Tag: publishing strategies

Fantasy from A to Z: U is for Unicorns

If you were expecting a post on unicorns or other mythical beasts, I hate to disappoint you again, but that’s not what this is going to be. Instead, I want to write a bit about that most mythical of all human creatures: the full-time fiction writer.

Okay, perhaps we’re not that mythical. After all, Brandon Sanderson estimates that of all his students over the years, perhaps as many as 10% of the ones who set out to become full-time writers actually make that dream into a reality. I sometimes wonder: would Brandon count me as one of those 10%? Should he? The answer to that is… complicated. 

One of the first questions I get whenever I tell people that I’m a writer is “oh, wow—how is that working out for you?” Which is really a roundabout way of asking how much money I make, and whether I’ve been able to turn it into a full-time career. I am not (yet) a major bestselling author, and the closest thing I’ve had to a breakout thus far has been my (now unpublished) Star Wanderers novella series, which managed (mostly by accident) to hit the algorithms correctly back when a permafree first-in-series with lots of direct sequels was the best path to success. Then the publishing landscape changed, the algorithms shifted to favor pay-to-play advertising, and my books got left behind.

I will admit that if it weren’t for my wife’s income, I wouldn’t be able to pursue writing full-time. As a family, we’re following a path very similar to my Scandinavian ancestors, where the wife tends the farm while the husband goes off a-viking. In other words, my wife has the stable, traditional career that provides our family with some degree of security, while I have the more risky career that has the potential to catapult us into transformative levels of wealth and prosperity. We’re doing just fine, but it does sometimes feel like my Viking ship has yet to land ashore.

Because here’s the thing: something like 90% of the money in book publishing (after the booksellers and publishers and other middlemen take their often-exorbitant cuts) goes to less than 1% of the writers who actually make any money (and something like 30% of kindle books never sell a single copy). 

For every Brandon Sanderson, there are thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of published authors who write on nights and weekends while holding down a day job to pay the bills. My writing contributes enough to the family budget to justify pursuing it, but if I were still single, I would need at least a part-time job.

Indie publishing has created a lot of opportunity for authors to make a career out of their writing, and there are many successful indies who are making a decent living at it. At the same time, indie publishing has also massively exploded the number of books that are published, so the proportion of full-time to still-aspiring authors is probably about the same (and may have actually tilted the other way). 

In recent years, it has very much turned into a zero-sum pay-to-play game, especially with advertising. From what I can tell, most authors lose money on advertising, and most of those who are making money are spending upwards of $10,000 each month to make $11,000. The elite few who learn how to successfully game the algorithms to blow up their books often put their writing on the backburner to launch their own companies or provide publishing services, leveraging their expertise to make a lot more than they otherwise would.

The algorithms are changing books in some very strange ways. If J.R.R. Tolkien or Roger Zelazny or Robert E. Howard were writing today, would they be able to make it in today’s publishing environment? 

Howard’s Conan stories would either have to be a lot sexier, or else would have to include the sort of tables and character stats you find in LitRPG. His covers would also be a lot more anime, and show a ridiculous amount of cleavage (which he actually might not have had a problem with, judging from some of the old Weird Tales covers). 

Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber would all be far too short to make it in Kindle Unlimited—to make it in that game, you have to have super long books that max out on page reads, in order to maximize advertising ROI so that you can outbid your competitors. And if you aren’t winning the pay-to-play advertising game, your KU books will sink like rocks. Also, Zelazny took way too much time between books. Gotta work on that rapid release strategy, Roger.

As for Tolkien… hoo boy, there’s an author who did everything wrong. Decades and decades spent polishing his magnum opus, with a short prequel novel that falls squarely in the children’s category (totally different genre) as the only other fantasy book published in his lifetime. I suppose he could have serialized Lord of the Rings, except nothing really happened in episode 1: A Long-Expected Party. Certainly not anything that would adequately foreshadow all the dark and epic battles to come. Perhaps if he followed a first-in-series permafree strategy, and just gave away Fellowship of the Ring for free… and then made The Hobbit his reader magnet for signing up for his email list… maybe that could have worked? After all, there’s always BookBub…

I jest, of course. Each of these authors’ books became classics, not because of their marketing strategy, but because they hit the cultural zeitgeist in exactly the right way. But is it possible for an author to do that today without also getting a boost from the algorithms? Or do the algorithms have more power to shape our culture than anything else? Those are disturbing questions, and I honestly do not know the answer.

