A is for Advice

For this year’s Blogging from A to Z Challenge, I’m going to write about self-publishing. I’m not a huge bestseller, but I have been a self-published indie author for the past three years, and I’m more or less making a living at it now (it’s still touch and go from month to month, but writing is my primary income now and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for the foreseeable future).

To start off this blogging challenge, I’d like to say something about publishing advice. I’ve heard a lot of it over the years, nearly all of it controversial in some way. The book industry has changed so much over the past few years, with so many publishing paths opening up to writers, that any piece of advice is bound to be contradicted in some way by another that sounds equally valid and well-reasoned.

So how do you know which advice to follow and which to discard? I don’t have easy answers, but I can point to a few things that have helped me to refine my crap-o-meter.

First, if the person offering the advice can’t back it up with a demonstrable level of success, then it’s just their opinion and should only be regarded as such. Good advice is backed by data, especially in today’s digital world.

Second, even if the person offering the advice does have a high level of success, if they present their advice as the Only True Path, they’re probably dead wrong on some level. Every writer is different, every book is different, and every path to success is different. Writers have so many options in this new world of publishing that anyone who takes a binary view is bound to be blindsided.

Third, just because a large number of people believe something doesn’t make it any more valid. This is something to be especially wary about when trolling online communities, since those tend to become echo chambers over time. No matter how many times a piece of advice is repeated, if it’s crap to begin with, it will still be crap when it gets to you.

Ultimately, it’s important to keep in mind that no one in this industry knows anything with any degree of certainty. With the way the book world has changed over the past few years, decades of publishing experience don’t count for much anymore. And even if someone knows what’s worked for them, it’s impossible to know whether it will work for you until you try it.

So how do you know if a piece of advice is good? By trying it, of course! One of the nice things about being an indie writer is the flexibility to reinvent yourself as often as you want. I’ve got twenty books out and I’m still re-inventing myself–still trying out advice and learning new things. There’s a lot of uncertainty, yes, but with uncertainty comes opportunity, as long as you don’t get locked down.

Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to share a lot of my own personal opinions and experiences, with a bit of advice thrown in just to be helpful. None of it should be taken as gospel. For everything that’s worked for me, I’m sure that the opposite has worked just as well for someone else.

Odds and ends

A couple of quick things I neglected to mention in my last post:

First, I ran a promo for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I) on The Fussy Librarian over the weekend. If you’re looking for a daily newsletter with good book recommendations, you should definitely check them out. The team behind the site puts a lot of effort into making it a quality newsletter, and they tailor your recommendations not only by genre, but by the level of sex, profanity, and violence as well. I’ve subscribed to them for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve already seen some excellent books on their list, including Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings.

SFA-Z (thumb)Second, my latest book, Science Fiction from A to Z, is now up on Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Kobo! Feel free to pick up a copy. It’s up just in time for this year’s Blogging from A to Z Challenge, which starts tomorrow! I’ve already got a couple of posts lined up, so it should be just as fun as last year.

When I finished last year’s A to Z challenge, I realized that those blog posts would work well together as a book. You can still find the original posts on my blog, of course, but I’ve collected them here for your convenience. It was a fun side project, and at $2.99 you can consider it like buying me a drink or tossing a couple of bucks into the tip jar.

That just about does it. See you tomorrow for this year’s A to Z challenge!

Crazy ideas and other updates

I had the craziest idea today while taking a late-night walk around Provo. It’s for the new series that I’m working on, Sons of the Starfarers, and it’s going to take six or seven books to get there, but it’s going to be AWESOME. Unfortunately, I can’t say much about it because the first book isn’t out yet, but I think you guys are going to be wowed.

I still remember the moment when the final PAGE of Desert Stars came to me. I was driving back to Provo from the Salt Lake Airport (alone, fortunately), and when it popped into my head I must have screamed for five minutes straight. The way that Mira’s final observation wraps everything up–both the overarching story her own personal growth arc–it was just awesome.

Those moments of insight are rare, but when they happen, they illuminate everything. It’s as if the whole story is unfolded to you, so that you can see how everything that came before ties into everything that happens later. It also opens you up to the heart of the story itself, so that you can see what it’s all about. As a writer, I live for that kind of insight. It’s one of the most powerful things that makes the whole endeavor worthwhile.

So yeah, Sons of the Starfarers is coming along nicely. The first book, Brothers in Exile, should be out May 10th, with the next two coming out six weeks apart from each other. That’s the plan, anyway. For updates on when those books come out, you can either follow my blog or sign up for my email list. I’ll post a few excerpts in the lead up before and after Brothers in Exile is published.

