To publish or submit?

Man, I am so sick right now. Caught a stomach flu from my neice, and it has been going through me like a chainsaw through butter.

In any case, things are going fairly well aside from that. Heart of the Nebula is now up for pre-order through November 21st, so you can expect to hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks. Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) is nearly ready to send off to my test readers, and should be published sometime in January or February. Besides that, I’m working on a couple of other big projects that should come out next year.

Right now, though, I have something of a dilemma. Do you guys remember Starship Lachoneus? It’s that completely unmarketable story idea I had a while back: the one where Jesus Christ organizes the construction of a generation ship to take humanity to the stars, because after His millenial reign, the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable. Well, I wrote the prologue, and it actually stands well enough on its own to be a short story. The dilemma is whether I should publish it now, or submit it to a short story market.

From what I can tell, the market for Mormon sci-fi short fiction is somewhere between small to non-existent. Irreantum closed a few years ago, Sunstone is limited to an annual contest, and Dialogue only pays in contributor copies. The Mormon Lit Blitz would be awesome, except that the story is more than 2k words long. Another option would be an anthology like Monsters and Mormons, but I’m not aware of any new ones.

I could try to submit it to the mainstream sci-fi markets, but I don’t think it would be a good fit for any of them. It’s written for a Mormon audience, with cultural and religious references that only people familiar with Mormonism would get. That said, the religious elements aren’t all that different from any other sci-fi world-building element, and the story isn’t overtly preachy or moral, so I suppose you don’t have to be a believing Mormon to enjoy it.

What do you guys think? Should I submit it elsewhere first, or publish it myself?

Why my books are not in Kindle Unlimited

Last year, Amazon came out with a book subscription service called Kindle Unlimited. As a reader and an Amazon customer, I’ve noticed that they’ve been pushing this service quite aggressively. As a writer, I’ve been following it quite closely, especially with some recent changes with how they compensate their authors.

However, if you check my Amazon catalog, you will find that none of my books are available on Kindle Unlimited. And if I had to tell you why, I could sum it up in just one word:

Exclusivity.

In order to enroll your books in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon demands that the content of your book cannot be available anywhere else. Not on competing retailers. Not on your website. Not on a site like Wattpad or posted on social media. It’s KU and KU only, take it or leave it. And you can’t get around that by doing separate editions, since it’s the content that must be exlusive, not the book.

Recently, Hugh Howey argued that KU’s exclusivity doesn’t really hurt writers or readers, because all of Amazon’s competitors in the ebook market suck so hard that it’s no big loss to lose them anyways. I disagree, though. Different readers have different needs, and as great as Amazon is, it isn’t the best choice for everyone.

I believe that readers should be empowered to make their own choices, not only in what they read, but in how they read it. Some readers would rather sideload their ebooks, and don’t want to deal with Amazon’s proprietary .mobi format. Others would rather keep their books native to their device and not deal with Amazon’s apps. Others live in parts of the world where Amazon tacks on an arbitrary $2 USD surcharge to every kindle store purchase, and that obviously doesn’t work for them.

Put simply, I believe that exclusivity is a bad deal for readers—and that because of that, it’s also a bad deal for writers. The less control that readers have over what they read, the less they are going to read. The more control that middlemen have over the market (and for all the wonderful things that it does, Amazon is still a middleman between readers and writers), the less pressure there is for them to innovate and improve.

On many of the indie writers forums and communities that I frequent, it appears that other writers are more interested in short-term monetary gains than in doing what best serves their readers. And that’s unfortunate, because Kindle Unlimited is structured in such a way that it pits writers against each other in a zero-sub game. Instead of paying a fixed rate for each page (or KENPC) read, Amazon sets a “pot” and pays each author a share of it, in proportion to how many borrows/pages they got. Thus, if one author gets more reads than another (or games the system to make Amazon’s algorithms think that he had more reads), that means less money for the other author.

A lot of writers argue that it’s not really a zero-sub game because Amazon usually adds to the pot after the month is over, thus manipulating the borrow rate to hit some undisclosed target. Even if that’s true, though, it makes things even worse. If Amazon has a target borrow rate in mind, why not tell authors up front? It basically amounts to not telling authors how much they’re going to be paid until after their books have been sold. In any other supplier relationship, this blatant lack of transparency would be insane.

