Thoughts on Creativity

Two pieces I feel are worth passing along.

First, the inestimable John Cleese:

Second, this from screenwriter Shonda Rhimes via Zen Pencils (follow link for full size):

The Digital Gold Rush

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Nine


Hey, remember the California Gold Rush?

Hundreds of thousands of people relocated to Califorinia between 1848 and 1855 from all over the world. Many came seeking gold, finding billions of today's dollars' worth within the first five years. Many others came and set up shops, selling supplies and services to the prospectors.

Who do you think made more money?

Well, about half the miners made a modest profit; a very few of them actually struck it rich. The other half made little money or actually lost money - spending more to support themselves than they recovered in gold.

On average, the merchants made far more than the miners. The first millionaire of the rush was Samuel Brannan - a shopkeeper and newspaper man. The name we most remember from the Rush - though I bet you didn't know the connection - is that of Levi Strauss, who began selling denim overalls in San Francisco in 1853.

Odds are, you don't know anyone whose family made money mining gold in California. But I bet you have at least one pair of Levi's in your closet.

Okay, Jack, but what's your point? And what does this have to do with DSP?

Sometimes, digital self-publishing is marketed to us writers a bit like the California gold discovery - especially by those who stand to profit the most from our work, the big distributors / online book sellers. Amazon's monthly KDP newsletter is particularly full of it: each month is a new success story from someone who's seen their book become a bestseller, followed with an article on how to write & market better for the rest of us.

I'm not saying the newsletter, or similar publications, are a pack of lies. Often they offer useful tips, valuable information, or at the very least inspirational stories. What I am saying is: beware their implications. Beware the philosophy that underlies the advice. Think about who's offering you marketing tips and why they're doing it for free (or are they?).

In the wake of the financial success of a few, high-profile DSP authors, has come a slew of companies and freelancers selling services to would-be DSP writers. You can hire people to produce book trailers, arrange blog tours, format & publish your manuscript so you don't have to. You can even buy reviews.

You can also enter into all kinds of profit-sharing enterprises with major companies. It costs Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble a fraction of a penny to add your book to their stores; even if just your mom and your best friend buy it, they make 10,000% profit on that transaction. They may make only half of what you do per sale, but they make it on every sale of every DSP author's books. The more authors they convince to publish through them, the better - even if most authors only sell a few copies.

From their perspective, it's kind of like the Gold Rush.

We writers can spend hours and days and years mining for ideas, staking out plots, sifting out words until just the right ones remain. To be able to do that, we need supplies and services provided by others.

But we've gotta be careful: the merchants don't take on the same risks we do. It's not just our money and our time at risk, but our art, our hearts, our lives.

Find a way to assess what is and what isn't worth paying for. When deciding where to invest your scarce resources, know before you commit how this service or information or technique fits into your comprehensive marketing strategy for your book.

For us, digital self-publishing isn't a gold rush.

Readers of good books aren't a scarce resource that will eventually be all mined up. DSP isn't going to get shut down by a not-so-secret cabal of traditional publishing companies.

You aren't going to suddenly strike it rich, either. You won't stumble upon the mother lode by buying into a different marketing technique or purchasing access to a new market.

If you do become a bestselling author, it will be from a combination of writing quality books that excite word-of-mouth recommendations from readers, from having a coherent, cost-effective marketing strategy, and from a set of market conditions and circumstances entirely beyond your control.

Remember: you're in this for the long haul. Don't let wily service providers turn your career into an all-or-nothing gold rush.

All Exposure is Good Exposure

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Eight

Wootton's First Principle of Digital Self-Publishing – First Build Reputation, Then Earn Revenue – has some corollaries. There are all kinds of ways to build reputation, after all, and all kinds of reputation you could have. When it comes to author reputation, these concepts help us understand what is and is not worth worrying about.

Corollary #2

All Exposure is Good Exposure.

This is a tough one to grasp, at first. It's an update of the older, more famous phrase, "All Press is Good Press", which phrases.org.uk traces to Oscar Wilde:

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

 Marketing research suggests that this principle is only true for small companies or unknown persons - which is what most of us DSPers are. It's less often true for already-famous, well-established brands (non-political celebrities are occasional exceptions).

You'll think of objections, of course, but here reality is counter-intuitive.

You would think that what first gains you exposure would dictate public expectation for the rest of your brand. But, for better or for worse, the public has a short memory. The fact that they've heard your name before is far more important than the reason they've heard it. 

(This does not necessarily mean that you should plan a publicity stunt completely unrelated to your product and expect its success to carry over - although that does happen sometimes. Still, nobody likes feeling bait-and-switched).

You would think that Corollary #1 would trump and supercede Corollary #2, and generally it does. But there are plenty of writers who've built successful careers out of acting like jerks. People appreciate scathing wit (when it isn't directed against them), and while the case can certainly be made that polarizing vitriol misrepresents most people and misleads the rest, those who can package it well often have little trouble selling it.

(This does not necessarily mean that you have a future as a shock-jock-blogger. Even if you could make it work financially, it's ethically questionable at best and besides, where's the art in it? Any middle-school kid with half a vocabulary can exploit shock-value).