And then there’s the question of AI, which is massively disrupting all of the creative fields. In the interest of full disclosure, I am actually quite sanguine about generative AI, and have already been working to incorporate it into my creative process. I’m not a fan of AI slop, but I don’t feel particularly threatened by it. I decided a long time ago that if AI ever became good enough to write an entertaining book, it still would never be able to write a Joe Vasicek book. That’s insulated me from most of the doom porn out there.

Right now, there is a HUGE fight happening between authors like me who are embracing AI, and authors who treat it all as anathema, and have vowed to never use any sort of AI in any of their books (except Grammarly, of course, because… reasons. And Microsoft Word. And…) Frankly, it reminds me of the big debate between indie and traditionally published authors, back before self-publishing had lost its stigma. The biggest difference is that the level of online outrage has been ramped up to 11, mostly as a result of the social media algorithms (which weren’t as robust or as powerful back in the early 2010s). I suspect that we will ultimately settle on a “hybrid” approach, much like we did with publishing, but the sheer level of vitriol has made me wonder about that. 

On the reader end of things, though, it seems like most readers don’t really care if a book was written with or without AI assistance, so long as it’s actually a good book. Which means that there is a real opportunity for authors who 1) know how to tell great stories, 2) have already found and honed their voice, and 3) know how to strike the right balance between the AI and the human elements. 

Which describes my own position almost perfectly. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve read, written, and published enough books that I have a pretty good handle on what makes a great story. I’ve also honed my voice well enough that I can write in it quite comfortably. And as for the balance between AI and human writing, I’ve been working hard on that since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022. Half a dozen books and about a million words later, I’ve learned quite a lot about how to best strike that balance.

Will AI replace authors entirely, making this particular unicorn extinct? I don’t think so. But AI may radically change our concept of what “books,” or “writers,” or “writing” really are. A long time ago, I realized that even if AI became good enough to write a decent book, it would never be able to write a Joe Vasicek book. Only I can do that. Whether or not that’s worth something is up to the readers to decide.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

Navigating Woke SF, Part 3: Toward a New Short Story Strategy

So I really love how China Mike Glyer cherry-picked the excerpts that he quoted from my last blog post, leaving out how I said that it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt, or how you can’t take diversity statements at face value because of all the elitist signalling language. But the thing that I especially love is the way he characterized all of what I said as an “opportunity to learn from a professional why he’s self-rejecting from these short fiction markets.”

No, That’s Not Self-Rejection

There are so many things wrong with the phrase “self-rejection.” On its face, it sounds empowering, but the underlying assumption is that submitting your short stories to the traditional markets is your best/only option, and therefore you’d be a fool not to follow that path. Is that really an empowering message? Or is it actually more empowering—not to mention, straightforward—to say that it’s not you rejecting yourself, but you rejecting them?

For a long time, though, I really did believe that choosing not to submit a story to a high-paying market was tantamount to rejecting my own story. Even as an indie author, I still believed that for a short story to be successful, it had to be traditionally published first.

That was the thinking that informed my old short story strategy. Submit to the traditional markets first, and don’t self-publish until all of the high-paying professional markets have been exhausted, or (hopefully) until the exclusivity period of your contract wears off. You might spend years sending your story out to the markets, only to find that self-publishing is the only way to get it out into the world, but at least you have the moral victory of knowing you didn’t “self-reject.” Except, in a world where it’s possible to be your own publisher, you did reject your own story all those years, simply by choosing to keep it on submission instead of publishing it yourself!

To be fair, when it comes to short stories, self-publishing and traditional publishing are not mutually exclusive. And years of experience with self-publishing short stories has taught me that it’s very difficult to earn significant money with them. As I put it a couple of months ago:

…short stories can be useful to do just about every other thing except make money selling them directly. If you price the singles at $2.99, you might sell as many as one or two per year, making less than $5. If you price them at 99¢, you may sell as many as a dozen per year, if you’re lucky—again, making less than $5. I didn’t have much luck getting bundles of 3-5 to sell, but larger collections of 10 to 12 stories do occasionally sell, and at a decent enough rate that I’m earning more on those stories than I would if I’d sold them individually as singles. But short story collections don’t sell anywhere near as well as novels.

