Archive for the ‘Writing Advice’ Category

What Is a Podcastable Story?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Greg Van Eekhout asks:

Thoughts on what kinds of sto­ries trans­late well to pod­casts and what kinds don’t?

First of all, full dis­claimer. I am the man­ag­ing edi­tor at Escape Pod, the sci­ence fic­tion audio pod­cast. I’ve been doing this job for about 3 or 4 months now, and I am by no means an expert on to topic. I can only com­ment as to my per­sonal tastes here. I reserve the right to change my opin­ion as I learn more about my job and what seems to work.

I can talk much more eas­ily about what does not work well in pod­casts. Here are a few things:

  • Typographic weird­ness, of the sort you would see in The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
  • Fiction that plays with for­mat­ting in some way–fake news report, branch­ing dia­logue, and so on. This would be great if we pro­duced audio dra­mas, but Escape Pod approaches pro­duc­tion in a very straigh­for­ward nar­ra­tive fash­ion. I’d love to do more radio-​​drama style read­ings, and we have one com­ing up that was recorded live by Steve Eley at a con­ven­tion. But the pro­duc­tion that goes into a reg­u­lar episode is dif­fi­cult enough.
  • Stories that have a lot of very short scenes and lots of jump­ing around in time.

The last one is the one I’m least cer­tain about, but I find that sto­ries that go back and forth in time can be a bit more con­fus­ing in audio for­mat. On the page, it seems eas­ier to orga­nize the events into a chrono­log­i­cal order, but when lis­ten­ing to a story, it is harder to do this. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing I pay atten­tion to.

Okay, so what works par­tic­u­larly well? Here are some gen­eral ideas:

  • A strong, unique per­spec­tive or voice. It’s my expe­ri­ence that some of the most pop­u­lar EP episodes have been from a very unique char­ac­ter, such as a bomb dog or the AI that resides in a soldier’s hel­met. These sto­ries are often in first per­son per­spec­tive. That’s not to say that I find first per­son bet­ter than third per­son. First per­son cou­pled with a really unique and orginal voice stands out very well. Like it does in reg­u­lar fiction.
  • All the other, usual things that make a story good.

Other than the few things I think don’t work that are spe­cific to the audio for­mat, I use basi­cally the same cri­te­ria for select­ing a story in audio that I would for select­ing in print. I have some restric­tions unique to Escape Pod, such as length. I can’t tell you how many times I remem­ber what I think would be a great story fo rthe pod­cast, only to look it up and find out that it was a novella. It’s some­thing I’d like to see us do more of in the future, but I’d want to pay more for them and pos­si­bly seri­al­ize them over the course of two or more episodes. It’s some­thing I think about a lit­tle when I have time.

If you lis­ten to pod­cast fic­tion, what do you think? What kinds of sto­ries really work well for you in audio? Try to focus on the things you think work par­tic­u­larly well, and cite spe­cific exam­ples if you like. This will make up for my rather under­de­vel­oped list. If you have some­thing crit­i­cal to say about a par­tic­u­lar pod­cast story, share it on the forums over at the ‘cast or send it to our feed­back email, as a favor to me, please.

Reader Questions: How Do I Decide How Much Work to (Self) Publish Online?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Let’s kick off reader ques­tion answer week with a real doozy. CDThomas asks:

I don’t have a web­site or blog. And I don’t know if I want one.

I under­stand if I’d cre­ate a blog for nat­ter­ing on, but most of that itch gets scratched by Twitter. I’m not much of an essay writer, because I think I find oth­ers who say what I’m think­ing bet­ter than I would.

That leaves self-​​promotion, pos­si­bly, of my fic­tion (plays, poems, short sto­ries). If I don’t want to go the full Doctorow and Creative-​​Commons license every­thing, then how do I decide how much of my work to pub­lish online?

I’m not going to be the type of writer who obses­sively searches for online theft, but I need to find a way of talk­ing about what I’m doing before I’m pub­lished reg­u­larly by mag­a­zines, online or oth­er­wise — learn­ing how to be part of a writ­ing SF/​F/​H com­mu­nity, I guess, but with­out my ques­tions get­ting lost on web boards.

First of all, I don’t think every writer needs a web­site or a blog. Anyone who says they do is prob­a­bly sell­ing some­thing (to para­phrase The Princess Bride). Now, I sell web design ser­vices, but I would never try to sell a writer on a blog/​website if they didn’t have any inter­est in main­tain­ing or updat­ing it. It sounds like you know what you like, and that’s Twitter. That’s great! You can do a lot to build a rep­u­ta­tion and an audi­ence with just that ser­vice. I tend to rec­om­mend a more com­pre­hen­sive strat­egy. I think of it as being like fish­ing. You can fish all day in one spot if you want, and you’ll catch fish. You’ll catch fish if you change up your lure and move around too. Now, read­ers aren’t fish, but poten­tial readers/​fans can be found in a lot of dif­fer­ent places. Unlike fish­ing, you can be in mul­ti­ple places at one time. So it’s more like hav­ing a cou­ple of poles in the water.