From what I can see, it’s all about control. Exclusivity gives them a great deal of control, not only over the marketplace but over authors as well. The lack of transparency and ever-changing borrow rates make it difficult for authors to gather the data they need to decide whether to stay in KU or to publish their books widely. And authors who decide not to opt into KU are punished by having their books rank lower, thus achieving less visibility in the Amazon ecosystem. In the year since KU came out, my Amazon income has fallen by at least 60%.

Even with all of that, though, I would be happy to enroll all of my books in Kindle Unlimited if Amazon dropped the exclusivity requirement. There are a lot of readers who prefer Amazon’s KU subscription service, and I would love to make my books available for them.

But exclusivity is a bad deal.

Streamlining

About a month ago, I decided to make some changes to my writing process. I’d noticed that a lot of time was passing between book releases, and that even though I was writing almost every day, there wasn’t much to show for it.

My old process tended to go in one of two ways:

ONE

“I have the coolest idea for a story! Ima drop everything and write it now!”

Writes the first chapter.

“Okay, it’s not quite as cool as I’d imagined, but I can work with this.”

Writes another chapter or two.

“Hmm, this story is starting to have issues. Maybe it’s not as cool as I thought it was.”

Gets writer’s block for a couple of days. Struggles to do anything productive.

“Dammit, why isn’t this story coming together? I should be doing 2k words a day, but I can barely manage 500. If this story is really that bad, then maybe it’s not the project I should be focusing on right now. Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing it at all.”

Gets discouraged and takes off a couple of days.

“I have the coolest idea for a totally different story! Ima drop everything and write it now!”

TWO

“It’s been forever since I actually finished anything, so I am going to stick with this project until it is DONE.”

Writes productively for a week or two.

“Yes! The story is coming together just like I knew it would!”

Reaches a difficult scene.

“Why am I not as productive as I was last week? I can do better than this! Words, dammit! Words!”

Struggles to finish the difficult scene. Loses all momentum and enthusiasm.

“Okay, that was pretty tough, but at least it’s finished. I am really, really, really excited about this random shiny story idea that came to me yesterday, but I have to stick with my current work in progress until it is DONE.”

Procrastinates for hours every day. Watches in dismay as productivity falls.

“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME??”

Tries for weeks to regain enthusiasm for the project. Invariably fails.

“Maybe I should work on something else.”

It went on like this for the better part of a year, which is why I haven’t published anything for the last six months (until Friends in Command, that is). And honestly, it’s not a lot of fun. When you feel like you should be more productive but don’t seem to really be getting anywhere, it’s very easy to lose touch with the passion that made you want to be a writer in the first place.

So back in May, while hiking in the mountains, I thought about it for a while and asked myself: what is the 20% of what I do that produces 80% of the results?

The answer, interestingly enough, wasn’t “butt in chair, hands on keyboard.” I’d been doing that for months, and all I had was a dozen unfinished projects to show for it. For me at least, merely showing up to work is not enough to produce results.

In 2014, one of my resolutions was to publish a new release every six weeks. I didn’t keep that resolution perfectly, but I did keep a regular release schedule right up to the holiday season. At that point, I ran into some troubles with Friends in Command and pushed the publication date back (which in retrospect was definitely the right thing to do). I abandoned my release schedule (which was not the right thing to do) and fell into the traps I mentioned above.

When I write without a goal beyond a daily word count, I tend to spin my wheels. In contrast, when I write with a set of goals for a project timeline, such as deadlines for finishing the first draft, sending it out to first readers, making revisions, and preparing the finished project for publication, I tend to get stuff done.

So I streamlined my writing process by giving myself more structure: a WIP log with writing deadlines and publishing schedules. And this is how it works now:

ONE

“I’m really excited about my next project! I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, ever since I put it on the schedule, and now I can finally work on it! Yay!”

Writes for a week. Gets the coolest idea for a totally different story.

“I have the coolest idea for a totally different story! Ima put it in the WIP log and schedule it for… let’s see… two months from now. That should give me something to write while I’m getting project X ready for publication.”

Continues to work on current WIP.

TWO

“It’s time to finally finish this thing so that I can publish it six months from now.”

Writes productively for a week or two. Reaches a difficult scene.

“This story is not coming together, and my deadline is coming up. I don’t know if I’ll reach my deadline. I’d better swap places with this and project Y in the publishing schedule to make sure I have something to publish.”

Keeps writing anyway. Begins to lose momentum and enthusiasm.