So if you can expect to sell a short story to a high-paying market in a reasonable period of time, it certainly makes sense to put it out on submission instead of self-publishing it first. But as I’ve established in the last two posts, when most of the high-paying markets have gone totally woke, that changes the equation—especially if you are a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee.

To review, here are the potential benefits of submitting to the traditional short story markets first:

  • The pay.
  • Marketing.
  • Prestige and reputation.
  • Networking.
  • Awards and SFWA membership, if you care about that. I don’t.

And here are the potential drawbacks:

  • Lost time.
  • Lost time in exclusivity.
  • Lost time in submission.
  • Lost time not submitting simultaneously.
  • Lost time running out of open markets.

In short, the biggest potential drawback is all of that lost time where you could have self-published that story, but didn’t. Tell me again how that isn’t self-rejection?

Costs and Benefits of Self-Publishing (and How Wokeness Changes the Equation)

So if you can’t really expect to make any money self-publishing short stories, what good are they anyway?

In my previous post, I compared short stories to pawns in the game of chess. The pawn is the weakest piece in the game, but many chess masters still consider it the “soul of the game,” not because of what each piece individually can do, but what they can accomplish when taken together. A strong pawn structure is key to both openings and midgame strategy, and in the endgame, pawns become critically important as they threaten to advance to the final rank, where they can be queened.

Short stories are similar to pawns in this way. Taken individually, they’re not particularly significant, and if you’ve only written or published one or two of them, they’re probably not going to have a huge impact on your career. But when you have a bunch of them and get them to work together, they can build your career (not to mention, help you develop your craft) quite effectively. And there’s always the chance that you can get one optioned for film, just like advancing a pawn to the back rank.

About a year ago, I did something very unconventional and made all of my short story singles free. Here was my thinking behind that decision:

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.

In the past several months since embarking on this experiment, I’m happy to report that it’s been a success! Not only have these free short story singles brought in new readers by giving them a wider sample of my work, but they’ve also been quite effective at building engagement among my newsletter subscribers and driving sales of my other works.

So here are the benefits I’ve seen by publishing free short story singles:

  • Marketing. The free short story singles are great marketing tools because the cost to try them out is minimal, not only in terms of price but in terms of time.
  • Discoverability. Nothing is quite as good at getting your name out there as a free story.
  • Name recognition. They say the average person has to see your brand at least seven times before it starts to stick. By putting a bunch of short stories out there that readers can pick up for free, it helps my name to stick with them.
  • Engagement. My short story singles are some of my most—and best—reviewed ebooks. This is something I genuinely didn’t expect, but it’s helped to boost the effectiveness of everything else.
  • Converting casual readers into fans. This has also been a pleasant surprise. Every time I send out a newsletter plugging one of my free short story singles—even one that’s been out for a while—I see an uptick in sales of my other books, as well as an uptick in fanmail from readers who credit the short stories for really turning them onto my work.
  • Regularly putting out new work. This is potentially huge. At the end of the day, nothing else is as good at selling your books as publishing the next book. Ideally, all those books would be novels, but since I’m not the kind of writer who can put out a new novel every month, short stories can pick up the slack—especially if they’re free.

There are still a lot of things that I still want to tweak, both to drive organic newsletter subscribers and to drive sales of my short story collections, but in terms of overall strategy I think I’ve got the self-publishing end down pretty good. So what are the drawbacks?