You would think you should do all you can to keep people from stealing your work, and try to shut down anyone who's distributing it without permission. Au contraire.

First, a reminder about the difference between piracy and plagiarism.

Piracy is stealing and/or redistributing someone else's work without permission.

Plagiarism is stealing and redistributing someone else's work under your own name, as if it were your own original work.

Plagiarism is bad for writers. Don't do it to other writers (obviously), and do try to keep it from happening to you. (Setting up a few targeted Google Alerts is an easy way to find out - usually within 24 hours - if anyone is re-distributing your work online. It has its limits, but it's a good start).

But what about piracy?

A little history lesson. Digital self-publishing really began with webcomics and file-sharing programs, which allowed for illegal music swapping. As industry slowly realized that discovering and downloading music online was something people wanted to be able to do, legitimate channels opened up (e.g., iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, customizable internet radio like Pandora, Grooveshark, Spotify, etc. Even YouTube now has radio-like licensing agreements for dealing with user uploads of copyrighted audio tracks), but they were all 5-10 years late to the table and accompanied by numerous anti-piracy laws, lawsuits, and ad campaigns.

Music artists have generally viewed illegal file-sharing as a good thing for them. Artists and music fans stumbled mutually onto the Prime Advantage of DSP: lowered opportunity cost for checking out new art. People no longer had to spend $20+ on an album to discover new music. As a result, they sampled more artists' work than they ever had before, and found they liked music they never would have found otherwise. Established musicians gained new fans; "indie" artists were lifted from obscurity. And most fans, sooner or later, paid the musicians back for what they'd downloaded, either in concert attendance or music purchases.

The only complainers were the big production companies, the labels. And it turns out they profited too, according to a study recently published by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Far from losing money because of online file-sharing, everyone from artists to labels - everyone except brick-and-mortar music retailers - saw significant boosts in profits.

So is piracy good for business? Neil Gaiman thinks so. But Cory Doctorow offers perhaps the best explanation of the whole dynamic in this article.

The important lines to notice come towards the article's end - From Tim O'Reilly, "the problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity," and Doctorow's follow-up, "although it's hard to turn fame into money in the arts, it's impossible to turn obscurity into money in the arts."

(This does not necessarily mean that you should welcome piracy with open arms, although that's been done as well - for example, several game developers deliberately pirated their own games last year. It does mean you shouldn't worry about piracy, since it's more likely to help you in the long run. It also means you shouldn't use DRM in your DSP books - DRM is crackable and barely slows down actual piracy, but potentially annoys or punishes your legitimate customers).

Lastly, you would think that controversy is bad for business - but just the opposite is true. In recent decades, attempts to get books banned generally results in increased sales. People look up controversial media to find out what all the fuss is about. Contrary to the popular saying, curiosity rarely kills cats and, unless it does, they tend to stay curious.

And when we come down to the point, that's really what brand-developers are after - evoking curiosity. Enough curiosity to cause people to sample their products.

So all exposure that makes people curious about your work is good exposure. All press that inspires follow-up is good press. 

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, if the talkers eventually become customers.

Oh, and negative reviews? They can be good for business, too. So don't worry about "negative" or "unprofitable" exposure. Worry about obscurity. Make people curious, and the rest will sort itself.

Advice from Edith Wharton

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. 

In this respect, the novelist of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle, for the insatiable demand of quick production tends to keep him in a state of perpetual immaturity, and the ready acceptance of his wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying the past history of his art, or in speculating on its principles.

This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of "originality" may be impaired by too long brooding on one's theme and too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that past - in every domain of art - disproves this by what survives, and shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour, should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes; and Mr. Kipling's "What should they know of England who only England know?" might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative artist.

One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the "fiction course" is getting the fiction it deserves. 

At any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms.

But though the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art.

There are writers indifferent to popular success, and even contemptuous of it, who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true vocation.

Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as "Inspiration," and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will.

Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in teaching his first child.

There is no doubt that in this day of general "speeding up," the "inspirational" theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs.

No writer - especially at the beginning of his career - can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him either.

The answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.

As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains sufficiently long in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. 

One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels.

But they must have hearts that can break.

Even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult, at first, to defend his personality.

Study and meditation contain their own perils. 

Counsellors intervene with contradictory advice and instances.

In such cases these counsellors are most often other people's novels: the great novels of the past, which haunt the beginner like a passion, and the works of his contemporaries, which pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands.

His impulse, at first, will be either to shun them, to his own impoverishment, or to let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs; but gradually he will come to see that he must learn to listen to them, take all they can give, absorb it into himself, and then turn to his own task with the fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes.

Even then another difficulty remains; the mysterious discrepancy which sometimes exists between a novelist's vision of life and his particular kind of talent.

Not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them otherwise than separately, meticulously, on a small scale.

Perhaps more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of proportion between the powers of vision and expression.

At any rate, it is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions; and the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one's vision to one's pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.

Of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination (subjects one sees one's self doing, oh so wonderfully, if only one were Merimee or Maupassant, or Conrad or Mr. Kipling!) probably but one is "fit for the hand" of the limited person one happens to be; and to learn to renounce the others is a first step toward doing that particular one well.


-Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction

A Bit of Hypocrisy

Thoughts on Digital-Self Publishing (DSP), Series Seven


I have a confession to make.

I frequently agree - even volunteer - to do author interviews, but most of the time I'm not even slightly interested in reading interviews of other authors. I think that makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

It's not that I'm not interested in other authors as people. I am. I'd be happy to make their acquaintance and chat with them about books and writing and life in general anytime.

Nor is it that I'm not interested in them as authors, necessarily. If they've written a good book, or a book that sounds like it might be good, I'd like to know about it.

But I don't like reading author interviews, because I'm not even a little bit interested in how they write.

Let me explain.

Knowing how someone else writes is mere trivia. It doesn't help you discover how you write. On the contrary, if Sherlock Holmes is even partly right about the brain being like an attic, liable to becoming cluttered, having that trivia in your head might even hinder you as a writer. You can get so caught up in trying to sort out "S/he does this, but s/he does that," wondering whose method to imitate, that you give yourself writers' block.

Here are a few examples of useless "writing process" type questions. I will answer them all here, and you will never need to waste your time reading another "writing process" question in an author interview ever again.


Q: What is your writing schedule?
Similar questions: Do you write part-time or full-time? Do you write every day? How many hours a day/week do you write? How much do you write at a time? Do you have word/page count goals for a given period of time? Do you find it hard to meet deadlines? Do you set deadlines for yourself? Etc., ad nauseam.

A: Irrelevant. You don't need to know the answer to this question, because that author's schedule is not identical to your schedule and that author's writing stamina for a given project is not identical to your writing stamina for a different project. Knowing what their writing schedule was for a given book will not help you arrange your own writing schedule for any of your books.

P.S. Everybody writes part-time. Many writers also have day jobs. Nobody puts words on a page for 40+ hours a week, unless they're in a deadline crunch.

P.P.S. If you're not a writer, why would you ask this question or care about the answer?

The question you should be asking instead is: What is MY writing schedule?

Further questions that help you establish the answer: What is my availability? What are my priorities? Do I write more effectively at a certain time of day / day of the week? What is a realistic self-imposed deadline for my final goal with this project, and what are realistic self-imposed deadlines for achieving component goals in support of that final goal? What adjustments do I need to make in my writing schedule, now that I've tried this for a little while? How can I be more intentional about writing?


Q: Where do you get your ideas?
Similar questions: What inspired you to write this book? How do you come up with your ideas / where do you go for inspiration? Are your characters/books based on real people/events? Did you do any research? Did you write this in response to something that happened to you? Etc.

A: Obvious & universal. Good writers are constantly and continually researching, seeking inspiration, developing and refining ideas. All credible characters and all compelling stories are at least partly based on real people and real events - that's what makes them convincing. Everything written has been written in response to something that happened to the author, or that the author observed happening to someone else.

Good writing is a product of craft and spirit. In other words, good writing is the result of developing ideas that interest you into ideas that captivate others (craft :: structure), which is empowered by cultivating personal habits conducive to your own creativity (spirit :: formlessness).

When asked, each author will answer these types of questions a little differently. Some will describe specific "active research" techniques, such as going to the library or interviewing people. Some will tell you where they were and what they were doing when the first brainwave that became book x struck them. Some will mention a friend of theirs or a personal experience that led to the creation of a character or episode or poem.

None of that matters. Their experiences will be too unique for you to replicate and their suggestions will be obvious things that you would have thought to try on your own anyway. Their answers to these kinds of questions won't tell you what you want to know.

The question you should be asking instead is: What should I do to develop/encourage my own creativity?

Further questions that help you establish the answers: How do I become more interested in other people? Which information sources are worth exposing myself to regularly, and with which should I limit my contact? What kinds of activities make me stop and think, or inspire me to reflect? When do I find myself noticing potential connections between unconnected ideas / people / events? How do I know when I've had a good conversation with someone, and how do I repeat that experience with the next person? Do I feel "brain-dead" at certain times of day, or after doing certain things or engaging with certain types of media? Do I find I write better in certain places, or under certain conditions?

N.B. that some of these questions could be profitably asked of other authors. Their ways of getting creative might work for you, or might give you ideas about what to try.


Q: How did you write this book?
Similar questions: Was it hard to finish? Did you encounter writer's block, and if so how did you get past it? Did you worry that you wouldn't get it done / on time? What made you keep going / why didn't you give up? Were you ever bored / frustrated / more interested in working on a different project than in finishing this one? What was the hardest/easiest part to write and why?

A: The author wrote the book by being sufficiently determined. That is the whole story. That is, as Dorothy Parker says, "the gist and sum of it." And while plenty more is said in response to this question, there is nothing more to learn than this.

Rarely are virtues the opposite of vices. More often, vices are extremes and virtues are the balancing points between opposite vices. When it comes to writing books, we can graph the essential character quality like so:

Really good books are written by authors who keep as close as possible to the center of the spectrum: really good books are written with diligence. Stubbornness can get a book done, even when it's not very good; cheating can produce books that sell. Diligence, which is excellence over time, produces really good books - books whose authors have been cleverly persistent and persistently clever. Who have combined craft and spirit, who have given form to inspiration. And who have been determined enough to do that all along.

