Archive for the ‘SF Business’ Category

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?

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.

5 Lies Writers Believe About Editors

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

At least in the sci­ence fic­tion com­mu­nity, there’s a lot of false com­mu­nity wis­dom float­ing around about the edi­to­r­ial process.  Some of them may have been true once.  Some were prob­a­bly invented to mess with the heads of noobs.   Some of them are care­fully nutured lies, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.   Well, no longer.  I’m here to tell you the truth, no mat­ter how ugly it may be.

LIE #1:   Editors give every story fair con­sid­er­a­tion. OR:  Editors reject sto­ries with­out read­ing them at all.

The truth is, the slush is deep, and it’s rarely an editor’s favorite part of the job.  Why do you think so many places have slush readers?

Every story doesn’t get fair con­sid­er­a­tion.  Not every story deserves it.  If you can’t be both­ered to read the sub­mis­sion guide­lines and fol­low them, it’s an easy rejec­tion.  If you have five gram­mar and spelling mis­takes in the first two para­graphs, it’s an easy rejec­tion.    If it’s a story about vam­pires, and I hate vam­pire sto­ries, it’s mostly an easy rejection.

Most sto­ries get at least a page out of me. Then I skip to the last 3 para­graphs, if I’m feel­ing gen­er­ous.   Some get less.   Some work is so obvi­ously bad that it’s star­tlingly easy to know it’s not going to work.  But every story gets looked at.  Nothing ever gets rejected with­out being par­tially read.  Honest.

LIE #2:  Editors never reject a good story.

I rejected plenty of really good sto­ries at the Fortean Bureau.   I’ve even rejected a cou­ple at Escape Pod.  The rea­son is pretty sim­ple: edi­to­r­ial vision or scope.   The Fortean Bureau was look­ing for a par­tic­u­lar kind of story.  Your space opera, no mat­ter how good, was never going to appear there.  Likewise, we don’t accept hor­ror or fan­tasy at Escape Pod.   If the story is good, and sucks me in, I will rec­om­mend send­ing it over to the other editors.

Stories get rejected for being too long, too short, too sim­il­iar to another story the edi­tor has already bought… there are as many rea­sons for rejec­tion as there are sto­ries.  And not all of them involve you mak­ing mis­takes.  There are aspects of the process that a writer can­not con­trol.  Best to just relax about it.

LIE #3:  Editors don’t fos­ter new writ­ers like they did in the old days, and don’t care about new talent.

John W. Campbell was a med­dle­some bas­tard who sent his writ­ers spe­cific ideas for sto­ries.  He was not what you call a “hands off” kind of edi­tor.  He wrote his fair share of sto­ries, and some of the tales I’ve heard about him make me think that he was often think­ing as a writer as much as he was an edi­tor.  He wasn’t afraid to rewrite some­one else’s story.

For what­ever biz­zare rea­son, some peo­ple wish edi­tors would take that level of inter­est in their work, and  they lament that edi­tors no longer fos­ter new writ­ers, giv­ing them the kind of con­struc­tive crit­i­cism that leads to their per­sonal growth.  Everything for writ­ers was just won­der­ful back then but these edi­tors today are jerks!

Not true.  Campbell may have had time to do this with a larger per­cent­age of his sub­mis­sions, but the field was smaller then.  Today, there are tens of thou­sands of writ­ers all try­ing to break in to the same pub­li­ca­tions.  We sim­ply don’t have time to give per­sonal feed­back to each sub­mis­sion.  These days, some­times the best you get is an encour­ag­ing rejec­tion.  My first came from Stanley Schmidt: “I like your writ­ing, so I hope you will send more in the future.”  Not very spe­cific, but it does the trick.  It tells you that you’re on the right track.

As much as I give Gordon van Gelder a hard time for his oppo­si­tion to online media, the man writes a very suc­cinct and help­ful rejec­tion let­ter.     Even the form let­ters have a sys­tem to them to help you fig­ure out why the story was rejected.  I always simul­ta­ne­ously feared and looked for­ward to his short notes.

Editors do build a sta­ble of writ­ers.  The rea­son most peo­ple don’t see it is because by the time you come along, the edi­tor has already estab­lished a group of authors he or she can count on.  But short story writ­ers in par­tic­u­lar are always going on to write nov­els, so open­ings do occur from time to time.