“Well, I’m not going to finish this project by my deadline. However, I have enough time that I can take another shot at it six weeks from now, after finishing project Z. I’ll write what I can by the deadline, then box it up so that I can approach it with fresh eyes when the time comes.

Writes until the deadline and sets unfinished project aside. Starts next project with renewed enthusiasm.

In June, I spent most of my time working on Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V). I hoped to finish the project by the first week in July, but I hit a really difficult scene about midway through. Instead of forcing myself to stick with it, though, I pushed on until the deadline and left it unfinished so that I could pick up the next WIP on the schedule.

I think that was the right thing to do, because changing it up has helped to keep things fresh, both for Captives in Obscurity and my current WIP, Heart of the Nebula. Instead of bringing heaps of baggage to the next project, I’m starting clean, and things are going quite well. With luck, Heart of the Nebula should be up for pre-order in September and published over Thanksgiving week. As for Captives, I’ll come back to it in September with fresh eyes, which will not only help me to fix what was broken, but finish the first draft in a few weeks, rather than taking months to agonize over it.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Hopefully it will lead to lots and lots of books in the coming months and years!

Things I learned in 2014 (Part 1)

Last week, Kris Rusch wrote an interesting blog post reflecting on 2014 and things she observed that indie writers learned, so I thought I’d do something similar and reflect on some of the things that I learned last year about the business and the craft. Here goes!

Readers of SF&F want longer books.

I did a lengthy blog post about this earlier, but the basic gist of it is that readers in my genre want longer, more immersive books. There’s a place for the short stuff, especially for high concept sci-fi, but most readers of speculative fiction want worlds they can get lost in with characters that become their best friends. It’s practically impossible to do that in a story that takes less than an hour to read, so to satisfy those readers, you’ve got to write long.

You can’t have a healthy career with only one income stream.

Between 80% to 90% of my income in 2014 came from Amazon. Times were good in the spring and summer, but then Amazon launched their ebook subscription service (Kindle Unlimited). None of my books were enrolled in KU, but because of the way that Amazon skews the rankings to favor KU books, my Amazon royalties took a huge hit.

I knew back in 2011 when I started that I needed to cultivate multiple income streams if I wanted to have a steady career, but I’d gotten complacent. Since my Amazon earnings were paying all the bills, I figured I was doing all right. But you can’t measure the healthiness of a career in just the revenue it’s bringing in right now; you’ve got to look at contingencies for the future, including the worst case scenario.When most of your revenue comes from a single client, that makes your career far too brittle.

So looking to the future, I can’t say that I have a healthy, steady career until I’m earning at least as much from all my other income streams as I am from Amazon.

I’ve been relying far too much on Amazon’s algorithms.

Related to the last point, I learned that I’ve been relying far too much on Amazon to sell my books. In fact, I can say that the Amazon algorithms were the linchpin of my marketing strategy (inasmuch as I actually had one, heh).

Amazon has the best book recommendation engine in the industry by far. It’s done a lot for my career, connecting my books with many readers who have gone on to become fans. But what the algos give, the algos can take away. To build a career with staying power, you have to constantly work to find new readers in a variety of different ways.

I’ve always believed that cream rises to the top. That said, if you’re starting at the bottom of the ocean, you’ve got a long, long way to rise. Up until now, I’ve been operating under the belief that readers will find me without me making much of an effort to find them. I learned this year that you’ve got to meet in the middle. You don’t have to hand sell every book (thank goodness!), but you do have to make an effort to make your books visible somehow.

A well-articulated negative review does more to sell books than a blasé positive one.

This one surprised me. When I published Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers: Book I), it garnered a fairly painful two-star review on Amazon about a week or two after launch. The review had some positive things in it, but it also had some negative things that were pretty spot on. Being the angsty writer that I am, I thought my chances had tanked. Instead, sales of the book immediately shot up, and stayed fairly high for about a month.

Readers aren’t stupid. They understand that not everyone has the same tastes in books, and parse their reviews accordingly. A negative review that is articulate and well-reasoned will lend a lot more credibility and cultivate a lot more interest than a string of positive reviews that lack any real substance. It sounds counterproductive, but it’s often the negative reviews that sell the book.

Sometimes you actually can get the best results by doing it yourself.

When I redid the covers for the first three Gaia Nova novels, I decided at first to hire a cover designer. For various reasons, though, that didn’t work out, so I decided to do them myself. I’d done the typography myself on the old ones, and let’s just say they left something to be desired.