For April, though, I’ll be participating in the Blogging from A to Z challenge. Every day except Sundays, I’ll have a post for a different letter of the alphabet, all following a common theme. Last year, I blogged about the science fiction genre and some of my favorite tropes. This year, I’ll be blogging about my experience as an indie writer and what I’ve learned from it over the past three years.

I’ve already written and scheduled the first couple of posts: A is for Algorithm and B is for Book Blurb. Beyond that, I’ll be doing stuff like D is for Discoverability, P is for Pricing, S is for Serials, etc. Whether you’re a writer from one of the indie author communities I’m a part of, or a fan who discovered this blog after reading one of my books, I hope you’ll find this behind-the-scenes series of blog posts interesting. I can already tell I’m going to have a lot of fun with it!

That’s just about it for now. This week, I hope to finish up Book II: Comrades in Hope and get ready to dig into Book III: Strangers in Flight. The stuff in that third book is going to set the stage for some major wow moments later on in the series, and I can hardly wait to dive into it!

BROTHERS IN EXILE now on Goodreads!

goodreads logoIf you’re on Goodreads, Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile (Book I) now has it’s own page! The expected publication date is May 10th, so all it really has is a title or a blurb, but more should be coming out soon.

This is something new I’m trying out, so that people have a chance to add it to their to-read lists and hopefully give it some visibility before it’s published. I’m not sure how to update people when it does come out, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure that out before then.

In the meantime, if you’ve been looking forward to reading it, feel free to add it to your to-read list!

New book coming soon!

So the A to Z blogging challenge is coming up again this year, and to get ready for it I’ve decided to put together my posts from last year into an ebook! I’ll be releasing it at the end of this week, probably around Friday or so. Here’s the cover:

SFA-Z (cover)

The space art is a picture of the Carina Nebula, taken by the ESO VLT (credit: ESO/T. Preibisch). The bookstore image is one that I took myself, of Pioneer Book, one of my favorite places in Provo. I’ve spent many, many hours happily browsing their Sci-Fi section. 😀

The book is basically an exploration of some of my favorite Sci-Fi genre tropes, starting with A is for Alien and ending with Z is for Zenith. This is basically a blog-to-book sort of thing, like what I did with Journey to Jordan. The original blog posts are still up, though, so if you want to read through them online, you can find them here.

In the meantime, I’m hard at work on Sons of the Starfarers and should have Brothers in Exile ready to publish in May. If all goes well, I’ll publish them in six week intervals, so you’ll get Comrades in Hope at the end of June and Strangers in Flight at the beginning of August, with the first omnibus sometime in September. That’s the plan, anyway–we’ll see how well it holds.

I’m also working to get new cover art for all the Star Wanderers books. I’ve found someone to work on them, and she says she can get them done quickly, so we’ll see how that goes. The print versions for the omnibuses may take a bit longer, but they should be out by the summer at the latest.

That’s just about it. Better get back to prepping Science Fiction from A to Z for publication–lots of work left to do!

What I’ve been up to lately (besides short stories)

It’s been a while since I did an update post, so I figure I should do one of those to let you guys know what projects I’m working on. There are quite a few of them, and I’m happy to say that the writing is going quite well! If I don’t post on this blog very much, it’s probably because I’m busy writing.

Anyhow, here’s what I’m working on (and what you can expect to see in the coming months):

Sons of the Starfarers
Book II: Comrades in Hope

This is the project that’s been taking most of my attention. What started out as a novella has grown and morphed into a short novel–I expect it will top out at just under 40k words. I’m just past the 2/3rds mark now, where it’s still a slog but I can just about see the end. I was hoping to finish it this week, but now it looks like I’ll be pushing it back into April.

That’s okay, though, because my second big project is:

Sons of the Starfarers
Book III: Strangers in Flight

I’ve been itching to start this one for a while, and last night I finally opened up and started it. In the first book, Brothers in Exile, the two starfaring brothers Aaron and Isaac find a beautiful girl covered in henna tattoos and frozen in a cryotank on a derelict space station. In this, the third book, the girl finally wakes up and we get to see things from her point of view.

With the way I’m writing Sons of the Starfarers, it’s going to be structured in a series of three book arcs. Since I want to release the books in each arc fairly close to each other, I don’t want to publish Brothers in Exile until Comrades in Hope and Strangers in Flight are both complete. So even if I end up taking a break from Comrades in Hope for a little while, if I’m working on Strangers in Flight, it’s not putting things off since I’d have to write that one first anyway.