If you really want feed­back on your work, join a work­shop or cri­tique cir­cle.  It’s not the editor’s job to help you become a bet­ter writer.  Sometimes, we’re help­ful, but we can’t do it for everyone.

LIE #4:  Editors are peo­ple too.

“Editors are just like us.”  No, we’re not. You don’t have a nev­erend­ing stream of bad writ­ing com­ing at you day in, day out.    You get to read for plea­sure, select­ing mate­r­ial that has been through at least one fil­ter.  Whereas you turn on the tap and get a stream of nice drink­able water,  we put our mouths to a sewer pipe and hope to get at least one swal­low that won’t give us rag­ing diarrhea.

I know the sen­ti­ment of the phrase is meant to imply that we’re not god­like arbiters of taste, mak­ing and break­ing careers on a whim.    But edi­tors do wield power.  And it changes us.  Generally it makes us ill-​​tempered and eas­ily dis­tracted by shiny objects.    I’ve yet to feel god­like, but I’m not rul­ing out the pos­si­bil­ity.  Maybe when some­thing I’ve pub­lished wins a Hugo, I will ascend to Asgard.

LIE #5:  Editors (and crit­ics) are failed writers.

As a rule, no.  A lot of us are mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful writ­ers.   Some of us have never wanted to write and never will.  There are a few who have started out as writ­ers and given it up for the editing/​publishing game (Gordon, I think), but not all of us have.

We’re not dri­ven to become edi­tors out of bit­ter­ness.  We all come to the posi­tion for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, but I think most of us start out as opti­mistic and hope­ful.  We think that maybe we have a vision for a type of story that nobody else has seen before.  We day dream about find­ing writ­ers that amaze us and pub­lish­ing them before any­one else.

It takes a pecu­liar sort of ego to take up edit­ing.  And thank god.  If it wasn’t for edi­tors, we’d all have to sort through the kind of self-​​published garbage that made it pos­si­ble for Geocities to stay in busi­ness for so long.  I shud­der to think of a world with­out editors.

And finally, a well-​​known truth:

You can bribe an editor.

Most of us are broke and dri­ven to drink copi­ous amounts of alco­hol.  See the sewer pipe anal­ogy above.  That gives us a weak­ness you can exploit.  Next time you’re at a con­ven­tion, go to the bar, and buy a drink for your favorite edi­tor.  Make sure you do it early on, because seven or eight drinks in, we’ll never remem­ber your name.   We’ll be lucky to wake up in the right hotel room, or even the right state.  Who bought the drinks on a night like that will be the least of our con­cerns when we wake up naked atop a desert mesa cov­ered from head to toe in blue paint.

Putting a name to a face, along with a men­tal data­base note of “bought me a beer” doesn’t hurt.  One of the things that makes edit­ing eas­ier is pre­tend­ing that the sto­ries aren’t all writ­ten by human beings with heart.  Sometimes, we have to put that out of our minds.  And if you find a way to politely shat­ter that illu­sion, well, it can be good for you.  But only if you are likely to start sell­ing sto­ries anyway.

There are no great secrets to being pub­lished.  Read lots.   Write sto­ries.  Lots and lots of sto­ries.  Submit the work until the sto­ries are either accepted or rejected by every mar­ket you could bear to see your name asso­ci­ated with.  That’s pretty much all there is to it.  Everything else is basi­cally unimportant.

Getting Started Writing Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Today, we move back to dis­cussing writ­ing, specif­i­cally, the begin­ning of a writ­ing career.  Considering I’m barely out of that phase, it’s really the only phase I feel con­fi­dent in dis­cussing.  So:

Read Bilal wrote last week:

I have been read­ing sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy for a long time. Given that I am a sci­ence grad stu­dent I also have some sci­en­tific back­ground. I come up with ideas to write a sci-​​fi story or novel. Then I think on them and develop a gen­eral direc­tion how­ever, time lim­i­ta­tions, English being my sec­ond lan­guage and gen­er­ally poor writ­ing skills (I don’t think peo­ple like sto­ries that sound like aca­d­e­mic papers) pre­vent me from doing any­thing with them. Are there any options out there to col­lab­o­rate or a way to start writ­ing? Thanks.

