about fif­teen min­utes, and gave me trou­ble, right­fully so, for not research­ing before I wrote.    So if you want to man­u­fac­ture a con­tro­versy, keep that in mind.  Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.

  5. Forget Everything I Just Said

    Sometimes, the best mar­ket­ing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, help­ful, gen­uinely inter­est­ing per­son.  Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meet­ing and talk­ing things over with new peo­ple.  Those peo­ple do well because they earn it.

    I’m try­ing to be that kind of per­son, but I’m also twit­ter­ing, shar­ing my exper­tise (what lit­tle there is), and some­times, not nec­es­sar­ily by acci­dent, man­u­fac­tur­ing a con­tro­versy or two.  To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writ­ing done out­side of the blog.

    I hon­estly write these posts out of a desire to be help­ful, and to feel like I am engag­ing in the com­mu­nity around me.  If I’m try­ing to mar­ket any­thing, it’s my ser­vices as a free­lancer.  I don’t have a book and my short sto­ries are rare lately.  Maybe the best pol­icy for a writer regard­ing mar­ket­ing is hon­esty and authenticity.

So what do you think?

Writers Should Not Blog About Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

We’re writ­ers, so we should write about every­thing, right? Not if we care about main­tain­ing an audi­ence, we shouldn’t.  Despite our deep-​​seated belief that every thing that hap­pens to us and every thought we have is inter­est­ing to oth­ers, some things writ­ers like to blog about are just plain bor­ing or, worse, por­tray them in a neg­a­tive light.  I’ve learned most of these because I’ve done them and dri­ven off read­ers with them, so don’t think I’m set­ting these down as reminders for oth­ers.  They apply to me dou­bly so.  They include:

  • Your rejec­tion let­ters.  You can use them to illus­trate a point, but blog­ging “rejected by F&SF, 8 days” isn’t very inter­est­ing.  Also, it makes you look kinda like a schlub when your blog is full of rejec­tion let­ters.  Your read­ers only need to know when you have new work com­ing out. They don’t care how many agents turned you down, or how many rejec­tions you gath­ered along the way before the sale.
  • Your word count for the day.  Good for you, seri­ously.  I know some peo­ple use this as a kind of social rein­force­ment, but per­son­ally, I can’t stand look­ing at a blog and see­ing noth­ing but a long list of short posts talk­ing about what you wrote that day.
  • Your favorite snip­pet from your work-​​in-​​progress.  Out of con­text, it isn’t nearly as neat or inter­est­ing as you think it is.  Publish the story and we’ll bask in the glow of your genius then.
  • Grammar.  Snore.
  • In gen­eral, the craft and daily tra­vails of being a writer.

I firmly believe that writ­ers should be inter­est­ing for some­thing other than being a writer.  It’s a rare indi­vid­ual who can be scin­til­lat­ing to the gen­eral pub­lic while talk­ing about the sausage-​​making of writ­ing.*     If you’re a writer, surely you’re pas­sion­ate about some­thing other than writ­ing.  Blog about what­ever that is.

Look at it this way–who is your tar­get audi­ence?  The sub­ject of writ­ing is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  They are not nec­es­sar­ily the read­ers you want, because there are not very many of them.  If your goal is to col­lect a fol­low­ing greater than a few hun­dred peo­ple, then you need a sub­ject of broader interest–even just the genre that you write in is more inter­est­ing than the act of writ­ing itself.

Clearly I am not fol­low­ing the advice of the last point here. I write about writ­ing for a good rea­son, and that’s because my free­lance busi­ness caters to writ­ers.   Writers are my tar­get audi­ence for these posts, so I am com­fort­able with it.  As I com­plete my busi­ness web­site, these kinds of advice posts will tran­si­tion to that site, and my per­sonal blog will become more, well, personal.

*Exempt from this advice are writ­ers with stag­ger­ing read­er­ships, such as  Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.

ETA:

Nick Mamatas has this to say in the com­ments, and it’s a strong point:

The sub­ject of writ­ing is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers. They are not nec­es­sar­ily the read­ers you want, because there are not very many of them.

Crazy talk. There are mil­lions of aspir­ing writ­ers, and thus an indus­try to ser­vice them—several monthly mag­a­zines, a plethora of how-​​to books, sem­i­nars and con­fer­ences, over 100 degree-​​granting pro­grams in the sub­ject, etc.

Aspiring writ­ers also tend to read more widely (and deeply) than non-​​aspirants. Aspiring writ­ers are cer­tainly a large audi­ence worth cultivating.

So I  took this advice much fur­ther than I should have.  And I should point out that my advice was aimed squarely not at writ­ers who blog as a kind of per­sonal jour­nal.  I aim it at peo­ple who are look­ing to delib­er­ately and method­i­cally grow an audi­ence.  If you’re writ­ing a per­sonal jour­nal style blog, but want to use your blog to grow an audi­ence, I thnk you need to think about tran­si­tion­ing the kind of con­tent you post.

Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The struc­ture and nature of short sto­ries haven’t really changed in the dig­i­tal age, as far as I can tell.  They’re still told the same way mostly, same per­spec­tives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3–7000 words).  E-​​zines are for the most part  straight for­ward adap­ta­tions of the print mag­a­zine for­mat, to vary­ing degrees.  PDF mag­a­zines are iden­ti­cal to print mag­a­zines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-​​zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hyper­text fea­tures, but the sto­ries them­selves do not take advan­tage of of any of those fea­tures except in rare occasions.

Flash fic­tion, or sto­ries under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with elec­tronic mag­a­zines such as Brain Harvest spe­cial­iz­ing in them exclu­sively.   Personally, I don’t find such short sto­ries very sat­is­fy­ing very often, despite my involve­ment with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fic­tion).  I don’t think I’ve ever writ­ten a really suc­cess­ful flash fic­tion story.   I would argue that flash fic­tion is even less pop­u­lar than reg­u­lar short fic­tion, which is pretty unpop­u­lar in the first place.

Continue read­ing ›

5 Rejection Horror Stories

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Rejection hor­ror sto­ries are like the camp­fire ghost sto­ries told to other writ­ers in hushed tones, per­haps over drinks at a hotel bar, but more likely over an email or instant message.

No, that’s not right.  Unlike ghost sto­ries, which seek to strike fear in the lis­ten­ers, these hor­ror sto­ries are meant to make us feel bet­ter.  The hor­ror comes from what was rejected, how it was rejected, and who was rejected.

I think most writ­ers, espe­cially those just start­ing out, col­lect these sto­ries to act as ward and charms against the fear of fail­ure that so often plague us as the rejec­tion let­ters mount, even those who have been writ­ing for decades.  Here are some of my favorites:

1.  Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous rejec­tion letter

The whole is so dry and air­less, so lack­ing in pace, that what­ever drama and excite­ment the novel might have had is entirely dis­si­pated by what does seem, a great deal of the time

The book being rejected?  The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that sub­se­quently found a pub­lisher and then went on to win the Nebula and the Hugo.   Read the full rejec­tion let­ter on Le Guin’s website.

2. J.K. Rowling’s long march to publication

Daughter Jessica was three-​​years-​​old when Joanne sent off her first fin­ished man­u­script. “Into the enve­lope it went, off it went and back came a very prompt response, say­ing ‘No, thank you.’ And then I got another rejec­tion let­ter. “The funny thing is they didn’t upset me because I had that back-​​against-​​the-​​wall men­tal­ity. By this time, I was on a teach­ing course. I knew I was going to have incred­i­bly lim­ited time to write and I just thought, ‘Well, even if what you end up with is a file full of rejec­tion let­ters, you know you tried.’ “The first agent sent me a let­ter back say­ing, ‘My client list is full’ – lit­er­ally! “No ‘Dear Madam’ and no ‘Yours sin­cerely’, and if I sound like I bear a grudge, I do because I’d sent my man­u­script in this beau­ti­ful plas­tic folder and I was broke and I didn’t have £5 to spend on a plas­tic folder and she sent it back with­out the folder and she wrote, ‘No, thank you.’ And with a hand­writ­ten PS, ‘The folder you sent would not fit in the enve­lope.’ And I just felt, ‘Well, buy big­ger envelopes, then.’ I was furious.

Even the best-​​selling series in recent mem­ory was rejected numer­ous times by agents and edi­tors. The truth is, something’s great­ness is not read­ily appar­ent.  You just have to keep look­ing until you find some­one who believes in your work as much as you do.  And if you don’t believe in your work utterly, why are you even both­er­ing to sub­mit it?

3. Flowers for Algernon– Gold’s Rewrite Request

As part of the larger essay “Thus Our Words Unspoken” (1994), Malzberg relates the story (as told by Robert P. Mills) of how Daniel Keyes’s clas­sic story (and one of the best SF sto­ries of all time) “Flowers for Algernon” came to be pub­lished, and pub­lished in F&SF. It seems Keyes had sub­mit­ted it to Horace Gold at Galaxy. Gold said he would pub­lish it only if Keyes made one cru­cial change: that Charlie not end up an imbe­cile at the end of the story, but remain a genius. Keyes refused and trunked the story. Then, on a shared train ride with F&SF edi­tor Mills, Mills asked Keyes for a story. Keyes thought imme­di­ately of “Flowers” and began to describe it to Mills. Mills found it inter­est­ing, asked to see the ms., and upon read­ing it wanted to pub­lish it … with one change. Keyes, assum­ing the worst, begged Mills not to ask him to change the end of the story. Mills said no, that the change he wanted was to add a girl­friend for Charlie. Keyes, relieved, agreed to the change, and we all know the rest of the story.

Dave Truesdale recounts this story, which I think is a good para­ble about stick­ing to your vision.  If you sac­ri­fice your vision for the sake of being pub­lished, then what’s the point?  Be per­sis­tent, but polite, but also will­ing to accept change sug­ges­tions from an edi­tor that makes sense.  Most of my sto­ries have been made bet­ter by an edi­tor.  But I’ve also turned down rewrite requests that I didn’t feel were in-​​line with what I wanted to do.  I lost money, but I felt bet­ter about myself.   But good lord, could you imag­ine a Flowers that turned out the way Gold wanted?  It would have been a travesty!