I am really, really excited about these books, and when you read them, I think you will be to. I’m trying to think of ways that I can share them, since it’s hard to talk about something if it’s not actually out there for you to read. Maybe if I posted a series of short excerpts from the first book, no longer than 400-500 words each? I generally skip over blog posts where authors sample their own books, but maybe if they were shorter excerpts, that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. What do you guys think?

So that’s what I’m working on writing-wise. Here’s what I’m working on publishing-wise.

New Star Wanderers covers (and print editions)

So the cover designer I’ve been working with for Star Wanderers told me this week that he’s overextended himself by taking on more work than he can handle and that unfortunately he has to drop some clients. That’s unfortunate but understandable–we all have limitations, and things come up in life that we can’t always plan for. We’ve parted amicably, and he’s promised to get me the files I need to pick up on the cover work where he left off.

I’m really anxious to get the new covers done, though, and would like to find a good cover designer as soon as I can. If you guys have any recommendations, please let me know. Ideally, I’d like to find someone who I could work with long-term, since there definitely won’t be a shortage of work anytime soon!

Because of this, though, I’ll probably keep the original space art covers for the POD books at least for the foreseeable future. The omnibus editions will feature the new art, though, and I’ve just bartered with a friend of mine to do the typesetting for those. I’m not sure when they’ll be out, but it will probably be sometime in the late spring / early summer.

As for the print edition of Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII), that should be out approximately whenever I get around to it, which would be sooner except that I’m so busy writing Sons of the Starfarers. I’m not sure how many of you are waiting on that one–the print versions for the individual novellas have been selling better than I’d expected, though still at a trickle, so that’s not quite at the top of my priorities right now.

Blogging A to Z Book

Last year, I did the Blogging from A to Z challenge and had a lot of fun with it! The topic I blogged on was science fiction, with a new post each day in April starting with “A is for …” “B is for …” etc. Well, I’d like to do that again this year, but first I’d like to put together last year’s posts into an ebook. It shouldn’t take too long–probably no more than a week at the longest–so I’ll probably take care of that next week or so.

For this year’s challenge, I’m going to blog about publishing. I already have the first few posts planned out: “A is for Amazon,” “B is for Big 6 (now 5),” “C is for Contracts,” etc. These posts aren’t meant to be advice, more just sharing my perspective and experience, since hey I’ve been indie published for 3+ years now, which might as well be 3+ decades what with the way the industry is changing. So even though there’s a lot I’m still learning, I do have a few things to share.

That’s just about it. Better grab some lunch now and head out to write. See you!

Operation SB #4: The Curse of the Lifewalker

Title: The Curse of the Lifewalker
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic
Word Count: 4,340
Time: 1 day (sort of)

So after “L’enfer, c’est la solitude,” I was kind of in a short story mood for a couple of days and decided to bang out another one. This one is actually an adaptation from my novel Lifewalker, a post-apocalyptic tale where a global pandemic kills everyone older than 25. The story takes place several hundred years after the apocalypse, where a society of children and teenage adults has evolved to fill the void left over by the collapse. It’s told from the point of view of a “lifewalker,” someone who is naturally immune and lives out a normal lifespan. Normal to us, at least–not to anyone else in the new society.

It actually wasn’t that hard to adapt the first chapter to a short story. It very much has its own narrative structure, with a beginning, middle and end. Obviously, it finishes on a rather open-ended note, but I think I was able to turn it around and focus on the premise: “when all the world is afflicted by the plague, sometimes the greater curse is to be whole.” Touched up the first couple of pages quite a bit, setting the stage for a short story and not a full novel, then went over the rest of it with a light pass and wrote a summation paragraph at the end to wrap things up.

Obviously, it took me more than one day to write the bulk of the chapter–in fact, I think it’s been through a couple of drafts now. But the adaptation to short story form went fairly well, and I’m quite pleased with the result.

Since I’ve already got stories at the top three markets (Writers of the Future, Asimov’s, Analog) and Clarkesworld is on cool-down, I sent the story to the next magazine on the list, Fantasy & Science Fiction. They only take snail mail, though, so I had to print out the story, print out a cover letter, take it to the post office, buy a letter envelope, stamp, manila envelope, fill out the SASE, etc etc. It was like a blast from the 00s or something.

Anyway, as I was walking over to the post office, I had this AWESOME epiphany in which the end of the novel came to me. It’s SO MUCH BETTER than what I’d originally had in mind, and actually got me excited to work on Lifewalker again. I probably won’t pick it up until I’ve finished the first three Sons of the Starfarers books, but now I have an awesome, amazing ending to work toward.