The answer to this question is always the same: the author wrote the book exactly the same way you will, if you do. S/he wrote it by writing it.

Some days, the author focused on learning and practicing her craft. Other days, the author pulled back from the words themselves to focus on ideas, to let his mind explore and recreate. Most days the author sat down with some kind of writing implement and arranged words on a page.

But whatever the activity was, and whatever the obstacle encountered, the author found a way to keep going. The problems that couldn't be tackled head-on were gradually eroded from the side or stabbed in the back. Because the author was determined to finish the book.

That is every author's "how I wrote my book" story, in a nutshell.

It can be your story too, if you stop hoping to find the secret recipe for becoming a writer in author interviews.

The question you should be asking instead is: How have I been a writer today? How will I be a writer tomorrow?

Further questions that help you establish the answers: If improvement (progress towards perfection) requires practice, how will I practice tomorrow / this week? Am I working too hard / too smart for my own good / the good of my project? What will I do to help keep myself in balance? Am I still determined to finish this book?


P.S. If you've read any of my interviews in which I've answered "writing process" type questions, I sincerely apologize for wasting your time.

I'll try not to do it again.

Wheaton's Law

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Six

Wootton's First Principle of Digital Self-Publishing – First Build Reputation, Then Earn Revenue – has some corollaries. There are all kinds of ways to build reputation, after all, and all kinds of reputation you could have. When it comes to author reputation, these concepts help us understand what is and is not worth worrying about.

Corollary #1

First and foremost, Wheaton's Law. Don't be a dick. Ever. Anywhere.

Always assume that everything you write or say in any public forum, whether live and in-person or online, has a global audience.

I fully anticipate that the outcome of all major political campaigns this decade will depend on which candidates understand this idea and which don't. The Internet is the most powerful publication and distribution platform there's ever been, and it has a long memory. If you're famous, or become famous, long-forgotten things you've said will resurface and circulate. But if you always follow Wheaton's Law, that won't be a problem!

Whenever you find yourself tempted to write something mean, or sarcastic, or terse, or dismissive, or belligerent, or belittling, or mocking: Don't. Bite it back. Walk away from the keyboard. Put the smartphone back in your pocket.

You're a writer, after all. When you use words against someone, it's like an MMA prize fighter beating up... well, you. It looks like bullying to those watching, it feels like being bullied to the person on the receiving end, and it turns you into a bully. Maybe you've noticed – when it comes to reputation, bullies aren't well-regarded. Save your witty skirmishes for friends of your own verbal acuity. Or write them into your stories.

Don't think you can hide behind “anonymity”, either. Nothing you do online is truly anonymous and there's always someone out there with more technical expertise than you. Give the right person a reason to discredit you, and if you've got past embarrassments to hide they'll mysteriously come to light.

Don't use your gift with words to curse other people, or you'll find you've cursed yourself.

The Business of Today (Part One)

Thoughts on Digital Self Publishing (DSP), Series Five

In the beginning of years, when the Internet was so new and all, and the Web Domains were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Dot-Com Idea, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert of Dial-up, most 'scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said "e-commerce!" Just "e-commerce!" and no more.

Remember the dot-com bubble?

In the late 90s online business models mostly centered around offering web-based services or translating existing businesses to the web, in part or in whole. The bubble happened because tech-hungry investors saw internet-business as the next emerging market force and created a lot of demand for stock in companies whose names began with "e-" or ended in ".com", but those investors generally didn't understand the technology du jour and didn't grasp that internet-based business was, in large part, pioneering a new business model. When stock prices collapsed most of the "dot-com" companies did too.

A few digital companies began during the dot-com boom and survived its bust - Amazon, eBay, and Google are obvious examples.

Amazon and eBay are textbook cases of physical businesses turned virtual. Amazon is just an online department store. eBay is just an online auction house + flea market. They succeeded in beating out early competition through old-fashioned business tactics - (1) being early to a new market, (2) becoming household names (brand recognition), (3) appealing to the average consumer with convenient, easy-to-use websites (analogous to store layout + location).

Google was, arguably, the first major company to succeed using the new business model of the internet. Their strategy went like this:

(1) Offer an effective much-needed service (search engine) for free. Yes, there was a time before Google when the best search engines were paid subscription services!
(2) Have a really simple landing page and results page so that it doesn't take forever to load for dial-up users (the vast majority of internet users were on dial-up until the 2000s). This set Google apart from popular "web portal" style companies like AOL and Yahoo.
(3) Get really popular and make all your money from advertising - BUT keep your advertising unobtrusive and make sure it never gets in the way of smoothly delivering your primary product (which remains free), so your users stay loyal. 

Interestingly, this business model is basically just a permutation of the one that magazines and newspapers have been following for years. Most aren't free, but the subscription fees and per-issue prices are pretty minimal compared to the cost of actually running and publishing a periodical. Print periodicals are drying up only because online advertising is less expensive and its results are more easily measured than print advertising.

"If you're good at something, never do it for free," said Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight.