Whenever any­one brings up this sub­ject, I am reminded of an inci­dent from my child­hood when I was first show­ing inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion.  In about 8th Grade or so, the three junior highs held a joint writ­ing con­fer­ence for kids like myself.  They put us into sem­i­nars with authors based on the gen­res that we were inter­ested in.  I got to meet some great writ­ers and get some feed­back.  And I met James Gunn, and I’ll never for­get it.

James Gunn was not like the other writ­ers.  He came in swing­ing for the fences.  “Most of you here will never pub­lish a sin­gle thing,” was pretty much the first thing he said to us.  He pro­ceeded to explain, in detail, why it was dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to sell sto­ries at our age.    Why, if we could, we should give up writ­ing all together and find some­thing bet­ter to do.   He went on in this fash­ion for an hour, and I have a mem­ory, per­haps false, of some of the kids cry­ing.  Me, I was excited.  Because I could see exactly what he was doing.  He was test­ing us to see how seri­ous we were.

At the end of the class, he gave us his mail­ing address and said if we were still inter­ested, he would cri­tique a story for us.  I took Mr. Gunn up on that.  I expected at the time to receive a Mamatas-​​style sav­aging of the story.  Instead, I got back a very kind and thought­ful set of line com­ments for what was prob­a­bly a truly awful, awful bit of juvenelia.

So when peo­ple ask me about writ­ing, I think of James Gunn, and I think that per­haps I should do every­thing I can in my power to dis­suade you from tak­ing up writ­ing, espe­cially writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion short fic­tion.   Reasons why you shouldn’t:

  1. The pay is crap.  The pro rate is 5 cents a word, but can some­times go higher.  What was the pro rate in the 1950s?  3–5 cents a word.  You will not get rich, or even pay the bills, writ­ing SF short fiction.
  2. It’s hard, and it takes a long time to get good at.  I’m a rel­a­tively fast learner, and it still took me 5 years of writ­ing every week before I started to con­sis­tently write well enough to sell the work.  And it’s hard work, so it’s easy to fall out of habit.  It’s not like rid­ing a bicy­cle.  You can for­get, or at least get a lit­tle rusty.
  3. It will iso­late you from every­one you know.  Because it won’t be your job, but a side gig, you’ll be doing it in your spare time.  Spare time means you sac­ri­fice things, like time with your fam­ily, or time with your friends.  You might give up TV like Jay Lake.
  4. You’ll read a lot less than you used to.  That time can be spent writ­ing! Ironically, one good way to get bet­ter at writ­ing is to read a lot.
  5. Rejection sucks.  You’ll get rejec­tions.  A lot of them.  I think I heard once that Michael Swanwick has never been rejected, but the rest of us have hun­dreds of them.   Sometimes, they’re kind, and some­times they’re nasty and make you want to never write again.  See, even the edi­tors will test you.
  6. Nobody reads sci­ence fic­tion any­way.  Like, what, 4% of books sold are SF?  And short fic­tion, the biggest mar­ket has 25,000 sub­scribers last I checked, and prob­a­bly fewer now.  They’ve been shrink­ing con­sis­tently for years.  It’s a niche pur­suit at best.

Still with me?  The prospect of dying alone, pen­ni­less, in the gut­ters doesn’t frighten you?  Well, then you have the infec­tion, and the only thing I can do is try to give you some advice to help you progress through the stages of your illness.

First of all, don’t worry about the lan­guage issue.  If you can learn to tell a story, it doesn’t mat­ter what lan­guage you write it in, and edi­tors will look past some some­what clumsy writ­ing for a great story.  You could write in your native lan­guage, and find some­one who knows English bet­ter to translate.

Starting out, I do not rec­om­mend you try to col­lab­o­rate (except maybe with a trans­la­tor).  You need to mas­ter plot­ting, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, theme, world build­ing, and a dozen other skills, and you’re not going to do that if you’re shar­ing your writ­ing duties with some­one else, in my opin­ion.  These are things you will learn on your own.

Being a sci­ence grad­u­ate stu­dent is an advan­tage.  Editors are hun­gry for hard sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries.  If you can write them, you are prac­ti­cally guar­an­teed a career.    But remem­ber, they have to be good sto­ries first.  If you write a bad story with cool sci­ence, it doesn’t do you any good.  It’s going to be rejected.