All I have to do is write it. 😛

Operation SB #3: L’enfer, c’est la solitude

Title: L’enfer, c’est la solitude
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 6,962
Time: about 40 days

I can’t stand people who humbrag, so I’m just going to come out and say that this story is awesome. Seriously. Kickass freaking awesome. It may be the best short story I’ve written to date. Six months from now, I may come to hate it (like I’ve come to hate some of my other stories), but I seriously doubt that will be the case with this one. This represents some of my best work, and I’m extremely proud of it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I guess I should explain a little what this story is about. The title (which I didn’t figure out until after I’d written the story) is a play on the Sartre quote: “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (“hell is other people”). The story basically takes the exact opposite point of view, by showing how two people from opposing planets stranded on an isolated post basically go through hell because of their isolation, and the way it both brings them together and pits them against each other.

The idea for the story came to me years ago, when I was studying political science and modern philosophy. I imagined a situation where two worlds in a cold war type standoff both claimed an isolated, unpopulated planet somewhere, where each maintained a tiny outpost with only one person in order to stake the claim. Even though they’re enemies, the two opposing soldiers would, in many ways, be closer to each other than to their other comrades. Or would they?

The balance of power changes when one soldier’s station goes down in a meteoroid collision and he’s forced to go over to the other soldier’s station in order to survive. On the way, though, he gets a transmission from his superiors that their two worlds are now at war, and he has orders to kill the enemy soldier who has just saved his life. Can he carry them out? Is it right for him to do so? Or did the other soldier receive the same order, and is he now planning to kill him?

The idea for this story bounced around in my head for a long, long time, but I never sat down to write it because I didn’t know how to resolve it. Then, a little over a month ago, I got a crazy awesome idea for how to do it. All the other details came together, and I knew exactly what was supposed to happen.

I wish I could say that the story practically wrote itself from there, but unfortunately that was not the case. I started it back in early February, but kept putting it off because the story in my mind was so awesome, I didn’t know if I could do it justice on the page. That fear was absolutely crippling, and it’s the main reason I didn’t write any short stories at all for the month of February. It wasn’t that what I had written was bad–in fact, the beginning was pretty good. It was the fear that my skills just weren’t yet up to writing this one.

Well, those fears were pretty unfounded. While talking about the story with some friends this last Tuesday, I realized that the whole thing was silly and I should just sit down and write it. Two days later, the story was finished–and it was actually pretty good.

I know as a part of this short story challenge, I’m supposed to keep Heinlein’s rules, including rule 3 which states “you must refrain from revising, except to editorial order.” I mostly kept to that rule for this one, but not entirely. I did a lot of cycling–reading through and tweaking previous sections before putting new words on the page–as well as some significant cutting. The original draft clocked in at about 7,700 words, and Analog puts a cap at 7,000, so I went through and cut about 10%. Hopefully, though, that will just make it stronger.

I really, really like this story. It’s in first person, and the voice is quite a bit darker than some of my other stuff, but I really connected with the viewpoint character and I think it shows. Besides that, the buildup and suspense was just a ton of fun. I really hope this story gets picked up soon, because I think you’re really going to enjoy it!

This brings the number of short stories on submission now to three. I’ve garnered two rejections for “The Infiltrator,” but that’s it so far. I’m honestly not sure whether to just trunk that one, but I’ll keep it on submission for a while just in case. As Kris Rusch said in a recent blog post, you should let the editor decide what goes in her magazine without pre-editing for her.

That’s just about it. One short down for March–seventeen days to write the second one. Let’s do it!

SW: TALES OF THE FAR OUTWORLDS is now out!

SW V-VIII (thumb)Well, it’s been a few days since I uploaded Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII) to the various retail sites, and I’m happy to report that it’s up on just about all of them! You can now purchase it for $3.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Kobo. In just a week or two, it should be up on iTunes as well.

This omnibus edition gathers Parts V through VIII all under one cover, with an author’s note that I’ll post here as well. So if you’ve bought or downloaded the individual parts already, there isn’t much of a point to pick up this one unless the omnibus keeps your library uncluttered. But if you have already read them, I would appreciate any honest reviews.

If you’re on Goodreads and want to add the book to your library, you can do so here. I need to get better about posting my reviews and to-read list to Goodreads, because it also helps to boost visibility. I’ve noticed my overall Goodreads author rating creeping slowly up, so apparently more and more of you are enjoying the Star Wanderers books. Thanks!

This omnibus ties up the main series, but I’m thinking very seriously about bringing the characters back for a full-length novel. It’s still in the pre-writing stages, of course, but I’d probably set it 15-20 years after the events of Tales of the Outworlds and bring back all the major characters, as well as their children. I even have a titled planned for it: Children of the Starry Sea.

