Decent writing day, though it would have been better if I hadn’t been so distracted in the evening by the election results. I suspect I’m not the only one doing NaNoWriMo this year who had that problem.
I would say more, but it’s late and Mrs. Vasicek is pulling me away from the computer to go to bed. Also, we have a baby who sleeps in until 6am if we’re lucky. Signing out.
Off to a bit of a rocky start, but it’s not as bad as it appears. Counting the words in my other WIP, I made about 1,600. Just had to tie it up at a good stopping place, but now that that’s done, I should be able to focus on NaNoWriMo.
The first story I’m writing is a fantasy piece pulled from an outline for a longer novel in the same universe as The Sword Keeper. I have very little idea where I’m going with it, and since I don’t want to draw it out longer than a few thousand words, that could be a problem. It has a great opening line, though:
“Everyone secretly wants to be a slave. That is the universal truth that no one wants to admit. Those who deny it simply haven’t met their true masters yet.”
I think I can finish it tomorrow, or at least get halfway. The thing about short stories is that when I get into the zone with one, I can knock off four or five thousand words easily. It turns into a race to the finish line, and since the ending is so much closer with a short story than with a novel, that enthusiasm feeds on itself until it’s done. If I don’t finish this one tomorrow, I’ll almost certainly finish it the next day.
The first day of NaNoWriMo was a Sunday this year, and I generally don’t write on Sundays, so no words today! Looks like we’re off to a delayed start.
It gets even better, though, because I had hoped to line up all of my November writing group submissions by October 31st, but last week was a bit crazy with the baby waking up at all hours of the night, so I still need to finish about 1,500 words of the next chapter in my WIP before I can lay it aside. So really, I’m more like 3k words behind, since I need to finish this chapter up before I can focus on NaNoWriMo.
So yeah, if you’re also running behind, know that you’re in good company! Now, off to write…
First off, how are you enjoying Trump: Season 4 so far?
I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical at first. Seasons 1-3 were all building up to the impeachment, and when the writers threw in the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, I worried that the show was about to jump the shark. I mean come on—a global pandemic? Really? I thought this was 2020, not 1918. But the writers did a really good job of tying the pandemic into everything else: US-China tensions, the trade wars, the Trump economy, the Democrats’ desperate need for another scandal to pin on Trump, etc.
As the season wound on, it was really interesting to see how the pandemic drove the story arc—or rather, how all the systemic rot and political corruption from seasons 1-3 made the pandemic far, far worse than it would have been if the country weren’t so divided and the people were more resilient. Then Black Lives Matter made a huge comeback, Antifa took to the streets, riots and wildfires broke out everywhere, and I thought to myself: “wow, the season is only halfway over and the country is literally on fire. What are the writers going to throw at us next?”
Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and the biggest ticking time bomb from the start of the whole show went off at the worst—and also best—possible moment. The writers deserve an Emmy for that plot twist alone. It was so obvious in retrospect, and foreshadowed so perfectly, but it dropped when we were least expecting it—and yet, at the very moment when it would have the most impact. Very well played.
But we were still several episodes from the season finale, which made me wonder: what are the writers going to throw at us next? The Trump-Biden debate happened, and it was terrible, with Trump debating Chris Wallace more than Biden, and Wallace siding so obviously with Biden that it made you want to tear your eyeballs out. It was, without a doubt, the worst presidential debate in US history. And again, I began to wonder if perhaps the show had finally jumped the shark.
But then Trump himself came down with the covid.
And we’re still at least two episodes from the season finale.
And once again, I have to admit that the writers were absolutely brilliant. Because aside from RBG, Trump actually coming down with the virus was the biggest—and in retrospect, the most obvious—gun on the wall. And yet, it somehow managed to be both surprising and inevitable in all of the best ways. Brilliant.
So now that we’re all psyched up for the season finale, what are your predictions for season 5?
I know, I know—a lot of you are probably expecting the show to end with season 4, with Biden winning the election and Trump either conceding in a peaceful transfer of power or being forcibly removed from office—but come on. Does anyone really think that the writers will end this amazing show with such a boring and anticlimactic ending?
If there’s one theme that has run through every episode of this show from the very beginning, it’s the futility in relying on politics to solve the problems that were caused by politics in the first place. I really like how season 4 hammered that home with the impeachment, and how it all turned out to be utterly meaningless after the pandemic hit. All the people who suffer the most from Trump Derangement Syndrome are the ones who look to the government to solve all of their problems.