As far as start­ing? Open a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram and type words together to form sen­tences, and sen­tences to form para­graphs.   You will prob­a­bly be ter­ri­ble at first.  99% of writ­ers are.  But the truth of it is, you get bet­ter through the act of writ­ing.  Jay Lake likes to say that writ­ing is a mus­cle and it needs to be exer­cised.  I agree with this notion.  The begin­ning of any writ­ing career is going to be about sta­mina train­ing and build­ing up some bulk.    You’re not going to be com­pet­ing in the Olympics for a very long time (to strain the metaphor).

Ideas.  You’ll hear this from every­body, so I might as well break the news to you.  Ideas for sto­ries are a dime a dozen.  Ideas can help put a story over the top, but they are not a good foun­da­tion for a story.  The foun­da­tion for a story is, well, story.  The com­pelling events of a prob­lem and the peo­ple that attempt to solve it.  That prob­lem could be built around a great idea, but with­out the peo­ple and their attempts and fail­ures to deal with it, it’s just an essay or a sci­ence fact article.

I thought when I was start­ing out that I was hot shit when it came to ideas.  I thought I had the best ideas of any new writ­ers I knew, and that it was all I needed.  I wish I could go back and start over again, real­iz­ing that the ideas should have taken a back seat to learn­ing storycraft.

Read and absorb every­thing.  Because once you become a writer, your brain becomes a black hole with a vora­cious appeti­tite for ideas and infor­ma­tion.  When I go to the doctor’s office, I don’t read SF mag­a­zines.  I pick up the mag­a­zine deal­ing with a topic I know the least about, say, Woodworking Monthly, because I never know if I’m going to want to write a story about a wood­worker.   A guy who builds cab­i­nets for a liv­ing doesn’t at first seem a likely can­di­date for a pro­tag­o­nist, but you’ll learn how to do it.  You’re going to use every bit of knowl­edge you ever obtain.  Your entire life becomes one giant research effort.

After all of that and  you’re still inter­ested in writ­ing?  Okay then.  Go, you have my bless­ing, what­ever that’s worth. Do it.  Put your butt in a chair and start typ­ing, or writ­ing with a pen, or what­ever method you pre­fer.  Do it, and do it con­sis­tently for sev­eral years.  Read every­thing you can–not just SF, but the classics.

I look for­ward to read­ing your first pub­lished story.  Drop me a line when it comes out!

So how about you all?  Do you have any inter­est­ing sto­ries to share about when you were just start­ing out with writ­ing, or what­ever career you pur­sue?    Any tips to add to mine here?

Previous Advice For Author Websites (and some new)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This week, we con­tinue our trend of answer­ing ques­tions from read­ers.  Right now I have enough ques­tions to get me through at least another week of posts.  So BlueTyson asked in the post of ques­tions last week:

Not for me, obvi­ously, but ‘here’s how to con­sider doing a site about a book/​author’?

I have writ­ten about this sub­ject in great detail in pre­vi­ous entries, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so.  I’ll break things down into a few points, with links to pre­vi­ous posts:

  • First of all, hire me.  I’m avail­able, I work at a rea­son­able rate, and I know author web­sites well.  Some of my clients include Mike Brotherton, Jay Lake, Rudi Dornemann, Shannon Page, and more.
  • Plug out of the way, read this post: 10 things your web­site should have if you’re an author.
  • When con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a pro­fes­sional or even build­ing it your­self, I’ve writ­ten this arti­cle advo­cat­ing for good, standards-​​based design:5 Reasons Why SF/​F Author Websites should be (more) standards-​​based
  • At one time, your web pres­ence was pretty much lim­ited to a web­site and a blog.  Now, we have microblog­ging sites such as Twitter and social net­work­ing sites such as Facebook.  It behooves the seri­ous author to main­tain a pres­ence on each one of these services–basically any­where you might have fans, you should be.   One of the things I have started doing is, rather than just build­ing a web­site for an author, I attempt to develop a com­pre­hen­sive online strat­egy for them to develop an audi­ence and to main­tain their read­er­ship.  It’s about build­ing rela­tion­ships through the tools that are out there.  Your web­site is impor­tant, but it’s no longer the only impor­tant thing.
  • That may sound like a big time com­mit­ment, and it can be.  A good exam­ple is Twitter, which can suck up time like noth­ing else.  But you don’t need to post to Twitter 50 times a day to be avail­able and acces­si­ble.  Y0u need to answer ques­tions directed at you, make a few new com­ments each day, and respond to direct mes­sages.  Share your work, your­self, and your inter­ests on these ser­vices.   One thing I do is make man­ag­ing all these sites cen­trally very easy but installing plu­g­ins into the con­tent man­age­ment.   No longer am I just the guy who builds the web­site.  I also help you man­age all these tools.   A good designer/​developer/​web mas­ter will do so as well.