4. Brandon Sanderson– 13 Failed Novels

“I spent nine years try­ing to get pub­lished.  During that time, I wrote thir­teen nov­els.  I even­tu­ally sold the sixth, Elantris, and got a con­tract from Tor for another tril­ogy after Elantris.”

Brandon Sanderson is the cho­sen one, lit­er­ally, picked to fin­ish the long-​​running and unfin­ished Wheel of Time series.The man wrote a baker’s dozen of nov­els before sell­ing one! Can you really argue that stick­ing to it and being per­sis­tent doesn’t pay off in the face of that fact?

5.  Just about Every Other Author You’ve Ever Heard Of

Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected for being “dystopian.”   Rudyard #*(@ing Kipling was rejected and informed that he didn’t know how to use the English lan­guage!  Dr. Suess?  Too weird.  H.G. Wells War of the Worlds?  Too scary and dreadful.

If there’s a writer who has never once received a rejec­tion, I haven’t met him or her.  Everyone gets them.  And they suck, I won’t deny it.  I’m lax about sub­mit­ting my work because they tend to ruin my day, but even still, I know I shouldn’t let them.  They don’t mean much of any­thing beyond one editor’s (or maybe a cou­ple), or an agent’s opin­ion.  Have some faith in your work.  Keep at it, try­ing to get bet­ter.  One day, that rejec­tion let­ter you’re expect­ing will turn out to be some­thing entirely different.

Special thanks to John Joseph Adams for help­ing me find cita­tions for some of these famous rejec­tion stories.

10 Writers, Editors, Agents, and Interesting Parties to Follow on Twitter

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Twitter is all the rage these days.  I resisted it for more than a year, not see­ing what pur­pose it had.  But then it achieved crit­i­cal mass in my com­mu­nity and I was on-​​board.  Now I can’t remem­ber what life was like before it.  Combine micro-​​blogging with tex­ting and instant mes­sag­ing and you kind of have an idea.  When you’re hooked in, it’s like hav­ing one big slow group con­ver­sa­tion, with side con­ver­sa­tions every­where.  It’s like being at a party and not hav­ing to choose which peo­ple to talk to and which con­ver­sa­tions to get involved with.  You get involved with all of them.

Here are ten peo­ple that I think you should be fol­low­ing if you’re inter­ested in the busi­ness of sci­ence fiction:

  1. @PaulGrahamRaven is the edi­tor of Futurismic, a great site for SF fans and writ­ers.  He doesn’t han­dle the fic­tion selec­tion over there, but his twit­ter stream is often has inter­est­ing links and quips.
  2. @ColleenLindsay is the agent behind the recent, con­tro­ver­sial #query­fail.  Colleen is full of advice for writ­ers.  She speaks truth to nerds.
  3. @Pablod is the one-​​man-​​band behind Tor​.com the cool online site run by the SF pub­lisher Tor.  Stories, arti­cles, blogs, with a side of social net­work­ing thrown in.  Pablo is a great source for tech-​​related infor­ma­tion that con­cerns the pub­lish­ing industry.
  4. @Charlesatan retweets the hell out of writ­ing and pub­lish­ing related links.  The man is a machine, well worth a follow.
  5. @Jay_Lake is the pro­lific author of nov­els such as Green and Mainspring is a good look in on how a work­ing writer bal­ances the rest of his life.  Jay has always been  a role model for me that it can be done.
  6. @ArachneJericho is the queen of the Kindle.  With the Kindle and ebooks on the rise, she’s a great source of infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject.  She’s not exactly unbi­ased, but she tries to be, and that makes me respect her opin­ion on such mat­ters even more.
  7. @MaryRobinette is a won­der­ful SF writer and pup­peteer. You’ll be hard-​​pressed to find tweets that are more sur­real, but grounded absolutely in reality.
  8. @GordSellar is nom­i­nated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year, an award that @JayLake and @MaryRobinette have won in the past.  He’s my pick to win this year.  His writ­ing is hot stuff.  He is often full of really inter­est­ing insights on liv­ing abroad in South Korea as well.
  9. @TobiasBuckell is the author of Crystal Rain and one of those  Halo nov­els (an obscure series of mil­i­tary sci­ence fic­tion nov­els about–oh, who am I kid­ding?  This book put Toby on the best sell­ing list!).  Tobias is a new par­ent of twins.   Ask him if he’s get­ting any sleep.  He loves that.
  10. @JohnKlima is the edi­tor of the acclaimed pub­li­ca­tion, Electric Velocipede (which can use and is deserv­ing of your help, by the way.).

This list is most def­i­nitely not a com­pre­hen­sive one and I’m prob­a­bly leav­ing out peo­ple that I will hit myself over the head for later.  If you’re inter­ested in find­ing more, hit up my fol­low list over on Twitter.

Do you have sug­ges­tions for folks to fol­low?  Please let us know in the com­ments, even if it is your­self.  I’m always look­ing for more inter­est­ing peo­ple to add to my stream.  Twitter is rapidly becom­ing the place to talk with peo­ple in the busi­ness, and there’s always room for more in the conversation.