So is Biden going to ride in on the wings of a clear election victory that isn’t fraudulent? If he does, it will be even more disappointing than the finale of Game of Thrones.
But what if Trump gets sick enough that the race suddenly turns into a contest between Harris and Pence? If so, then I think Pence will come away in a landslide. Pence is everything that red state America has been yearning for that Trump cannot give them, and Harris is everything that blue state America has been taught to despise—aside from her gender and skin color, of course. But I just can’t see the Bernie bros and communists (but I repeat myself) pulling the lever for Copmala “let’s-enslave-nonviolent-drug-offenders” Harris. Besides, she has all of Clinton’s worst affectations.
Will Trump actually die from the covid? I doubt it. If anything, I expect he’ll be out of commission just long enough for Pence to carry the election for him, and then come back for season 5. But I can see Biden dying of covid during the season 4 finale. After all, Trump tested positive just days after that terrible debate. If he was presymptomatic during that time, there’s a significant chance that Biden could catch it from him—and I don’t think Biden is healthy enough to beat it. Certainly not healthier than Trump.
So if Trump pulls off an election landslide (ironically, by being out sick during the final weeks of the election), and the deep state / intelligence community’s plans to pull off a color revolution fail to launch, what comes next?
At some point, I think the Qanon folks who see Trump as the orange Jesus are going to have a major disappointment. That’s very much in keeping with the ongoing theme that when politics is the problem, you can’t solve it with more politics. I also think that the radical leftists pushing for a full-out communist uprising are going to suffer a major blow. That, or they actually are the blow to the establishment Democrats, and the DNC itself is going to collapse before the series is over.
A couple of episodes ago, I thought that season 5 would start with the civil war, but now I think the writers are going to thread that needle and leave that plot thread deliberately unresolved. Why? Because the other major theme of the show is that Trump isn’t actually the problem: we are. Trump is both a mirror to all the flaws of his many enemies, and an avatar to all the worst impulses of his friends. He’s a symptom of the fact that America has lost her Unum. That happened well before Trump took office, and I expect it will continue long after he leaves, peaceably or otherwise.
Then again, we could rediscover our Unum at the last moment and find a way to pull together again. That would make for a very American story. As Churchill said, “you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve done everything else.” Trump himself is a testament to that.
Saw this, couldn’t resist.
We’ve got smoke here in Utah, too, but nowhere near as bad as California (for the moment). A couple of new fires started here in Utah Valley over the past week, and it looks like they may have been human caused, but the firefighters put them out very quickly. But whenever California is on fire, the smoke finds its way over here.
Here’s another one:
I subscribe to just about every science fiction and fantasy podcast, both the pro-zines and the semipro-zines, and on Saturdays I listen to all of the episodes from the last week while making waffles or doing chores. Since there’s usually about a dozen stories to listen to, and I rarely have the time to get through them all, I’m not shy about skipping a story when it becomes too boring, or too graphic, or too preachy, or if the sound quality is too poor.
Today, while listening to episode #36A of Uncanny Magazine, one of the editors started it off with this:
Well, Lynn, summer’s nearly done… it went into a, um, sad chasm of hopelessness and pandemic. Yay! I hope everyone out there is doing okay and holding on best they can, um, you know, there’s, it seems to be pretty much daily bad news or troubling news, but, you know, we are still fighting back, you know, make sure that you are registered to vote and you can go vote if you can in America and hopefully some things will improve once we change this regime into actual reasonable humans, so…
At this point, I rolled my eyes and skipped the episode. It really is insufferable when these crunchy progressive types bring their politics into everything that they try to create.
But it got me thinking: I don’t always hate it when people bring their politics into their fiction. In fact, I listened to an episode of Clarkesworld soon after this one that had some very alarmist undertones about climate change, but I listened to the end and thought it was a very good story. And I don’t think the editor who went off about the election was trying to gaslight his audience, or being at all insincere. So what was it about the episode of Uncanny that really turned me off?
(It’s an especially relevant question, because I recognize completely that I have a tendency to be that guy. I don’t always try to inject my politics into everything, but it does tend to come on strongly when I do, which is one of the reason why I’ve turned this blog into a place to discuss politics: so that I can get it out in a place where the people who want to read it can find it, and keep it out of my other reader-facing activities, so that the people who don’t want to read this stuff don’t have to.)