Remember: like any other busi­ness, you should think about what pur­pose a web­site serves, and what are your goals.  Everything about your web­site should reflect those goals.  It could be as sim­ple as “to sell books” or it could be com­pli­cated like “to share what I know about web design, pho­tog­ra­phy, and writ­ing. Also, cool links.  Also, to show­case my pho­tog­ra­phy and my designs.  To build read­ers for my fic­tion, but in gen­eral to make friends out there.”   Okay–so that vision isn’t very coher­ent, and could use some focus­ing.  I’m work­ing on that.  In the mean­while, you’ll still get every­thing but the kitchen sink.

The Perfect Cover Letter: things to do and don’t

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Where “per­fect cover let­ter” is to mean the cover let­ters that work best for me in my edi­to­r­ial capac­ity at Escape Pod.  I may very well con­tra­dict the writ­ten guide­lines of Escape Pod when I describe what I believe to be the per­fect cover let­ter for a mag­a­zine sub­mis­sion.  If my advice is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent, I will get those updated.  Also, I have no idea what con­sti­tutes a good cover let­ter for sub­mit­ting your novel, but I imag­ine there are a lot of folks out there that can explain that to you.

So here is what I both put in my cover let­ters and what I would like to see in cover let­ters attached to sub­mis­sions I read, as well as some things I don’t want to see, and yet occa­sion­ally and most unfor­tu­nately do.

Do These Things

  • Contact Information.  A no-​​brainer.  If we can’t write you back  to accept or reject your story, the whole process falls apart.
  • A sub­ject line that starts with the word SUBMISSION: .  A lot of ran­dom junk can end up in the sub­mis­sions box.   Your story can eas­ily be mis­taken for that if you don’t put the word SUBMISSION in front of it.  This makes it eas­ier for us to sort, and any­thing that makes the editor’s job easy to do is some­thing you should do.
  • A salu­ta­tion with the editor’s name.  When in doubt, pick the edi­tor in chief.  Do not address “Editor.”
  • Here is the most cru­cial ele­ment that is often done badly.  A short one sen­tence list of recent pub­li­ca­tions, specif­i­cally any well known and accepted major pub­li­ca­tions.  This cor­re­lates mostly to pay, but some mar­kets have high pres­tige and lower pay. More on this in what not to do.
  • I think it’s okay to men­tion if you’ve attended a major work­shop like Clarion.  It is a neu­tral point with me, maybe a slight pos­i­tive.  At the very least, it tells me you’re serious.
  • For Escape Pod, where and when the story was orig­i­nally pub­lished.  We  do accept unpub­lished work, but think about your odds here.  Your story, which has not been tested, is going up against pretty much all the fic­tion that has ever been pub­lished, ever.  Originals are going to have to be really spe­cial.  Besides, we’re like free money if you crack a major mar­ket with a good story.  Selling to us first may pre­vent you from sell­ing to them later, but not vice versa.  We encour­age you to try print mar­kets before us.
  • A quick thank you, sign off, whatever.
  • Optional:  pro­vide me a con­text for who you are.  If we met at a con­ven­tion and shared a drink at the bar, it can’t hurt for you to remind me of that. It won’t nec­es­sar­ily help, but  it pro­vides a pos­i­tive context.