Because most of the high-paying short story markets only purchase first publication rights, the cost is that you give up what you could have gotten by going with the traditional markets first. But if all of those markets have gone too far woke, that changes the equation considerably:

  • The Pay. If all but a handful of the higher paying markets have gone woke and are therefore off the table, it doesn’t make sense to hold out for the money—nor does it make sense to make pay rates the deciding factor in whether or not to submit. If you have the time on your publishing schedule to send it out, great! Go for it! But don’t let the hope of a couple hundred bucks keep you from putting it out yourself.
  • Marketing. If a market has gone woke, then it’s reasonable to assume that its readers and supporters have also gone woke. Since that’s not my target audience, it doesn’t make sense to hold out for getting published, no matter how large their readership or subscriber base. In fact, publication with a woke market may actually hurt me by turning off the very non-woke readers that I’m hoping to reach.
  • Prestige and reputation. Same as above. If a market has gone woke, their reputation precedes them for both good and ill. Better to know my target audience and stay true to them than to seek honors from those who insist I bend the knee.
  • Networking. If my predictions are correct and the culture is starting to shift decisively against everything woke, then the writers and editors I ought to be networking with are largely working on passion projects and semi-pro startups, not the established markets.

Revised Short Story Strategy

With all of that in mind, here is my new short story strategy:

Stage Zero: Put the Story on the Self-Publishing Schedule

The goal here is to publish something new consistently every month. Every time I write a short story, I immediately put it on the publishing schedule for a month where I don’t have a novel or a bundle already scheduled.

At a minimum, I should have enough stories to fill out the publishing schedule for at least the next six months. That way, if one of them sells to a traditional market, I can bump all the other ones forward, or have time to write something new. And ideally, I should fill out the schedule for the next 12 to 18 months, in order to have more time to put new stories on submission.

But unlike before, I’m not going to wait until a story exhausts all the potential markets before I self-publish it. If the story hasn’t sold yet to a traditional market and it’s slotted to be self-published next month, self-publishing takes precedence.

Stage One: Submit to the Traditional Markets

Before, my plan was to submit to all of the available markets that paid at least 5¢ per word, starting at the highest paying ones and working my way down until all of them were exhausted. But since most of those markets have gone incurably woke and it no longer makes sense to hold out for the pay, I’m now willing to submit to any market that pays at least 1¢ per word.

Since time is the key factor here—and the most relevant cost—instead of starting with the highest paying markets and working my way down, I’ll prioritize markets that allow simultaneous submissions and hit them all up at about the same time. Of course, if the story sells, I’ll promptly inform all of the other markets and withdraw my story. The same holds true if the story is still out for submission when I self-publish it.

For markets that allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll submit to any market that has an average wait time of 90 days or less, but for markets that do not allow simultaneous submissions, I’ll only send my story to them if their average wait time is 45 days or less. Again, time is the key factor here, and the most relevant cost. If a market can’t turn around my submission in less than six weeks, and still demands that I give them the exclusive right to consider my story, free of charge, I’m probably better off submitting elsewhere.

Stage Two: Self-Publish as a Free Short Story Single

This part of the plan remains exactly the same as before. But since ideally I’m turning around stories faster, that means I can put out short story collections faster as well. I’m not sure when I should decide to keep the short story single up while it’s also bundled in a collection, but that’s a publishing decision that has little to do with navigating the woke SF markets, so I’ll mull it over for now.

Stage Three: Bundle in Collections and Submit to the Reprint Markets

Again, this part of the plan is largely unchanged, with the caveat that I won’t be submitting my stories to any market that’s gone totally woke. Because of this, there may be times when my previously published stories aren’t on submission at all, but since that’s already the case, I’m not too worried about it. Besides, submitting to the reprint markets isn’t a high priority.

Conclusions

Thank goodness we live in a time when independent publishing is a viable option! If not, there’s a very good chance that none of my stories would have an avenue for getting out into the world, simply because I’m a straight white male who refuses to bend the knee to the woke establishment’s lies. In spite of all the insanity—and in spite of the fact that most of the major SF&F short story markets have gone completely woke—this is still the best time in history to be a writer and a reader.

Navigating Woke SF, Part 2: When Is It Not Worth Submitting?

So a couple of hours after I published my last blog post, China Mike Glyer of File 770 infamy picked it up for his daily pixel scroll. Hi, China Mike! I thought you might be looking for some red meat to feed your readers—aside from the Chinese clickfarms, of course—but I was especially pleased that you included my affiliate links with the excerpt you copy-pasted! Not only does this bring in some extra cash (thanks, China Mike!), but it also gives me some metrics to compare File 770 with, say, some of the other indie authors that I do newsletter swaps with. And wow… let’s just say there’s a reason why they call you China Mike Glyer and leave it at that.