After thinking about it some more, I realized that the thing that got to me was how the comment from this editor deliberately failed to acknowledge that people like me exist. Both of my parents are Democrats. I voted for Obama in 2008. By the end of his second term, I vowed never to vote for another Democrat again. In 2016, I voted third party because I didn’t think Trump was fit to be president. But since then, I’ve come to realize that I misjudged the man, and that his enemies in politics and the news media are so batshit fucking insane that they are going to burn this country to the ground unless Trump wins in a landslide in November (and even then, I’m not so sure they won’t burn it all down anyway).
I recognize that there are good and reasonable people who disagree with me, but here’s the thing… I recognize that there are good and reasonable people who disagree with me. Does this editor? Apparently not.
And here’s another thing: even if Trump is the second coming of Hitler, there were good and reasonable people in Weimar Germany who were deceived by the Nazi propaganda machine into believing that Hitler was their only hope. The people at the time who recognized this, like Bonhoeffer and Sebastian Haffner, didn’t just dismiss their fellow countrymen. On the contrary: they were not afraid to make a deep and honest inquiry to understand exactly how Hitler and the Nazis came to power. Have these crunchy progressive types made such a deep and honest inquiry? The vast majority have not.
But it’s not just people like me that these Trump-deranged people aren’t willing to acknowledge. They often fail to acknowledge reality itself. How often have you heard them say “mostly peaceful protests?” How often have you heard them claim that Antifa doesn’t exist? Or here’s a good one that I’ve recently started to hear: there is no such thing as cancel culture, and no one can point to a single person who has been successfully canceled. I suppose the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is just a figment of my imagination—that, or Jon Ronson is a white supremacist. Probably both.
And that’s when I realized that it isn’t the politics that turns me off. It’s the gaslighting.
I’m actually just fine with listening to people whose politics differ from my own, so long as they acknowledge the good and reasonable people like me who disagree with them. That’s why I have no problem listening to Tim Pool, or Joe Rogan, or Eric Weinstein. I’m hungry for it, even, because I recognize that so many of my other news sources skew so far to the right.
The conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t ever discuss politics if you want to have a writing career. But I don’t think that’s precise enough. Rather, I think that you should never do anything to alienate your audience. That may mean avoiding politics, if that’s not what they’ve come for, but science fiction is the genre of ideas, including political ideas. We never would have had 1984 or Animal Farm if George Orwell had kept to the conventional wisdom about not discussing politics.
I’m sure that there are readers out there who are so disgusted with my politics that they’ll never buy any of my books after discovering this blog. But are they my audience? Probably not. Then again, there are other readers who probably disagree very strongly with my politics—readers like me and Uncanny Magazine—who are still willing to read my books, so long as I don’t alienate them by pretending they don’t exist.
On the other hand, I’m sure I have other readers like me who are sick and tired of all the gaslighting from the left, and are hungry for stories that push back against the reality-denying political narratives that currently dominate the field. They may be able to tolerate fiction that doesn’t take a side either way, but what they’re really hungry for are stories that tell them “no, you’re not the crazy one.”
At the very least, we want stories that acknowledge that we exist.
If you are white, and you write science fiction or fantasy, it is only a matter of time before you are cancelled.
This is the logical end of intersectional identity politics, which is really just the resurrected, zombified corpse of Marxism. White people are the oppressors. People of color are the oppressed. All white people are racist, and the only way to fight racism is with more racism. Black lives matter. White lives don’t.
The United States of America is currently engaged in a violent struggle that will determine whether this hyper-racist intersectional ideology will defeat the populist uprising that has its champion in Trump, or whether the country will reject this new form of Marxism and come back from the brink of insanity. But in science fiction and fantasy, the war is already over, and the intersectionalists have won. It is now only a matter of time before they purge the field of everything—and everyone—that is white.
The last chance for the SF&F community to come back from the brink was probably in 2015. The intersectionalists were ascendant, but they hadn’t yet taken over the field. (That happened in 2016, when N.K. Jemisin, an avowed social justice warrior and outspoken champion for anti-white identity politics, won the Hugo Award for best new novel for the next three consecutive years.) A populist uprising within fandom known as the Puppies attempted to push back, and were smeared as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, and Nazis. Whatever your opinion of the Puppies (and there were some bad eggs among them, to be sure), they did not deserve to be silenced, ridiculed, shouted down, and threatened with all manner of violence and death threats for their grievances. After the Puppies were purged, the intersectionalists took over and began to reshape the field in their image.