The reason I wanted to hire the work out was because I didn’t think I’d get the best work if I did it myself. I figured that if I hired someone who was an expert in it, it would turn out so much better. Instead, when I did it myself, I discovered that my own skills had improved to the point where I could produce really good work myself.

It is possible, especially in self-publishing, to become so skilled at every aspect of the production process that you can do it all yourself and still produce a quality book. The learning curve is so sheer that it’s practically a cliff, but you can do it. And even if the work that you produced at the start of your career wasn’t all that good, you can improve to the point where your work is on par with that of professional designers.

The trouble is, it takes so much time and effort to get to that point that you may be better off hiring the work out. It takes a certain type of personality to DIY everything and produce a quality product without feeling overstretched. I’m pretty sure that’s my personality type, though of course I still have a lot to learn. But just because it’s DIY doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be of an inferior quality.

There are other things I learned in 2014 about the craft and business of writing, but this post is starting to get long so I think I’ll table it for the next post. Take care!

How going indie is like driving a manual (plus a cover reveal)

A couple of weeks ago, I got a new (to me) car. It’s a 2005 Ford Focus / Saleen: a two-door hatchback that drives like a racing car and gets about thirty miles per gallon (WA-A-AY better than the gas guzzler I was driving before). It’s also a manual transmission, which is perhaps the biggest difference between this and my previous car.

This is my first time driving stick shift, and I have to say, it is a lot of fun! When you drive a stick, each hand and each foot is doing something different. There’s a lot more to keep track of, and if you do things in the wrong order (like braking without engaging the clutch, or starting without giving it some gas), you run the risk of making the car stall or doing nasty things to your transmission. On the other hand, driving a manual gives you a much better feel for the engine and what it’s capable of. You can feel when you’re putting too much stress on it–or alternately, when you can push it a little further.

I usually like to walk everywhere, but ever since I got this car, I just want to drive it! It’s way more fun than driving an automatic, even with (or indeed, because of) the extra challenge. So today, while I was walking to BYU campus (alas, the parking situation there makes driving a major pain), I got to thinking about it, and I realized that driving a manual is a lot like being an indie author.

When you’re an indie, you have a lot more things to juggle, just like driving a manual. This gives you much greater control of your career, but it also makes it easier to stall or screw up. At the same time, because of that extra control, you’ve got a much better feel for the market, and probably a better connection with your readers. And for me at least, the extra challenge doesn’t make it less enjoyable, it actually makes me enjoy it more!

Nothing Found

This week, I had the first day where I sold 100+ books in a 24 hour period. That was pretty awesome! I’ve been running a $.99 sale for Star Wanderers: The Jeremiah Chronicles (Omnibus I-IV), and it got picked up by a couple of ebook sites that really pushed it in the right way. Now that I know how to run a sale like that, I hope to do it again, perhaps for Black Friday. And if you haven’t picked up this one yet, it’s on sale for $.99 through Friday.

Marketing and promotion is one of the harder parts about going indie for me, kind of like how finding the clutch point and starting without stalling is hard when you first drive a manual. The more that I practice, though, the better that I get at it, and the more I enjoy it.

Another area where I think I’ve more or less stalled is in my covers. When I put out the first few Gaia Nova novels, I spent a fair amount of money hiring out artists to do the illustrations, but I did the typography myself. On those earlier covers, it definitely shows. For my later books, I worked with a bunch of cover designers, and seeing their work made me realize that there’s definitely room for improvement on those earlier ones, especially for the print editions.

I’ve decided to redo the covers for those three novels (Bringing Stella Home, Desert Stars, and Stars of Blood and Glory), keeping the illustrations but changing the typography. I tried to find a cover designer to do it, but I wasn’t able to find one that did satisfactory work, and after playing around with them for a bit I think I can actually do them myself. I’ve got a lot more experience with covers and cover design now than I did when I was starting out, and I’ve learned a few photoshop tricks as well.

In any case, here is what I came up with for Bringing Stella Home:

How do you like it? I rather like how it turned out, though I’ll admit I’m still learning. I did the new design just this morning, so I figure I ought to wait a couple of days and maybe seek out some feedback from professional designers before I go through with it.

I hope to have the new edition out before the end of the month. The content and story will all be the same, but the cover and metadata will be updated, and some minor errors such as typos will be fixed. I also hope to do the same thing with Desert Stars and Stars of Blood and Glory. Once the new editions are out, I’ll probably run some sales and giveaways with them, so definitely stay tuned!