Okay, that metaphor is stretched to the break­ing point. Moving on.

I used to blog rarely, think­ing basi­cally that I didn’t have any­thing unique to say. But I don’t think that’s true of any­one, espe­cially any­one who writes. Why do we write if we’re not com­pelled do to do so by a need to share some­thing we feel is unique? Everyone has some­thing unique to say. Maybe not on every topic or issue, but every­one has within them, in my opin­ion, the poten­tial to write a great and grip­ping blog. Sometimes this involves liv­ing a very pub­lic life, shar­ing your deep­est embar­rass­ments. Sometimes, it means shar­ing the lit­tle bit of knowl­edge about writ­ing you’ve gar­nered. But if you’re sure, no big deal. You don’t need to have one. Nobody’s going to order you to have one.

Now, how do you decide what fic­tion to release online if you don’t want to go the full Creative Commons route and release absolutely every­thing? My opin­ion is, unless you’re really, really cer­tain of it, don’t release it online unless it’s been pub­lished some­where. I’ve writ­ten pos­si­bly a hun­dred short sto­ries. But only about a dozen are avail­able for any­one to read out­side of my close friends and fam­ily, and only one of those was self-​​published online.

It’s hard to build authen­tic­ity as a self-​​publisher. It’s not impos­si­ble, but the thing is, there is a lot of stuff to read online. People are look­ing for rea­sons to key in on things to read, and just throw­ing your writ­ing out there all on its own can be a very hard way of build­ing authen­tic­ity. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but I per­son­ally wouldn’t want to go that route.

Now, say you’ve sold a cou­ple of sto­ries. You might want to release some of them online, but let’s back­track and remem­ber that we don’t have a web­site. How do we release fic­tion online and get it out there to be read if we don’t have a web­site? Well, you can throw up a quick free web­site with a ser­vice like Blogger or LiveJournal. Or you can sell your fic­tion as down­loads with Fictionwise. Or you could upload it to Scribd and take your chances. There are a lot of ways to put your work out there with­out hav­ing a web­site, but you take your chances with each one of them. It’s really, really hard to get peo­ple to pay atten­tion to you online.

I find that it’s best to try online reprint sales first.  Might as well get some money from it, right?  That’s more respectabil­ity than just pub­lish­ing it online your­self.  Most sites will archive it for a long time.  The pod­casts like Escape Pod, Drabblecast, and Starship Sofa  are another great way to get your fic­tion online in basi­cally a per­ma­nent fash­ion.  The main dif­fer­ence here is that some­one else is lend­ing cred­i­bil­ity to your work by select­ing it for their pub­li­ca­tion, as opposed to you putting it up on your per­sonal web­site.  If one place lik­ing a story gives cred, imag­ine that two places means even more cred.  Same prin­ci­ple behind the Year’s Best antholo­gies, I think.

As to how much of your work should you get online?  That’s up to you and I can’t give you a sat­is­fac­tory answer.  I per­son­ally try to get every sin­gle story online via the ways I’ve listed above.  If I can’t sell some­thing as a reprint or pod­cast, I’ll for­mat it nicely on my web­site and throw it up myself.  Especially if I want to do a cool illus­tra­tion to go along with it.  Once you’ve made all the money you can from a story, why not put it out there for free?  Stories are dis­pos­able most of the time.  If you write a story so great that you can resell it dozens of times, then, well, some­one will post it online for you whether you want them to or not.  Try Googling the title of a clas­sic SF short story, and you’re likely to find a boot­leg copy online on some poorly policed .edu site as much as any­thing else.  Might as well be the per­son to be in con­trol of it, right?

The last aspect of the ques­tion above deals with how to become a part of the com­mu­nity and take part in a con­ver­sa­tion with­out being lost amongst the noise. This is very easy. I’ll break it out in bul­let points.

  • Pick four or five blogs or forums and haunt them. Check them every day if you can.
  • Provide help­ful answers to ques­tions. Key word here is help­ful. Don’t be neg­a­tive or crit­i­cal unless it’s asked for. Talk about your­self and your work only if it relates directly to the topic at hand. Be pos­i­tive. Try to find a unique per­spec­tive on the posts you com­ment on.
  • Do that over and over again. You’ll get a rep­u­ta­tion quickly.