The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer wasn’t renamed the Astounding Award because Campbell was a racist (even though he was). His name was stripped from the award because the people who renamed it are racists—not in the bullshit way the intersectionalists have redefined it, but in the true sense of the word: discrimination based based on race.
Before I get smeared as a white supremacist for writing this post, I want to make it absolutely clear that I welcome racial diversity in science fiction and fantasy. I’ve been very pleased to read some excellent stories from people of color in Lightspeed Magazine recently, including “Miss Beulah’s Braiding and Life Change Salon,” and there have been several excellent stories from Chinese authors in Clarkesworld recently as well. I just don’t think it’s necessary to tear down white authors in order to make space for non-white ones. That’s the racism of intersectionality, and I reject it.
It is much easier for these intersectional racists to cancel you after you’re dead, but they’ll come after you while you’re still alive if they can. That’s what’s happening to George R.R. Martin right now. Frankly, I would have a lot more sympathy for him if he hadn’t made his bed with these people back during the Puppygate debacle. Behold your “true fans,” Mr. Martin. The fact that you’re the biggest name in epic fantasy right now isn’t going to save you.
But if the intersectionalists are all anti-white racists, why are so many of them white? Because for decades, crunchy liberal white folks have been taught that everything bad in the world is their fault, and the world would be better off without them. Climate change. Racism. Colonialism. It’s the white man’s burden 2.0. I know, because I was raised in this milieu. I was forced to read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in high school, and I know just how false and dangerous it really is. Besides, the revolution always eats its own. If you think you’re going to get a pass because you’ve read How to Be an Anti-Racist, you’ve posted a black square to your social media, and you’ve donated money to any of these social justice causes, you’re deluding yourself.
If you’re white, they’re coming for you. It’s not just your “whiteness” that they want to purge—that’s just a motte-and-bailey tactic to make their racism less overt and more palatable. The only thing they need to know about you is the color of your skin. If they know that, they think they know everything else about you, because they are the true racists—and in the world they’re trying to create, everything white must be purged.
The good news is that the cultural tides are turning, and the racist ideology that drives these folks is at or near its zenith. Marxism always fails, and cancel culture cancels itself in the end. If you play your cards right, getting cancelled can actually boost your career, rather than destroy it.
But the next ten years are going to be very tricky to navigate. Even if the intersectionalists lose on the national level, as I hope and pray that they do, they have already taken over the SF&F field so thoroughly and completely that the only way forward is to abandon all the old institutions and rebuild them from scratch. The indie publishing revolution has made this much more possible, but Amazon still dominates the indie publishing world, and they’ve already donated tens of millions of dollars to these Marxist causes. How much longer do we have before the intersectional ideologues within Amazon rewrite the algorithms according to their ideology? It’s only a matter of time.
Fortunately, if you are resilient enough, time is on your side.
I got into an interesting argument on a message board forum for writers in the last couple of days. We were discussing whether or not it’s a good idea to give Amazon exclusivity in order to sign onto Kindle Unlimited, and I pointed out that Amazon has donated tens of millions of dollars to the groups and organizations that are promoting the violent riots currently sweeping the country. My point was that it’s important to take Amazon’s corporate values into account before giving them exclusive control over your ability to have a career.
Immediately, a bunch of left-leaning forum members jumped on me for having the audacity to attack Amazon for their support of social justice. No surprises there. But the next thing really surprised me. A member of the forum who claims to live in Portland said:
Joe I have yet to see any riots. If you mean demonstrations, those are the right of any American citizen.
When pressed about that, she responded:
Many people have drank the right-wing Kool-Aid, including Joe.
How bad do I think it is in Portland? Well I happen to live here and the violence and incitment to violence comes from the Fed troops, not from anyone donated to by Amazon. No demonstrator has ever kidnapped someone in an unmarked van off the street or gassed someone. Stop listening to the lies put out by propagandists like Andy Ngo and Tim Pool because I know exactly how false their gaslighting is.
In fact, the demonstrations (there have been NO ‘riots’ here) in Portland would have long stopped if his adored Donald Trump hadn’t decided to send in Federal agents from the Homeland Security Agency (actually the Homeland Oppression Agency) to kidnap and rought people up.