"Consumers don't value products they don't pay for," is one school of thought (that holds particularly strongly in Japan, by the way).

But the internet business model of today, particularly for us DSP folks, is precisely the opposite.

Depending on your product and its distribution channels, free might be a great way to get discovered or it might be a great way to get buried. Products that need a brief time investment from your audience, like comic strips or music or poems - generally anything that's short or serialized - works well free. If your audience has to invest time in your product to get rewarded by it, charging them money can be a better option.

Regardless of the purchase price, early on in your DSP career, just like those newspapers I mentioned you're not going to earn back in sales anything close to what it cost you to create the product - and you shouldn't try to.

Wait, what? I shouldn't try to make in sales money what it costs me to make my product?

No, you shouldn't. Your job is not to chase sales. Your job is to create an audience.

Here is Wootton's First Principle of Digital Self-Publishing:

First  Build Reputation. Then Earn Revenue.

Expanded, the First Principle goes like this - if you actively build reputation, you passively earn revenue. Conversely, if you pursue revenue directly, you erode your reputation indirectly and end up with neither.

Make your brand - your story, your series title, your main character, your pen name - discoverable. Make it enticing. Make it exciting. Make it contagious. Worry about your reputation and revenue will come. Worry about revenue and your reputation will leave. This paradox is critical to keeping your focus where it should be - on the excellence of your product, and on the quality of your online presence.

"Look," you might be thinking, "this sounds great, but the bills are due when they're due. I can't just sink all this time and effort and money into a creative project and not get paid for it!"

No, you can't. So don't quit your day job.

Publishing, whether traditional or DSP, is not - and never has been - a get-rich-quick scheme. It's not even a make-a-living-quick scheme. There is not one single example of an "overnight success" first-time author. None. IN ALL HISTORY. Even the very few debut books that rocketed to early fame had thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours and several years of time sunk into their creation and release before that book showed up in stores. If there's ever an overnight-success DSP debut, it will only happen because of some early celebrity endorsement - someone with an already-established reputation who can "lend" their audience to that un-established first-time author.

It doesn't matter how good your book is. It could be the best book ever written. It's still not going to take off in time to pay next month's rent. Books sell because of word-of-mouth recommendations. Word-of-mouth takes time. So don't have a fast-investment-turnaround expectation of your DSP projects. Don't ask more from your creations sooner than they can deliver. You're in this for the long haul.

Your biggest investment into your DSP project - the one that, if you were paying yourself by the hour and tabulating all your business expenses greatest-to-least would easily top the spreadsheet - is time. And that's the investment you should be looking to recoup from your audience. You should be trying to earn their time. If you earn their time, they will happily pay you money.

Think about it: you've spent a lot of time with your project - planning it, creating it, revising it, and publicizing it. You want your audience to spend a lot of time with it too. You want them to actually read what you've written, start to finish. You want them to speculate about your project when they're away from it, wonder about it when they're at work or in the car. You want it to capture their imaginations and find its way into their conversations. You want them coming back again and again to your website to see what you're doing next.

If your brand - your story, series, characters, or author persona - can do that, you win. You succeed. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this year. But as times goes on you'll slowly but surely attract an audience that keeps coming back for more. You'll have an audience that trusts what you create to be worth the money and, more importantly, the time it takes to find out what happens next. You'll have an audience willing to stake their personal reputations on recommending your next book, sight unseen, to their friends.

So build reputation. Let revenue worry about itself.

That's Principle #1.

Authors as Marketers

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Four


All successful authors are successful self-marketers.

Occasionally, you'll see traditionally-published authors arguing that they aren't interested in “going indie” because they don't want to do their own marketing. This is misleading; what they really mean is that they prefer doing the kind of marketing required by traditional publishing over the kind of marketing required by DSP.

Traditional publishing compresses its marketing to a single selling point, known as the “pitch” or “query”. Authors pursuing traditional publishing must send one-page-or-less queries, which pitch their book to agents and/or acquisition editors. Writing good queries is arguably the single toughest marketing job there is in normal business. It's so tough that writers (myself included) actually celebrate personal rejection notes. The people we're marketing to are so busy that even getting their attention to the point where they'll take time to write us a rejection themselves, rather than handing the job off to an underling who will send a “Dear Writer” form letter, means that we've written a good query.

This may sound a bit masochistic to those unfamiliar with the situation, but that's not even the most absurd thing about traditional publishing. Although a traditional publisher typically does a good bit of pre-release marketing, in both the typical traditional and DSP scenarios post-publication marketing is left up to the author.

For a lot of us writers, marketing isn't our primary area of expertise. Even if we do have marketing backgrounds, that experience often isn't directly applicable to “building an author platform” or selling books. The sooner we admit we've got something to learn, the quicker we can get on with learning it.

So what does it take to market a book? What are the requirements for success?

It takes creativity. It takes a little bit of technical savvy. It requires a basic understanding of online social etiquette. It requires the willingness, eagerness, and ability to self-educate. Above all, it requires a top-quality product: a really, really good book.

That list is prioritized in reverse, by the way. And that's exactly how we're going to go through them, beginning with the next post.