Don’t Do These Things

  • Do not include a sum­mary of the story.  I don’t know who is teach­ing writ­ers to do this for short story mar­kets, but if you find out, tell them I said stop or I’ll kick them square in the kid­neys.  Nothing is a surer sign to me of a writer who doesn’t know what they are doing than when I open up an email and am pre­sented with a sum­mary of the story before read­ing it.  DO NOT DO THIS.
  • I can­not stress this enough, but let me try.  DO NOT DO THIS. List every pub­li­ca­tion and every sale or credit to every for-​​the-​​love, semi-​​pro, and local news­pa­per pub­li­ca­tion that you have ever had.  Also every award nom­i­na­tion,   and that one time your mother gave you a com­pli­ment.  Remember here that  your cred­its bit should not be more than a para­graph.  If you have the cred­its to impress me, I most likely already know who you are and what you’ve pub­lished.  If you don’t have those cred­its, list­ing cred­its that I haven’t  heard of  does the oppo­site.  It’s the Bambi rule as applied to sub­mit­ting your work.  If you don’t have some­thing nice to say about your­self, omit it.  Here are the awards I care about:
    • Hugos
    • Nebulas
    • The Campbell
    • BSFA
    • That Canadian one
    • Writers of the Future, if it was actu­ally printed
  • Do not include non­fic­tion cred­its.  Your abil­ity to write an arti­cle does not  tend to have much bear­ing on whether or not you can tell a good story.  Sorry, I don’t really need to know about non­fic­tion credits.
  • Please do not tell me that this is your first sub­mis­sion ever or that you are unpub­lished.  If you leave out the cred­its bit, which you should if you have none, then you’re doing your­self a favor.  We know what it means, but it doesn’t draw as much atten­tion to itself as when you state it.  I am a con­scious and a sub­con­scious crea­ture, and I don’t want that knowl­edge influ­enc­ing how I approach your story.  Because it is true:  if I have faith in you as a writer, I will come to your story with more faith, and will be will­ing to look past a few early mis­takes to see where the story goes.  With writ­ers who are still green, those early mis­takes are not likely to be over­come later in the story.

And Now, The Truth

Some edi­tors will tell you that they don’t read cover let­ters at all, or at least until they have already read the story to the point of mak­ing a deci­sion.  I used to be in the for­mer camp.  I read them now at Escape Pod because I am look­ing to sort out and pare down my back­log quickly.  I search cover let­ters for pub­li­ca­tions in major pro­fes­sional venues, from authors who work I am famil­iar with, in order to set them aside for later read­ing.  Does this help them get pub­lished in Escape Pod?  Not as much as you might think.  Just because Stan Schmidt liked a story doesn’t mean I will.  And cer­tainly vice-versa–I have the rejec­tions to prove it.

Cover let­ters are the very first impres­sion your story makes on me.  I would like to say that I take each story as it is, but cover let­ters in all hon­esty can do three things.

  • No influ­ence.  A neu­tral cover let­ter.  This is what you should aim for.  Informational.
  • Hopeful.   You’re a vet­eran of the field and this story was nom­i­nated for the Nebula last year.  I will admit to being hope­ful about the story.
  • Discouraged.  You’ve botched the cover let­ter so badly, so I don’t have much hope that you’re going to nail the story itself.

Yes, we are influ­enced by a bad cover let­ter.  And we get excited about cred­its from big­ger mar­kets.  But none of these are the sole basis of how we judge your sub­mis­sion.  We still read the story, or as much of it as we need to anyway.

Remember that it never counts against you to just leave them off entirely (but please still include the con­tact infor­ma­tion).  When I was just start­ing out, I didn’t even write a cover let­ter until I had a few sales from mar­kets the edi­tors would know.  Then I started includ­ing my very short cover letter.

So I hope that’s proved a lit­tle use­ful.  What do you think about cover let­ters?   Have you had good or  bad expe­ri­ences with them?  If you’re an edi­tor, feel free to point out in the com­ments where we dis­agree.  I don’t really pro­pose the above as th

You have the rest of today to hit me up with ques­tions over on Tuesday’s post.  I’ll be announc­ing the win­ner of the copy of Federations on Monday.

International Science Fiction Collection

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Lavie Tidhar has long been one of my favorite authors, and we fre­quently pub­lished him at the Fortean Bureau.  He’s a fas­ci­nat­ing indi­vid­ual and it shows in his writ­ing, which is very often influ­enced by his grow­ing up in Israel.  I like exotic locales in my fic­tion, and Lavie has a way of mak­ing places on Earth itself seem exotic.