There are other ways, but I think this is the eas­i­est way. It involves putting in a lot of time, but being a part of a com­mu­nity isn’t easy. I have a really hard time keep­ing up with all the writer blogs and forums I would like to read in an ideal world. I try to stay on top of a few spe­cific ones as best I can. I’m not very good about my sec­ond point of advice, so bear that in mind, but I think if I could do things over again, that’s how I would approach it.

I hope some of these answers prove help­ful. If any­one else has any advice for CDThomas, please share it in the comments.

Revising Short Fiction is for Suckers

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve heard a lot of dif­fer­ent opin­ions on the sub­ject of revi­sion over the years. The one that has stuck with me was the opin­ion of, I think it was Heinlein. This author wrote one draft, dropped it in the mail, and never looked back. I don’t know what his rea­sons for this were, but I know what a mod­ern writer’s rea­sons would be, espe­cially when it comes to short fiction.

It’s all about time man­age­ment and cost/​benefit analy­sis. Because sto­ries are pur­chased not based on the time it took to write them but how many words they con­tain, the actual hourly wage you make varies depend­ing on how much time you spend on a story. And the more time you spend, the less money you’re making.

For exam­ple, I gen­er­ally write first drafts at a speed of 1000–2000 words an hour. At a mod­er­ately decent payrate of 5 cents a word, that puts me at $50 an hour, if I were to sell my first draft. That’s a very nice hourly wage. Each draft you do, and each hour you spend rework­ing your draft, is reduc­ing your poten­tial hourly income. Spend as much time revis­ing as you did writ­ing the story, and now you’ve cut your hourly in half. Spend three times as long revis­ing the story as you did writ­ing it and now we’re talk­ing work­ing at McDonalds wages. I guess it’s bet­ter than dig­ging ditches.

However, I per­son­ally am not a writer who can churn out a sell­able first draft. I find the story in revi­sion, much like Pixar does. Partly this is because I often start writ­ing a story before the idea has fully fer­mented. Partly this is because I write so fast when I am on the first draft that I miss good oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s only in sub­se­quent drafts that I can tweak the machin­ery of story into a form that actu­ally runs.

When I first started out writ­ing, I was with Heinlein all the way. One draft, and be done with it. And I sold a cou­ple. I also never sold dozens. When you think about it, was that really mak­ing me any more money as a writer? Almost cer­tainly not. It’s prob­a­bly a wash, if I sat down to fig­ure it out.

These days, I not only redraft and redraft, I also sit on sto­ries for months or years. Yesterday, I broke out a story that I wrote almost 2 years ago and began revis­ing. It’s prob­a­bly now on draft 5 or 6. And it’s most likely still not there.

These days, I’m much more con­cerned with mak­ing money from my writ­ing than I was before. That’s because I have no reg­u­lar source of income. So I’m look­ing at the Heinlein way again. It’s wish­ful think­ing though. I’m not a first draft writer, and that’s okay. Even if my hourly wage works out to be some­thing akin to min­i­mum wage, it’s still bet­ter work than just about any job that actu­ally pays min­i­mum wage. Unless that job has health insurance.

What’s your approach to revis­ing? What’s the longest you’ve ever tin­kered with a piece before send­ing it out?

5 Writing Lessons Learned from Land of the Lost

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This past week­end, I spent my hard-​​earned money to see the new Land of the Lost movie. In terms of enter­tain­ment, I do not feel that I got my money’s worth out of it. So here I sit, try­ing milk­ing a blog post out of the film in order to get some writ­ing lessons from the thing. I’ll be damned if I am going to actu­ally waste money in these hard eco­nomic times!

I guess my child­hood appre­ci­a­tion of the orig­i­nal series col­ored my expec­ta­tions for the film. No wor­ries, it won’t hap­pen again. At least, until G.I. Joe comes out. And Transformers 2. Ahem.

This post is going to be rife with spoil­ers, but hey, if you don’t want to see the film (which you shouldn’t), or god for­bid, saw it already, then those won’t bother you. Lessons behind the cut. Oh, and yes. I’m dis­card­ing my usual “don’t say it if you can’t say some­thing nice” ethos here, because, well, some­times you wake up on Monday morn­ing and want to tear apart a bad film. Onward!

Continue read­ing ›

5 Writing Lessons I Learned from Pixar

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s my per­sonal opin­ion that some of the absolute best sto­ry­tellers on the planet today work for Pixar. Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant is eas­ily my favorite tra­di­tion­ally ani­mated film. And now, I think Up, the lat­est Pixar mas­ter­piece, has man­aged to top all the films that came before it.

I’m rarely as touched and thrilled by an expe­ri­ence as I am by watch­ing their movies.