Industry Shifts. You Should Too.

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Three

As Jenny the Bloggess recently pointed out, there are no "rules" for successful digital self-publishing. Many industries have a proverbial mailroom, a place where you "do your time" while learning the ropes and making connections, providing ambitious/determined/persistent/tenacious individuals a path to the job they actually want. Most professional creative arts don't have anything as concrete as an actual mailroom – typically, your career begins with some manner of audition, upon which the industry either accepts you or it doesn't, and if it doesn't you have to decide whether to try again – but there have always been ways for new artists to boost their chances of breaking in. Musicians can move to Nashville and play coffeeshops. Stage actors can garner credits by working their way up through community theaters and small companies. Artists can gain exposure through local galleries and art shows.

Writers' "mailroom" used to be periodicals. Once upon a time, you could intern with a print publication or freelance with several, work your way up to having your own regular column (a paying gig!), build readership and reputation, then capitalize on that experience and position to make the leap to part-time or full-time book author.

That wasn't the only route to writing success, of course, but it worked for centuries, from Charles Dickens to Neil Gaiman.

But with the recent decline of print periodicals, the path from "starving writer" to "successful author" has gotten a whole lot less clear. Free-to-read web-based publishing has gobbled up our trail of breadcrumbs. 

(True, it also creates opportunity; but if something is broad it is assumed to be shallow, and often deservedly so. All-access web publishing means that everyone can be a blogger, anyone can start an online periodical, anybody can get thousands of hits per month. All you need is sensationalism, a clever URL and SEO tweaks, and some possibly-off-topic viral marketing. The fact that this opportunity exists undermines the credentials and credibility of legitimate web writers.)

It won't always be this way. Right now, writers are operating during a brief window where technological changes are shaking up established industries. The big players are slow to change, but they also have a lot of capital and clout. Although its not optimal, they can afford to take their time adjusting. Here's what I'm expecting:

• Periodicals will make a digital resurgence, severely limiting access to free web-based content in favor of paid subscriptions managed through ereaders. New periodicals will have lower subscription and production costs, fewer employees, and decentralized (cloud-based) virtual offices. I've been anticipating this for a few years, and it's only recently started to happen.

• The decline of brick-and-mortar bookstore chains, far from heralding the end of physical bookstores - as champions of the ebook revolution like Smashwords founder Mark Coker continue to imply - will actually re-open market space for smaller, privately owned, mom-and-pop bookstores. 

Of course the big players like Borders have a hard time competing with online booksellers. Giant retailers are able to take over from local shops because their size allows them to conduct business more efficiently and less expensively, so they can undercut local shops' prices and steal their customers. Online retailing takes efficiency to a whole new level: it's far easier and more cost-effective to maintain a single virtual storefront than thousands of physical storefronts. It's the difference between running a single store that a billion customers can access, and running a thousand stores that reach a thousand customers per store.

But people will always want real books, and physical bookstores are good for readers, authors, and publishers alike. They allow for "accidental discovery" and socializing with other, local, real readers, in ways that social media will never be able to provide. I think that as Walden, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million stores gradually slip away, smaller, more interesting, more agile bookshops founded by smarter, more interesting booksellers will begin to pop up in neighborhoods and shopping centers.

These new bookstores will be organized around interest and connection. New bookshops will be organized around genres, book clubs, particular literary movements and writers' groups, award-winning titles. Or they'll be organized around activities other than reading, but that go very well with reading - the new bookshops will look like coffeeshops, tea emporiums, pubs, cafes, curiosity shops, board game parlors, used book exchanges, gardening shops, christmas shops. They'll be the kind of place where you sit and stay awhile, or where your hobbyists' group or book club meets on midweek evenings.

Meanwhile the new bookseller, or shop owner, will likely have a small enough inventory to manage that he or she will have read each book the shop stocks, so customers will be able to trust that any book they risk buying will be worth the read. Or maybe, after a few visits the girl behind the register will know what drink to get ready as soon as you push the door open, and when you talk about what's going on this week you'll each have a book to recommend to the other.

I, for one, am happy to see the corporate booksellers, always chasing efficiency, move online and out of our neighborhoods. Once they do, it won't be long before I can walk down to the little shop on the corner, order a coffee, and be told which of the new titles that came in this week I ought to read next.

• DSP will become the de facto vetting process for traditional publication. Here's my reasoning:

For years, the traditional-publishing acquisitions process has been fundamentally broken, just waiting for some new method to come along and replace it. Acquisition editors receive so much correspondence and have so many projects to wade through, they're choking. There simply aren't enough hours in a week to give pitches sufficient attention. Editors work ten hours a day at the office five and six days a week, then spend hours more each evening reading manuscripts. Inevitably, great books get rejected because their authors haven't written a sufficiently compelling query – and lots and lots of crap books get published because an author wrote a great pitch, but has only written a mediocre story, and the publisher can't afford (because of time constraints or cost-benefit analysis) to give the mediocre book the developmental attention it needs to become a good book.

How many times have you been in a bookstore and thought, “how on earth did this get published??” or “I'm not at all surprised to see that one in the Bargain Books section.” (And then followed it up with, “if this guy made it, how come I haven't?” or “hey, if this got published, mine certainly has a shot”?)