Which brings me to his new anthol­ogy, The Apex Book of World SF.

Lavie has put together a ros­ter of authors you have prob­a­bly never heard of before, and maybe a few that you have.  Writers from India, Thailand, China, Croatia, and more.   Sometimes we in the sci­ence fic­tion lit­er­ary cir­cles fail to real­ize that the genre extends past the bor­ders of the English-​​speaking world.  This book in a per­fect world would get a lot of atten­tion from us.

I often hear peo­ple won­der­ing when the next big move­ment will come along.  We had New Wave, and Cyberpunk.  I have sus­pected for some time that the next move­ment is going to come from sci­ence fic­tion authors for who English is a sec­ond lan­guage, if a lan­guage at all.

I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing this one.  I hope you check it out. There’s even a World SF Blog that has been run­ning some great con­tent late.
You can order the anthol­ogy at the Apex Book Company Website.

Charlie Finlay Gives Away Books (with a catch)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Charlie Finlay is a great writer who taught me a ton about writ­ing back when I didn’t really deserve it.   He has a new fan­tasy book series launch­ing, set dur­ing the Revolutionary War, and the first book is called Patriot Witch.   I have really been look­ing for­ward to this.  Historical fan­tasy set in this time period is rare as far as I know, and cou­pling the period with a writer like Finlay is going to be a treat.

CCfinlay: You Say You Want A Revolution?

But what I really wanted to point out to you today was this inter­est­ing strat­egy he’s using to build buzz for the book.  He’s giv­ing out free early copies for the book, so long as you go and post a review on one of the mer­chant sites.  Then he’ll send you an advance copy of the next book, so long as you do the same. I sus­pect he is going to chain peo­ple all the way through the series this way.

I think it’s a clever way to get some men­tions out there. If I were him, I would have asked for blog posts as well, for read­ers with blogs, but maybe Amazon​.com reviews will have more of an impact on sales.  I’m not sure.

Charlie, like most newer nov­el­ists, has not much of a mar­ket­ing bud­get behind his book.  These days, mar­ket­ing falls on the shoul­ders of the writer more and more.  I col­lect strate­gies like these to offer to my clients as part of my web design series.  I’ll be watch­ing this one to see where it goes.

I wish I had time to take him up on the offer, but things are get­ting really hec­tic around here between look­ing for a job, free­lance, and Escape Pod.  And I’m also writ­ing again a bit.  Not enough time in the day, damn it.

Twitter Will Murder You While You Sleep

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

If you are vir­tu­ous, you have have lit­tle to fear from Twitter.  But if you screw up, it will cut you, man. It will cut you DEEP.    I will explain how I think this can eas­ily be avoided, but first, let’s talk about Twitter.  I swore I would never make a blog post about the “power of Twitter” but this is too fas­ci­nat­ing to pass up

In the after­math of the #ama­zon­fail  deba­cle, I am only just now com­ing to real­ize the ulti­mate power of Twitter and just how dan­ger­ous it can be to the sta­tus quo and those in posi­tions of power.  That power remains mostly untapped and com­pletely undi­rected, for now.

The scan­dal broke over the week­end.  I won’t go into detail, but let me sum­ma­rize by say­ing, basi­cally, a crap-​​ton of books by gay authors, on GLBT themes, etc  were delisted from search and from sales rank­ings.   I was dri­ving cross coun­try and missed the begin­ning, so when I tuned in on Monday, it was a bit bewil­der­ing.  I imag­ine that’s how Amazon’s man­age­ment felt on Monday morn­ing when they were briefed on the issue.

From my per­spec­tive, the issue was a per­fect storm of  issues– GLBT rights and pub­lish­ing.   As I move in writing/​publishing cir­cles,  the last cou­ple of days on my twit­ter feed have been one long angry, out­raged dis­cus­sion, with links, retweets, the whole deal.  It con­tin­ues as I type this.

Don’t mis­take my detached atti­tude here to be one of con­done­ment.  What hap­pened was bad for writ­ers, bad for pub­lish­ers, and as we have seen, very, very bad for Amazon.  I am how­ever ambivi­lent about ascrib­ing blame or malev­o­lence.  I’ve worked in large orga­ni­za­tions, and it’s very easy for me to believe that this entire prob­lem was the result of a bureau­cratic error.