As for my other projects, the next book in the Sons of the Starfarers series is out with my first readers, so it’s on track for a January release. My next WIP is The Sword Keeper, a fantasy novel I think I’ve mentioned before, and I hope to get that one knocked out in about a month or so. It’s already halfway finished, so the hard part is just ahead. There are also a couple of Gaia Nova novels that I’ve been meaning to get around to, and probably will before the end of the year.

That just about does it. Look out for more covers soon! I’m definitely having fun with the new ones. 😀

Why writing retreats and seminars make me uneasy

Writing retreats and seminars make me uneasy. I’ve never attended one, mostly because the prices tend to run so high, and that’s part of what makes me so uneasy about them. Yes, writing is a business, and yes, the author deserves to be paid, but paid for what exactly? For telling stories, or for telling other people how to tell stories?

There’s an unfortunate tendency in the writing world, especially the SF&F corner of the writing world, for us to elevate authors to a quasi-godlike status and take them as a definitive final authority on the field. Certainly, when Brandon Sanderson or Orson Scott Card gives an opinion, I give it more weight than an anonymous handle on a message board somewhere. At the same time, though, an opinion is just an opinion, no matter where it comes from.

You don’t have to shell out a lot of money to learn the craft of writing. There are lots of excellent books on the subject, as well as online communities, videos on Youtube–I think all of Brandon Sanderson’s lectures from his English 318R class at BYU are now up on Youtube. More importantly, there’s no one stopping you from sitting down in front of a computer (or setting out a pen and paper) and learning from doing it yourself. So why do we need all these huge, expensive retreats and seminars?

Perhaps my view on this subject is different because I’m an indie writer. One of the great things about self-publishing is that it tears down the walls, throws open the gates, and levels the playing field for everyone. Since we all can be authors now, the pedestals are a lot shorter. The old authorities are no longer quite so definitive, because there’s so much room for experimentation in this new marketplace.

In the indie writing community, there’s a very strong ethic of sharing. Hugh Howey is probably the biggest example of this. He repeatedly goes out of his way to help his fellow writers, putting together the Author Earnings Report and being very generous in sharing everything he’s learned. He’s also very modest about it, constantly putting other, lesser-known authors forward as much better writers than he is. Instead of capitalizing on his knowledge by creating artificial scarcity, he puts it all out there on his blog and the internet communities where he participates.

Of course, retreats and seminars are just as useful for the networking opportunities as they are for the actual instruction. The thing is, just how useful is that networking really? The market is open–we all have access to readers now. The gatekeepers no longer have the power to make or break anyone’s career. And if you’re in the business of writing and telling stories, what better way to network is there than doing exactly that? Sure, it can boost your career to be on a first-name basis with a successful author/editor, but if you don’t also have the writing chops to back that up, it’s not going to do you much good.

I don’t want to call in doubt the motivations of those authors who do put on retreats and seminars. I think that for the most part, their motives are pure. But the structure is one of artificial scarcity that props up this legacy model of gatekeepers and pedestals. It makes me uneasy, because it grants too much of an air of solemnity and authority in a field where the brightest new voices are often self-taught.

Perhaps the thing that makes me most uneasy about these retreats and seminars is the fact that I’ve received so much bad writing advice over the years. To the extent that I have succeeded at all, it has been in spite of the advice I’ve received, not because of it. When I see people turning around and selling their advice for top dollar, it makes me very uneasy, regardless of their motivation in doing it.

I never want to participate as an instructor in expensive retreats or seminars. I don’t feel comfortable supporting that sort of thing. If I ever do get to the point where people would pay to hear me pontificate, I’m going to be very careful not to put myself out there as a definitive authority, since I’m sure any of my advice will be just as harmful to the wrong person as it is helpful to the right person. As for networking, I’d much rather do that through collaborating, reviewing, guest blogging, and putting anthologies together.

A Letter to Mr. Bezos

Mr. Bezos,

I know you’re a busy man, so if it’s true that you read all the emails directed to this account, I’ll keep it brief.

I recently read an open letter written by Douglas Preston that encourages readers and writers to email you to let you know what they think about the hardball negotiating tactics in the contract dispute between Amazon and Hachette Book Group. I am an author who has published more than 20 books via Kindle Direct Publishing and is now making a living thanks to the ability that your company has given me to put my books in front of readers.