This situation is pretty bad for traditional publishers, authors, and retailers alike. As Mark Coker explains in Smashwords' Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, print-book retailing is based on a consignment-style business model. Physical bookstores only have so much floor space, so they generally only stock new, unproven titles for a few weeks before sending unsold copies back to the publisher for a full refund. A good book only has a few weeks to capture reader attention (and investment); a bad book is just stealing precious visibility from a better title.

You would think that, given how difficult it is to break into traditional publishing, publishers would at least be able to guarantee the quality of their products. But they can't. There are so many wannabe writers clamoring for attention, on top of all the usual demands of business, that it simply hasn't been possible.

And that's where DSP comes in.

Traditional publishers are already starting to wake up – already starting to comb the top-100 lists of DSP books for new authors to offer print deals to. If a DSP book is doing well, acquisitions editors already know that fronting the cash to market and print thousands of copies is a sound financial investment. Before DSP, they had to guess. And they were pretty good at guessing – good enough to be profitable, anyway – but it was still guessing. A successful DSP title removes the guesswork.

All that's a bit of digression, though. Say you do become successful as a DSP author. At that point, you may not be interested in traditional publishing (even if traditional publishers are interested in you).

Regardless, one reality that DSP hasn't changed for writers is the need to dodge slush piles. In case you're not familiar with the term: in traditional publishing, a slush pile is the name for the bottomless stack of sub-par query letters and manuscript proposals that whole sections of acquisition editors' offices are buried under. You get tossed into a slush pile, man, you may as well have fallen into a black hole. There's no coming back from that. (Not with that project + editor combination, anyway.)

In DSP, the slush piles aren't gone – they've just moved. Tactics for avoiding them – also known as the best practices for marketing your book – have shifted as well.

As I said before, there aren't rules for DSP. What worked for one author with a particular title or body of work at a certain time with a given venue isn't necessarily going to work for you / your book, even if all the other conditions are essentially identical.

But there are trends, principles, for how internet-based creative business works. I'm going to tell you what they are, explain why they operate the way they do, and make suggestions about how to harness those ideas on behalf of your own writing. Stay Tuned – that's what's up next.

Marketing: A Metaphor

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Two

Imagine, if you will, that you are holding a large blanket – say an overstuffed comforter for a king-sized mattress. Say that is made out of some very heavy and bulky fabric, like wool or denim. Now imagine it even heavier, because it is soaking wet.

Further imagine that the reason you are carrying this dripping-wet king-sized comforter is because you are doing one of those team-building obstacle courses. The object of this particular challenge is for you to get the blanket over the wall you are standing in front of. The wall is twelve, fifteen... maybe twenty feet high, you're not really sure.

Standing on top of the wall is your challenge partner. If you can just pass the wet blanket up to him – a corner of it, even – he can gather it up and successfully throw it over to the other side. At which point, you'll win, pass the challenge, and be able to move on.

The task seemed straightforward enough when your guide explained the challenge rules. But now that you're standing here below the wall, looking up its smooth concrete height to where you can just see your partner's tennis shoes peeking over the edge, you're beginning to realize that it won't be as easy as it seemed.

Climbing the wall while carrying the comforter is clearly out of the question, so you try gathering the comforter into an awkward bundle and lobbing it – but it doesn't stay bundled, even when you fold it into the tightest, neatest package you can manage. The comforter unfolds mid-ascent, slowing itself down and falling short.

Nor can you toss up just one corner for your partner to grab. Even if the comforter were long enough for that – and you're not sure it is – the weight of the rest of the blanket pulls it back before it rises even halfway.

On top of these inherent difficulties, your challenge partner atop the wall is wearing a premium set of noise-canceling headphones, and can't hear you. He can't see you either, because he's facing the opposite side of the wall. He doesn't even know that you want him to catch the blanket. Nobody told him what the challenge was before he put on the headphones.

That's what trying to market your DSP book is like.

If you could just get your book into the hands of the right people – those readers who will become so excited about it they'll tell everyone they know to read it – inertia and momentum begin to work in your favor. The weight of your book's excellent qualities will carry it forward, freeing you to work on other challenges – writing your next book, maybe.

Until then, you'll feel like you're up against a brick wall holding a big heavy wet blanket.

How do you identify those first several enthusiastic readers? How do you get them to take time for your book while they're continuously surrounded by countless other marketers clamoring for attention?

As Han Solo famously said, “That's the real trick, isn't it. And it's going to cost you something extra.” Maybe not in money, but certainly in time. This is where working smarter, rather than harder, becomes absolutely paramount. Beware the Internet's limitless capacity to soak up your unwisely-spent cash and sweat. You can waste a lot of resources shouting or lobbing the wet blanket at your partner on the wall. With ill-conceived tactics you can almost definitely annoy him into turning around – but when he does, will he grab the blanket and haul it over... or throw it right back in your face?

Stay tuned. Strategies & principles for maximizing DSP authors' scarce promotional resources are up next.