So in today’s episode of red meat for China Mike, I’d like to pick up where I left off with the last post and pose the question: when is a science fiction market too woke to be worth submitting to? But to answer that question, we first need to answer: why bother submitting short stories to traditional markets at all, when self-publishing is an option?

It’s a good question, because there are a lot of good reasons to self-publish short stories. In my experience, they don’t earn particularly well on their own, but they are quite useful as newsletter magnets to gain new email subscribers, free ebook giveaways to let readers sample your work, and giveaways for newsletter subscribers to remind them that you exist and keep your books in the forefront of your mind. I make all my short story singles free on all the ebookstores, and keep them up until I have enough to bundle them into a collection, at which point I take them down and submit to the reprint markets. It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for me so far.

Potential Benefits of Submitting to Traditional Markets

So why submit to traditional markets first? Why hold off self-publishing in the hopes that you can sell first publication rights? Here are a few of the reasons:

  • The pay. A professional short story sale will bring in several hundred dollars, and even a semi-professional sale (1¢ per word or more) will typically earn more than pizza money. Over the lifetime of a typical story, that’s a good chunk of the income you can expect to earn from it (unless it’s optioned for a movie, of course).
  • Advertising. A short story sale, especially to a higher-paying market, will get your work—and your name—out to many readers who may have never heard of you before. Making your self-published short stories free accomplishes a similar thing, but with a different audience. Lots of readers who follow the magazines don’t typically look up free short stories on Amazon, though I’m sure that some of them do.
  • Prestige and reputation. Whenever you make a professional or semi-pro sale, that’s another human being proclaiming that your story is good enough to pay you for the privilege of publishing it. The SF&F short story markets are incredibly competitive, especially the higher-paying ones. Not all readers care about this, but being able to say that your stories have been published in Analog, or Asimov’s, or F&SF helps to set you apart from other authors—and many readers do sit up and notice. I certainly do.
  • Networking. Breaking into a short story market can be a great way to make connections with other writers and editors in the field, which can open up some really great opportunities later. I’ve had some really great experiences with this, and I look forward to having more in the future. You never know how things will turn out when you put yourself out there!

I suppose you could also include “awards” and “SFWA membership” on that list, but frankly I don’t care much about either of those. Contrary to the impression that China Mike wants to give you, I’m really not much of a drama llama, and as for awards… we’ll get there.

Potential Drawbacks of Submitting to Traditional Markets

Importantly, there are several potential drawbacks to putting your stories out on submission, especially if you have a viable self-publishing strategy. Some of those reasons include:

  • Lost time. It takes a lot of time to submit your stories to all the traditional markets, even just the professional ones. I used public data on The Submission Grinder to discover that the average wait time for professional SF&F markets is about 30 days, which means that if you want to submit to all of them, you won’t be able to self-publish that story for years.
  • Exclusivity. A lot of markets include an exclusivity period in their contracts, which can run upwards of a year or longer. Again, that’s a lot of lost time where you can’t self-publish that story, even if it does sell.
  • A very competitive market. You can keep a story out on submission for years, only to exhaust all but the token-paying markets. This isn’t necessarily a judgment of the story’s quality, either—I have stories that I’ve sent out 30+ times that have received more than 25% personalized rejections, that have never been picked up by a traditional publisher. There are just too many really good stories out there for the higher-paying markets to publish them all.
  • No simultaneous submissions. This one really bugs me. For some reason, most of the higher-paying SF&F markets don’t allow simultaneous submissions—that is, they demand the exclusive right to consider your story before they pay you a dime. What’s worse, the wait times for many of them can stretch on for months. This is how stories end up on submission for years—and all of that is time where you can’t self-publish.
  • Submissions bandwidth. At any given time, there are only between 10-20 SF&F markets open to submissions that pay more than 5¢ per word (for flash fiction, it can get up to 30). The average wait time for these markets is about 30 days, and most of them do not allow multiple submissions. Therefore, if you write more than one short story per month for an extended period of time, you will very quickly run into a bandwidth problem, where there aren’t any available markets to submit to.

So those are the potential costs and benefits that you have to contend with when writing and publishing short stories.