The forum moderator had previously asked us not to get into politics, and in a previous post, I had stated that this isn’t a question of politics, but of violence, corporate values, and narrative control. In fact, no one had even mentioned Trump until this particular post.
Needless to say, the thread was soon locked.
But one thing still bugged me: the fact that this person could so emphatically claim that there are no riots sweeping this country. Does she not have two eyes and a brain? I know that the left-wing echo chambers run deep, but to say that there are no riots is like staring at the sun at noon-day and claiming that it’s midnight. Hell—there was a riot not ten miles from where I live here in Utah, where a person was shot by a member of Antifa. In Utah. UTAH.
So I sent her a private message with pictures of Kenosha Wisconsin (this was more than 48 hours after the shooting of Jacob Blake, by the way), and that video of the guy driving down 5th Avenue in New York City days after the George Floyd protests (aka the 1619 riots). Here was her response:
A man was also murdered by the police in Kenosha, WI within the last 48 hours. So that demonstrations there may have turned into riots is no surprise. Now take your right-wing extremism elsewhere.
Oh really? The fact that there are riots in Wisconsin isn’t a surprise? I thought you said that there are no riots, only demonstrations?
Here was my response:
Jacob Blake was not “murdered by the police,” because he is still alive. But thank you for admitting (1) that riots are happening in this country, and (2) that fact is not surprising to you.
And hers:
You’re right. It was only attempted murder. When people are oppressed they have been known to riot. A pity that you support the oppressors. Now go away before I block your messages.
At this point, I probably should have just stopped engaging. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have sent the private message in the first place. After all, it’s not like anything I could say would change this person’s mind that Trump is the embodiment of all evil in this country, and that everyone who opposes him is either a martyr or a saint.
But the mental gymnastics I’d just seen this person jump through really fascinated me. In the space of less than a dozen posts, she’d gone from (1) emphatically denying that riots of any kind are happening in this country, to (2) admitting that riots may be happening, to (3) implying that the riots (which are indeed happening) are justified, because the rioters are oppressed.
Here’s the problem with all of that: if you believe that the riots are justified and you’re willing to admit in private that they are actually happening, why would you publicly deny them? Either you lack the strength of your own convictions to stand up and defend them, or you don’t want to examine your own belief system too closely for fear that it will fall apart.
Either way, that makes you a moral coward.
I would have had a lot more respect for this person if she’d just come out and say “yes, some of these demonstrations are violent, but it’s right and just because racisexislamohomofacisgenderonazi” or some other such garbage. At least then she would be sticking by what she truly believes. Instead, her moral cowardice DEMANDS that she do everything she can to deny reality, even when it is staring her in the face.
I think that’s where we are in this country. There are only two sides: those who are willing to acknowledge the reality of what is happening right now, and those who are still determined to deny reality. There may be some people in the first side who do not vote for Trump in November. But of the people who vote for Trump, I don’t think there will be any moral cowards.
A clear pattern is emerging in the ongoing violent unrest that is currently sweeping the United States.
It starts with a police shooting incident of a black or minority person. So far, it’s all been police, but I suppose it could also happen with a white-on-black shooting as well. Before the facts of the incident come out, a victim narrative gets pushed across all media channels. Within hours, rioters and looters descend on the community where the incident took place and begin to spread chaos and destruction.
If the municipal leaders are Democrats, the police are restrained from defending the community from the riots, and the rioters are released without charges or bail. If the state leaders are Democrats, they do everything they can to obstruct federal law enforcement and refuse to accept federal help in putting down the riots, even as their cities and communities burn.
The mainstream, blue checkmark-verified news sources downplay or ignore the violence. When forced to acknowledge it, they blame it on Trump, whose hands are tied by the governors. But if the members of the local community push back against the rioters, either in self-defense or otherwise in reaction to the violence, it gets covered as an act of “white supremacy” against “mostly peaceful protests.”
If the local community doesn’t push back, and Trump honors the governor’s orders not to send in the feds, then the violence steadily escalates, with Democrats and the news media continuing to run cover for the rioters until the “mostly peaceful protests” narrative can no longer be sustained. But before that happens, a new incident happens somewhere else in the country, the news cycle shifts, and the pattern begins all over again.