Limitations

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series One

For me, adulthood has largely been a process of encountering my limitations, accepting them, and finding creative ways to work around them in order to meet responsibilities and achieve goals and desires.

One of the surest ways to stop a good thing from happening is to suggest doing a perfect thing instead. Sure, the perfect thing would be perfect – but it's going to take so long and require so many resources and prerequisites – not to mention a lucky alignment of the universe and your schedule to miraculously open up for hours and days at a time.

By the time all of that falls into place, you could have finished several good things. Instead, weeks or months later, you're still on a steep uphill climb to the pinnacle of your perfect thing, eighty percent of which is still ahead of you.

This is not to say we should be settling for 'good enough' (there's a world of difference between a good thing and a good-enough thing). Merely recognizing and accepting my limitations might help me find some temporary measure of inner peace, but by themselves they're a recipe for stagnation. This is where that third part – employing creative workarounds – comes in.

I.

As a full-time author, it would be great if I could work on two long-format book projects during the same period. I can't write for more than a few hours a day on any one project, but I ought to be able to work on a novel in the morning, break for lunch, change gears, and put in a few hundred words on a nonfiction project in the afternoon, right?

Well, yeah – that would be fantastic. In theory I should be able to do that without a problem, and I spent a couple months last year trying.

But in the course of a day, whatever I'm working on gets a lot of passive attention – when I'm in the shower, doing chores, out for a walk, cooking dinner – the project is simmering away on a back burner of my brain. I've found that I'm dependent on that subconscious development to move a project forward, to maintain its momentum. And my peripheral mind can only pay attention to one thing at time.

So I had a simple decision to make. I could keep trying to push through two projects simultaneously, knowing that one was going to detract from and impede the other... or I could embrace that need for passive-development time by focusing on one until it was finished and then moving on to the other.

I took the second option and produced a beta-reader-ready draft of each project – a combined total of about 65,000 words through two drafts apiece – within 8 months (not counting the two I wasted trying to work on both at once).

The workaround here takes the form of pint-size legal pads scattered strategically throughout my living space. I keep them in my desk, my car, my backpack, my bedside table. That way, when some notion bubbles up from my simmering semiconscious, I don't even have to leave the room or interrupt whatever I'm doing to write it down. I was able to capture anything and everything that randomly occurred to me about the second, delayed project, even as I focused on finishing the shorter one first.

II.

As a digital self-publisher, I'm under few illusions about the task I've taken on. In choosing not to pursue a traditional publishing deal – at least, not yet – I've given up the automatic benefits that typically go with it, benefits like:

-creative oversight from experienced story-development editors,

-professional manuscript proofing,

-access to professional artists, graphic designers, and a high-resource marketing engine,

-protection from financial risks, and

-the well-established industry reputation of NY publishing houses.

In return, I've gained near-absolute creative control, agility, flexibility, incredibly fast turnaround time for the actual publishing process, and something like triple per-sale royalties. But that exchange leaves me, the author, with a lot of additional hats to wear.

The entrepreneurial side of DSP appeals to me. I started a residential-landscape design & installation company when I was 15 and ran it successfully for ten years. Yardscapes was a small company – typically a three-person crew – and as such, there were plenty of things I could not do, could not do well, or could not do as well as someone else.

For example: I couldn't compete with big companies' mowing rates, so Yardscapes didn't do lawn care. I couldn't start one project until the previous one was finished, or I'd confuse my focus and jeopardize relations with both clients when both projects dragged unnecessarily. And while I can get by as a graphic designer, it made a whole lot more sense to delegate advertising design to an employee who was getting his degree in communications and marketing.

During my first year in DSP I realized that I can't market a project while I'm working on one – even if it's the same one. Marketing and book-writing engage my brain in totally different ways. Just as I have to finish one long-format creative project before beginning the next one, I have to wait until a project is done before I can work on marketing it.

Eventually, in terms of optimizing my time, marketing could become something it makes sense for me to outsource (I currently outsource my cover art, design, & manuscript proofing).

However, at this point in my career, I have more time to invest than money – so I do my marketing in-between book projects. Right now my second novel, The Eighth Square, is out with beta readers. I won't even look at the draft again until the end of August, and until then I'm focusing on re-promoting its prequel, Her Unwelcome Inheritance, and laying the groundwork for The Eighth Square's launch campaign.

While I was writing The Eighth Square I did little more than maintain my existing social media presence. Is this a perfect strategy? No, absolutely not. A year after Her Unwelcome Inheritance's publication for Nook and Kindle, I'm still unknown as an author. (Not that I'm surprised, or complaining – HUI has been fortunate to enjoy rave reviews and a steady trickle of sales, despite a flooded ebook market). As of the time of this writing, sales momentum isn't yet in my favor. There's still a direct, observable correlation between sales figures and my own personal marketing efforts. So neglecting marketing while I wrote my next book meant (presumably) missing out on sales I might otherwise have made.

I chose this course because I believe and expect that, over time, refining my craft and producing more products will be significantly more beneficial than continuously marketing my first product. Moreover, if splitting my focus threatens the quality and pace of my writing – and it does – then that's a risk I simply can't afford.

After all, in the world of digital self-publishing, writing good books is Priority #1.