This is actually a project I’ve had on my mind for a while–I first blogged about it here–but I’m thinking a lot more seriously about it, and will probably bump it up on my writing to-do list. It would certainly be fun to bring all the old characters back for another adventure. And I have the beginnings of a plot, too. I can’t say much about it, but it would probably revolve around Salazar, the exiled pirates, and a couple of things from Sons of the Starfarers.

So yeah, even though Tales of the Far Outworlds represents a closing point for now, it probably won’t be the end of the whole series. But I have no idea when anything else will come out, or even if Children of the Starry Sea will be the next book. I could quite possibly write a couple more novellas.

tl;dr, I have no idea what I’m going to write until I actually write it, but there’s probably going to be a full-length novel after this one. So keep an eye out, either here or through my email newsletter. I’ll be sure to keep you posted!

Further thoughts on the drama in the SF&F community and a rescinding of some previous thoughts

About a year ago, there was a big discussion in the science fiction & fantasy community about sexual harassment and sci-fi conventions. As a result of that discussion, allegations were thrown out about a certain senior editor at Tor, rumors began to fly, and through what some might characterize as popular justice and others might characterize as an internet bullying campaign, the editor was fired.

That disturbed me, so after engaging in a rather heated discussion on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog about it, I wrote a blog post of my own, which I then took down (though not before it was picked up elsewhere) after some private email correspondences that were rather toxic. Even though I had an opinion, I decided that this wasn’t where I wanted to plant my flag, especially since it looked like I’d be hard-pressed to defend it.

Well, at the risk of taking some rightly earned flak, I want to bring back that post in order to give myself an opportunity to respond to it. My views and opinions have changed since then, and I don’t think I was right.

First of all, it’s come to my attention that this isn’t the first instance of high drama within the SF&F community. In fact, there have been so many inane kerfluffles and genuine spats over the years that for lifelong, hardcore fen, engaging in them is practically a sport. So now, I can see that my concerns about the community “tearing itself apart” were naive at best, and concern trolling at worst.

Second, through the efforts of writers like Jim C. Hines and Cora Buhlert, through following various discussions on Twitter, KBoards, and blogs like The Passive Voice, and through various conversations on-line and off-line with personal friends, I’ve come to realize that bigotry, sexism, and sexual harassment are much bigger problems within the SF&F community than I thought they were. The majority of voices now being raised are not trying to advance some nefarious PC agenda, but are simply pushing back against some very legitimate grievances. If we’re only hearing about those grievances now, it’s because they’ve been swept under the rug for too long.

Whether or not there is a faction in the SF&F community with an overt political agenda, that’s an entirely separate and disconnected issue from sexism, sexual harassment, and the stigmatization of minorities. Just because it’s not as visible to me as a white male author and fan doesn’t mean that there isn’t a major problem. If anything, I’m the least qualified person to make that judgment. The people who are complaining about these issues should be taken entirely at their word.

The science fiction & fantasy community as a whole is maturing and diversifying, and that’s a very good thing. It’s bringing in a rich influx of wildly imaginative stories, which strengthens the genre tremendously. Whatever your worldview, whatever your gender, whatever your preferred fandom, you should feel like there’s a place for you here if that’s what you want to read and write. Anything that makes people feel harassed or unsafe, stigmatized, or unwelcome is a much bigger threat to the genre than anything else.

As the SF&F community continues to mature and epublishing brings in a whole new generation of writers, there’s going to be a lot more drama as issues that have been swept under the rug for years are brought into public view. As this happens, I think it’s important to keep in mind what makes our genre strong: a rich variety of visionary and imaginative voices. The message should always be “there’s a place for you here,” not “you’re only welcome if you look and think like me.”

So yeah, I want to go on the public record and take back what I said in that previous post. There’s a much bigger issue here that should not be overshadowed, and it was wrong for me not to acknowledge it. I hope that no one feels that I’m disparaging of women, minorities, transgendered individuals, or any other group within fandom, because that’s not what I stand for. I may not agree with all of your views–in fact, I expect I’ll disagree with many of them–but that’s what makes the genre strong, and I don’t want anyone to feel like their voice is being silenced.

As for the other issues, I’m not quite so worried about the internet bullying aspect anymore because it’s clear that most of the pushback is not malicious, even if it can become quite vocal and heated at times. I don’t condone internet bullying at all, and I reserve the right to be critical where I believe the intent is malicious. At the same time, I don’t think there can be much credibility when gender-normative white male writers cast themselves as the victims.

If you felt demeaned or angered by what I said, either here on my blog or by my comments somewhere else, I’m sorry. My views on these issues are evolving, so I hope you’ll take that into account. And I hope that we can all keep an eye on what makes the community strong, which is a wide diversity of visionary and imaginative voices.