Whether or not the shooting incidents that spark these riots are spontaneous (I personally believe that they are), the pattern of events that follows each shooting appears to be coordinated, with the goal of provoking a violent backlash. Once the backlash happens, it will be spun as conclusive evidence that Trump is a fascist and that white supremacy in the United States is widespread, deep, and intractable. That’s exactly what happened with Charlottesville in 2017. It’s a false narrative, of course, but that doesn’t matter to the partisands who are coordinating this violence. The narrative has already been written: they just need to fabricate the evidence to support it.
Thus far, there hasn’t been enough of a backlash to give them anything substantial to point to. Which is remarkable, given that this violence has been happening almost nonstop since the shooting of George Floyd in May. But last night in Kenosha Wisconsin, there was a shooting that gave these people exactly what they’ve been looking for.
I expect that all of the blue checkmark-verified news outlets will give this shooting wall-to-wall coverage until the news cycle shifts, and that the Democrats will play it up the way they played up Charlottesville until the November elections. I also expect that the violence will escalate, and that the pattern of incident-riots-backlash will continue into November, and possibly beyond.
The scary thing is that this pattern could repeat itself almost anywhere in the country at this point. It’s more likely to happen in places where Democrats are in power on the state or local level, but it could also happen in Republican strongholds if the local Republicans are squishy enough. That’s probably what happened here in Provo, where a demonstration organized by Salt Lake City Antifa resulted in a shooting. Thankfully, there was no violent backlash, and the response from the local community was strong enough that the riots did not spread here.
If this pattern continues, I see one of three scenarios playing out in November:
If Biden is elected with a clear majority, the United States will descend into a hot civil war. The Left sees political violence as a dial to be turned up; the Right sees political violence as a switch to be turned on. The only reason that switch has not been flipped is because Trump is still in power. If he were replaced by a moderate or a centrist, things would probably be all right, but the Democrats have moved so far to the Left in recent years that I don’t see a compromise candidate emerging until the DNC goes the way of the Whigs and the Federalists, and is replaced by a third party. But that isn’t going to happen between now and November, so a Democrat victory will trigger the Right to flip that switch and throw the country into a civil war.
If Trump is elected with a clear majority, the Left will double down and the rioting and violence will escalate, at least in the short-term and in Democrat-run areas. With that said, Trump will also have the mandate he needs to go after his political enemies who are coordinating this cycle of violence. The DNC will either go defunct or become the minority party in this country for the next twenty years. Regardless, it will probably take most of Trump’s second term for the violence to abate.
If there is no clear winner in November, there will be absolute chaos in Washington. The Democrats will attempt to take power, Trump will refuse to give it up, and the violence sweeping the country will escalate until it is indistinguishable from a hot civil war. There may also be a secession crisis and a high profile political assassination or two.
Regardless of what happens in November, I don’t see any scenario where this pattern of violence de-escalates anytime soon.
So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how best to leverage my short stories, not just from the traditional publishing angle, but from the indie publishing side as well. The problem is that self-published short stories really don’t sell much, so after you’ve sold them to a traditional market, what are you supposed to do?
I’ve tried all of the following things, with varying levels of success:
Taken individually, there are problems with all of these strategies. Short story singles don’t earn very much at any price, and while they garner a lot of downloads if you make them free, they don’t really lead to sales of other books unless they’re part of a larger series. Even then, not so much.
The bundles and collections don’t do much better. Dean Wesley Smith says you can bundle 3-5 short stories together just fine, (or at least, he used to say that) but I tend to think that readers prefer collections with at least 10-12 short stories in them. At this point, I don’t self-publish a collection unless it has at least 40,000 words.
Short stories can be useful as newsletter magnets, but I’ve found that first-in-series books get a higher CTR than standalone shorts. Besides, it’s much more useful to send a follow up email to a first-in-series book (“Have you read ____ yet? Here’s what comes next.”)
So what’s the best way to self-publish short stories?
Let’s take a look at this from a reader’s perspective for a moment. These days, most short stories from the magazines are available for free. They’re either available on a podcast feed, like Uncanny or Escape Pod, or they’re published on a website for a limited time (sometimes for an unlimited time.) There are a handful of magazines like Asimov’s and F&SF that put their content behind a paywall, (usually a subscription of some kind) but there are also magazines like Clarkesworld that put their content up for free on the podcast AND offer an optional subscription. In fact, I believe it was Clarkesworld that discovered that revenue actually went up when they put everything out for free.