I think that you, Mr. Bezos, have done more to “defend literature” and advance books and reading than all of the Big 5 publishers combined. The big publishers are middlemen whose existence depends on inserting themselves between readers and writers and extracting as much value from them as they can. They are parasites who would rather treat authors like indentured servants and hold them as collateral than treat them as valued business partners.

For all of our sakes, I hope that you squeeze the bastards at Hachette until they beg you for mercy. The fact that Hachette is using their authors as hostages should not stop you from sticking to your guns. You are taking power from the monopolistic big publishers and putting it back into the hands of readers and writers everywhere, and we–the little guys–can see that clearly.

Stick to your guns, Mr. Bezos! Make the bastards squeal!

Joe

Z is for Slaying the Zombie Memes of Publishing

Being an indie writer is awesome. Without a doubt, self-publishing is one of the best decisions I have ever made, and has enabled me to build exactly the kind of writing career I have always wanted.

So it frustrates me to no end when people in the publishing industry try to discourage new writers from self-publishing the way that I did. What’s worse, they often justify their advice with information that has been debunked or opinions that have been shown to be unfounded. These “zombie memes” keep coming back as if the act of repeating them is enough to make them true.

Some examples of these zombie memes include:

Self-publishing is a bubble.
Ebook growth is stalling and will soon decline.
Getting visibility as a self-published author is impossible.
Amazon is evil because _______.
Amazon is destroying literature.
Self-publishing is destroying literature.
______ is destroying literature.
Publishers nurture writers.
Publishers are the guardians of literature.
Traditional publishers only publish high-quality books.
Self-published books are flooding the market with crap.
Only a handful of indie writers are making a living.
Self-publishers should not be called authors.
Ebooks shouldn’t be cheaper than print.
Publishing a book is harder than writing one.
Readers are reading the wrong books.
Publishers help authors navigate the digital world.
Agents help authors navigate the digital world.
There is nothing unethical about agents who act like publishers.
There is nothing unethical about standard publishing contracts.

Bullshit, all of it. Pure, unfiltered bullshit.

No matter how many times you kill these memes, they just refuse to die. Some people get a thrill at rehashing all the old arguments, but not me. I’d much rather leave the good fight to others, and quietly keep building my career while the naysayers all please themselves with the sound of their own voices.

Then again, perhaps that’s the key to slaying the zombie memes right there–successfully building your own career in spite of all the critics and naysayers. It’s a lot harder to believe all this crap when you see enough people succeeding in spite of it. The critical mass of indie writers is growing, and becoming a lot harder for the establishment to ignore.

This month, I sold over 700 books. I’m making enough on my books now that I don’t need a full-time or even a part-time job–writing is what I do full-time now. It’s still touch-and-go from month to month, but I’m living the dream, and because of the opportunities made possible by self-publishing, I have every confidence that I will continue to live that dream until the day I die.

The best way to slay a zombie meme is to create a competing meme that speaks even louder. That’s exactly what we in the indie movement are doing. And one day, when the zombie memes are finally dead for good, ours will be alive and thriving. It’s a new world of publishing, and never a better time to be a writer.

Y is for Yog’s Law

Anyone who was trying to break into publishing before the ebook revolution should be familiar with Yog’s law, which states:

Money should always flow toward the writer.

The purpose of the law was to keep new writers from falling into one of the many writing scams. Places that charged writers to publish were almost all vanity presses, and those that weren’t didn’t give writers access to the distribution channels necessary to make their work widely available. If you wanted to have a career, you had to go with a publisher, and the best way to tell if a publisher was legitimate was to look at how the money flowed.

Nowadays, with self-publishing, the line between writer and publisher has been blurred. An indie writer can expect to contract out work, sometimes to the tune of several hundred or even thousand dollars, in order to produce a professional product. In these cases, money clearly is not flowing to the writer. So what does this mean for Yog’s Law?

Some people have attempted to reformulate Yog’s law by drawing a distinction between the writing side of the business and the publishing side. While I think that that’s instructive, I’m not convinced it’s entirely useful. The distinction is not always clear, and even where it is, in practical terms it’s basically meaningless. You can just as easily fall for a publishing scam with your publisher hat on as with your writer hat.

So is Yog’s Law obsolete? Is it a curious relic of a publishing era that is passing into the twilight of history? In its old formulation, perhaps, but I would like to propose a new formulation that is perhaps even more relevant to today’s publishing industry than the old one ever was. That formulation is as follows:

Control should always flow toward the writer.