In the infor­ma­tion void that existed on the week­end, many inten­tions were invented to explain.  Right-​​wingers had col­lab­o­rated to manip­u­late the sys­tem via tags.  Amazon had capit­u­lated to right-​​wingers and dropped the titles.  It was a pro­gram­ming error.  A mas­sive con­spir­acy of inter­net pranksters man­u­fac­tured it so that they could feed on the out­raged tears of  twit­ter users.  And so on.

Much like Nature abhors a vac­cum, the inter­net ahbors an absence of information.

Amazon’s lack of imme­di­ate response allowed the con­tro­versy to build to unprece­dented lev­els.   Rarely have I seen the inter­net move in one angry direc­tion so effec­tively.  It never would have moved this quickly in the time before Twitter.  Email, texts, none of them had the per­fect assem­bly of fea­tures and usabil­ity that Twitter does.

The equa­tion looks some­thing like this:

(Incredibly Easy Link Sharing + Social Networking + Tagging) X Programming Error/​Scandal/​Gaffe  = Internet Shitstorm of Epic Proportions

We’ve been see­ing this with peo­ple los­ing jobs via Twitter as well.  You tend to think, as a twit­ter user, that the world is small, lim­ited to your fol­low­ers.  But they fol­low oth­ers, and oth­ers fol­low them, and it’s easy to resend some­thing you said with a click, and… it’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only instead of being linked to the excel­lent star of such films as Footloose and Wild Things, you get fired and mocked by 30 mil­lion people.

Do some­thing bad, catch the atten­tion of Twitter, and don’t respond for sev­eral days.  This is a recipe for total and utter rep­u­ta­tion ani­hil­i­a­tion.

So how do you avoid this?  Well, nim­ble com­pa­nies should not be threat­ened by Twitter’s awe­some might.  The faster you fill the void of infor­ma­tion, the more quickly Twitter as a whole will move on to some­thing else.   It prob­a­bly doesn’t mat­ter what you say.  All you have to do is acknowl­edge it.  Say, “We see the prob­lem. We don’t know what’s caus­ing it.  We’re on it.  Thank you.” And then keep peo­ple updated.  The lack of response is as impor­tant as the mistake.

Larger com­pa­nies like Amazon face a big­ger prob­lem.  I sus­pect Amazon can’t decide what brand of toi­let paper to put in the employee bath­room with­out six­teen com­mit­tees and mas­sive exec­u­tive over­sight.   The peo­ple in power in these com­pa­nies tend to believe in out-​​dated ideas like “I shouldn’t have to work on the weekends.”

So, two things if you’re Amazon-​​big.  One–your rep­u­ta­tion doesn’t turn off on the week­ends. You need peo­ple mon­i­tor­ing it at all times thanks to the inter­net.  And Two– empower the peo­ple mon­i­tor­ing your rep­u­ta­tion to man­age it.

Sounds risky, huh?  Only Bezos should have that power!  Right?  That’s the kind of think­ing that will get you into an #ama­zon­fail scale mess.  Top-​​down man­age­ment method­olo­gies will not last in today’s cli­mate.   Twitter and the inter­net will eat such com­pa­nies alive.  If your sur­vival depends on the decision-​​making of one or a few wealthy elites who can’t be both­ered to check their email on Sunday, to call an emer­gency meet­ing or some­thing, then you are, roy­ally and truly fucked.

To sum­ma­rize:  pay atten­tion, respond quickly, and for god’s sake, set up an search feed track­ing your com­pany name.  If Comcast can respond to any tweet that men­tions their name, so can Amazon.

Or, ya know, we can all start shop­ping at Barnes & Noble or Powell’s or some other smaller inde­pen­dent chain.  We don’t really care.  Twitter as a whole loves get­ting angry.  Outrage, kit­tens with bad gram­mar, and porn  are the fuels in the engines of the inter­net. And the inter­net makes it just as easy to order a book from Mom & Pop Reseller as it is AmazonCo.  Brand loy­alty doesn’t really count for much, and in the face of con­tro­versy, it evap­o­rates pretty damned quickly.