  1. Writing doesn’t have to be YA, or for Adults. It can be both.

    The book world may have sto­ries divided down lines based on age and level of matu­rity, but the line between enter­tain­ment for adults and enter­tain­ment for younger chil­dren has never been as blurred as it has been by Pixar’s films. It’s indis­putable that their films are pop­u­lar with chil­dren. The sheer vol­ume of Nemo mer­chan­dise I see to this day backs up that asser­tion. At the aquar­ium, no kid could see the fish from that film with­out shout­ing out their names. “Look mommy, Dory!” I lis­tend to vari­a­tions of this for two hours.

    I think Pixar is the very model of fam­ily entertainment–films that can be enjoyed by every­one. And the more I think about it, the more I real­ize that much of chil­dren or YA lit­er­a­ture is the same way. There’s a kind of sub­con­cious stigma for adults read­ing YA fic­tion in my expe­ri­ence. I saw this often when Harry Potter was pop­u­lar. Some could not get past the idea that “Harry Potter is for kids.” It’s not. It’s for peo­ple who enjoy sto­ries. Just like Pixar’s films. I have a lot of respect for some­one who can tell a story so broadly appeal­ing, and per­son­ally, I want to learn how to do it too.

  2. Don’t Be Afraid to Put Heavy Stuff in a Light-​​Hearted Story

    This les­son has never been dri­ven home so well as by Up. The pro­tag­o­nist is a wid­ower, and we spend the first 20 min­utes get­ting to know his free-​​spirited wife. We see their lives pass before our eyes, and when she passes, we feel it deeply. I had a hard time keep­ing my eyes dry, I admit it.

    Funny with­out bite is like a fluffy cake. It lacks sub­stance and grav­ity. The under­tones cre­ated by the loss of a loved one, absen­tee fathers, and lifes not lived, those are the things that take an enjoy­able story from being fun but for­get­table to being great and unfor­get­table. Make us laugh. Make us cry. Make us laugh and cry in the same breath. If Pixar can do it, we can do it in our sto­ries and nov­els too.

  3. A character’s first inter­ac­tions can often tell you every­thing you need to know about them.

    In Wall-​​E, the first inter­ac­tions with another crea­ture we see are between the robot and a cock­roach. Does Wall-​​E smash the bug, dis­gusted? Of course not. He befriends it. The essence of his char­ac­ter is revealed in that sim­ple scene, and we fall for him.

    Pixar’s char­ac­ters appear­ances often reflect their per­son­al­ity, some­thing that can­not so eas­ily be done in fic­tion itself. But it’s not just their appear­ance. Watch each one of the films. In a few brief moments, we learn that Marlin will do any­thing for Nemo, that Woody is a leader and likes help­ing other toys, that Mr. Incredible is a bit full of him­self and dis­mis­sive of oth­ers, but loves his wife, and then, his fam­ily, very much, and that Remy loves food. Often, the cen­tral con­flict of the story arises from this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as well. Wall-​​E needs to love some­one, and fol­lows EVE into space itself. Woody butts heads with Buzz. Mr. Incredible makes his own arch-​​nemesis because of his rude­ness. And so on.

  4. The work is found in the process of rewrit­ing. Also, write for yourself.

    In this inter­view with some of Pixar’s writ­ers, a cou­ple of com­ments really struck home with me, align­ing with things I had noticed from watch­ing the Behind-​​the-​​Scenes extras on their DVDs. Pixar doesn’t do focus groups. They write what they love. And they rewrite and rewrite until they get it the way they want. The story often changes dra­mat­i­cally in the course of revi­sions. Sometimes, we get obsessed with our first drafts, and our hopes rise or sink with the rel­a­tive suc­cess of it. I am par­tic­u­larly guilty of giv­ing up on sto­ries when the first draft doesn’t turn out as well as I imag­ined it.

  5. Amazing char­ac­ters can be born from the sim­plest of ideas.

    The gen­e­sis of the pro­tag­o­nist Walter in Up was a sim­ple sketch of a grumpy old man hold­ing a bal­loon. “Grumpy old man” is a hoary stereo­type, but stereo­types in and of them­selves aren’t wrong. It’s stop­ping with a stereo­type is a mis­take. From that sim­ple sketch, Pixar build a fully real­ized and appeal­ing char­ac­ter. They took some­one and made him both unpleas­ant and lov­able at the same time.

    Russell, seen right, is designed as a char­ac­ter to coun­ter­point every­thing about Walter. He’s round where Walter is angles. He’s kind and inno­cent and youth­ful. The con­tra­dic­tion of the essence of these two char­ac­ters gen­er­ates much of the humor and the con­flict to drive the story.

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.

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.