In the old days of publishing, writers had virtually no control over their careers. Publishers decided which books would make it to readers, which writers would get the attention of the publishing establishment, and how many books those writers could publish in a year. Authors had almost no say in their cover art, marketing, or any other aspect of the production and distribution of their work. In such an environment, the only assurance they had that their publisher would do a reasonably competent job was by seeing whether they put their money where their mouth was–hence Yog’s Law.

But today, writers do have control. We have a variety of publishing options today, and money isn’t the only factor in determining whether a path is legitimate. In fact, it may be one of the worst factors. Not only have advances gotten worse in the last few years, but the rights grabs have gotten so bad that signing a traditional book deal today basically amounts to selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. Yes, money is flowing to the writer, but the writer is still getting screwed.

Control means being able to have the final say on the cover art, the editing, or on an other aspect of a book’s production. It means that important stuff like the metadata or book description is not left to an entry-level employee that the author has never met.

Control means that no contract should be one-sided. It means an end to non-compete clauses of any kind. It means that rights reversions should actually have meaning, and that no book should be tied up for the life of copyright.

Control means that the bulk of the revenue should go to the person who does the bulk of the work. Bringing a book to market is not a challenge in the digital age, but writing a book certainly is. Publishers exist to serve writers, not the other way around.

Control means that a writer should know exactly what services they are paying for. If they commission work from a freelance editor or cover designer, they should be the one who directs that work, not a third-party who doesn’t also assume some of the risk if the project doesn’t work out.

By the standard of control flowing to the writer, most of the contracts coming out of New York fail miserably. That is not acceptable in an age where the New York publishers aren’t the only game in town. If a writer can make a living by going it on their own, then anyone who pays less than a living wage is basically running a scam.

Control should always flow toward the writer. Money used to serve as a proxy for control, but now that we have the real thing it’s no longer the best measure. Control, not money, is what you need to build a career.

X is for Expectations

What sort of expectations should or shouldn’t you have when you start self-publishing? What is plausible, and what is unrealistic?

Honestly, it’s probably a good idea to go into it with expectations that are fairly low. Most books don’t sell more than a handful of copies, and there’s no way to tell what will and will not take off (if there was, publishing would be a whole lot more lucrative). There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, but it will save yourself a lot of trouble and heartbreak (not to mention, money) if you go in expecting things to be kind of rough for the first few years.

When I started out with “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and a couple of other shorts, they didn’t hardly sell at all. Then I published Genesis Earth, and while I saw maybe 50 sales in the first three months, after that they fell off to single digits for the next two years (and yes, zero is a digit). I made my shorts free for a while, and they got tens of thousands of downloads, but that didn’t really translate into sales.

I didn’t expect to be a runaway bestseller right out of the gate, so I wasn’t too disappointed, but still it was kind of a blow. It was worse when Bringing Stella Home only got about ten sales in its first month before falling off to single digits just like Genesis Earth. I suppose things could have gone differently if I’d promoted a bit more aggressively, but that seemed like such a crap shoot that I channeled that energy into writing instead.

And it paid off eventually. When Star Wanderers took off, it generated some interest in all of my other books–not as much as I was expecting, but enough to bring them up to double digits every other month or so. My Star Wanderers books are all selling in the double and triple digits, and I couldn’t tell you why other than that the story just seems to strike the right chord with enough people. Those books would probably be doing better if I promoted them more, and since it looks considerably better than a crap shoot now, that’s something that I plan to be more aggressive about.

I think there’s an important difference between dreams and expectations. Dreams can suffer through setbacks considerably better, and help to maintain a sense of optimism that is perhaps one of the most important things an indie writer can have. Expectations, though, are much more practical and down to Earth, and can provide a useful yardstick for measuring progress. They can also provide an anchor in the face of uncertainty. Those are important things for an indie writer to have as well.

Expectations can be negative, though. If you don’t expect a book to do well, then perhaps you won’t put as much effort into it, sabotaging and self-rejecting your own work to the point where it really can’t do well. If you expect a book that hasn’t been selling at all to continue not to sell, you may lose sight of important opportunities to put it in front of the people who are most likely to fall in love with it.

Every genre is different, every book is different, and every writer is different. Because of this, no one can tell you exactly what to expect–including me. Like me, you might be stuck making nothing but pizza money for the first two years–or your books might take off fantastically well right from the start. There’s no way to know what will happen until you get your feet wet.