So as a short story reader, there’s really no need for me to purchase single short stories, since so many of them are available from the magazines for free. In fact, I would probably prefer to get my stories from a magazine, since I know they’ve been vetted by an editor. If I like a particular author, I may pick up some of their short stories, but I’m more likely to wait until they’ve bundled them into a collection of some kind, just to maximize the value.
Anthologies are a different story (sorry for the pun.) I have yet to see a short story anthology that isn’t priced like a regular book—no free or 99¢ ebooks. That’s probably because, as a short story reader, I know I’m getting a bunch of stories for that price. It’s kind of like buying an album, back in the days before Spotify: I know I’m going to get a couple of stinkers, but I also know that I’ll get some really great ones too. But if there are only 3-5 stories in that bundle, I’m going to think twice before buying it unless it’s at a super deep discount price. After all, I can always get my short story fix for free.
So if there are enough high-quality short stories availabe from the magazines for free, and self-published singles don’t really earn much at all, what’s the best way to go indie? Here’s my thought: sell anthology-sized collections at full price and make all the singles free, with the backmatter in the free stories pointing to the collections.
As a short story reader, I’m already used to paying for anthologies—and I’m more likely than other readers to buy them, since I’m the kind of reader who seeks out short stories. So if I pick up a handful of free short stories from an author and come to really enjoy her work, I’m already primed to buy her collections when I finish each story—and that makes the backmatter of each free single the best place for her to advertise her collections.
It’s a bit like first-in-series free, except instead of the one free book pointing to the rest of the series, there’s a bunch of free short stories all pointing to the same one (or two or three) collections. The typical reader is probably going to need to read a few of an author’s short stories anyways to really become a fan, so making all of the stories free could really be the way to go.
Of course, the big downside to this as an author is that you probably can’t sell reprint rights to the stories that are available as free singles. Why would an editor buy your story for their publication if it’s already available for free? So you would have to make the singles free for a limited time, if selling the stories to the reprint markets is part of your strategy.
But if you’re going to eventually bundle those stories into a collection, that’s not really a problem. Publish them as free singles as soon as the rights revert back to you, and then take down the singles when you have enough of them to put into a collection.
So under this hybrid publishing system, the typical lifecycle of a short story would look something like this:
The goal of the first stage is to sell first publication rights to a professional or a semi-pro market (typically a magazine or an anthology.) So before self-publishing, you would submit to all of the traditional markets, and keep the story on submission until it has sold. But you would have to limit yourself to the markets with a pay rate that you’re willing to accept, otherwise you might as well just self-publish.
If my goal is to be a 6-figure author, I should value my time at $50/hour at least (since $50/hour X 40 hours/week X 50 weeks/year = $100,000/year.) That means I can use my writing speed to calculate my minimum pay rate. If I can write 2,000 words in an hour, then that’s $50/2,000 words, or 2.5¢ per word. Round that up to 3¢ per word, and that’s the minimum pay rate that I should be willing to accept.
Once the story has sold, the contract will dictate when I can self-publish. Most contracts have an exclusivity period of a few months to a year. Every contract is different, so how long the story remains in this phase depends on each contract.
This is where you start to implement the strategy that I discussed above. As soon as the rights revert back to you, you self-publish them as short story singles—but rather than trying to make money with them, you give them away for free in order to point readers toward your collections.
In other words, after a short story has been traditonally published, it goes through a temporary period where it’s used as a free loss leader. This period ends as soon as the author has enough shorts to bundle into a novel-sized collection—but since there are always at least a few free singles floating around, it serves as an effective way to attract new readers and win over new fans.
This is the final stage, where you take down the free singles and bundle them into collections instead. Once that’s done, you update the backmatter in all of the other free singles to include links to buy the new collection, and the story starts to earn money for you again.
Because the story is no longer a free self-published ebook, it makes sense to start submitting to the traditional markets that buy reprint rights, since why not? At this point, it’s free money. I generally don’t accept anything less than 1¢ per word, since I’ve found that the token-paying markets don’t make an appreciable dent in any of my stories’ lifetime earnings, but that’s just me.
I think this three-stage lifecycle may be the best way to extract the maximum value from my short stories. Like pawns in the game of chess, it’s not what each story individually is doing, but how they’re working together. A self-published single that sells only a dozen copies (if that) per year isn’t doing much for me, and while I can use them to gain new subscribers, there are more effective tools for that than standalone short-stories.
In any case, I’m going to give it a try. It will be interesting in a few months to see how it turned out!