How Wokeness Changes the Equation

Now, let’s get to the first question: when is a short story market so woke that it isn’t worth submitting anything to them? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few days, and while I don’t think it’s possible to come up with an objective, impartial standard, I do think that it’s important to draw the distinction, because wokeness changes the cost/benefit analysis substantially.

It wasn’t always this way. Traditional sci-fi publishing has trended to the political left (sometimes to the extreme political left) of mainstream American culture since the New Wave era back in the 60s and 70s. It seems that the campus radicals took over much of the field, not to mention the fact that American traditional publishing has always been centered in New York. But until just the last few years, it was still possible for left and right to coexist in our pluralistic society. People of different political persuasions could agree to disagree amicably, and while there may have still been whisper campaigns and secret author blacklists, you could still expect to see a healthy mix of opinions and perspectives in most places that published short stories.

That is not true today. Certain subjects and opinions have been deemed verboten, while others have been exalted to the status of eternal truth, and any story that questions or challenges the politically correct narrative doesn’t have a chance in most of these markets. In other words, science fiction has gone woke.

(As a side note, this reminds me of a review that I received for my short story “Payday,” in which the universal basic income leads to runaway hyperinflation, causing society to unravel and forcing the protagonist and his family to flee. Sound familiar? In the author’s note, I mentioned how the story had been rejected by all of the pro-paying science fiction markets, and the reader found that even more disturbing than the story itself.)

“Woke” is a slang term describing a basket of socioeconomic and political ideologies that are incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties. Taken to their logical conclusion, they end in the sort of totalitarian horrors the world saw in the 20th century (and continues to see today in communist China).

I recently listened to an episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast where he interviewed Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist. It was an incredibly powerful interview—well worth listening to in its entirety. One of the things that really struck me was the fact that nightmare dystopian societies can only endure so long as everyone, in their own little way, tacitly supports the lie. In such a society, declaring the truth is itself a supreme act of insurrection, because (in the words of Solzhenitsyn) “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

In the science fiction markets that have been taken over by wokeness, the truth is silenced by vicious accusations of white supremacy, transphobia, post-colonialism, and a hundred other virtue-signalling examples of doublethink. If George Orwell published 1984 today, they would probably pan it as anti-Asian and push to get it cancelled or banned. There can be no compromise with these people, as there is no room for discussion or debate. These woke ideologies possess people, who cling to it like the worst possible kind of religion.

I used to think that a story from someone like me would still be able to slip through, if it was good enough. But then I spent a year subscribed to every science fiction and fantasy market that had a free podcast. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, but the authors hit all the woke intersectional checkboxes—and made sure to tell you that in their author bios. There were some exceptions, of course, but that was the general rule. Whenever there was an exceptionally good story, it was usually from an author who only checked one or two of the boxes—but their story would usually check off a couple more, such as having an LGBTQ+ romantic subplot, or having mostly POC characters. And in the wokest sci-fi podcasts, the editors always made sure to pound you over the head with an explicit political message, sometimes even before the story itself.

Of course, there are still some short fiction markets that care more about the strength of your story than upholding the woke establishment narrative, or making sure all their authors hit all the right intersectional checkboxes. But not generally among the professional-paying markets.

So how woke is too woke?

The events of the past year have convinced me that wokeness is like a cancer: no matter how small or innocuous it is when it starts, if left untreated it will metastatize and grow. The only way to treat it is to remove it from your life. No compromise. No discussion or debate. The woke care nothing for right or wrong, truth or falsehood: only narrative and power. When they look at me, they do not see a person: they see a heirarchy of identities. And if my stories are any good—that is, if they serve the truth—then they see those stories as a threat. After all, “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Therefore, it cannot be a question of degree. If a market has gone even slightly woke, then submitting your stories is an exercise in futility if you don’t hit the right checkboxes or will not bend the knee. And I will never bend the knee.

How To Tell If a Market Is Woke

So now, with a working definition of “woke” (promoting ideologies incompatible with and antithetical to individual rights and liberties) and the determination that wokeness is toxic in any degree, how can I tell if a market has gone truly woke?

First of all, I think it’s important to give everyone—and every market—the benefit of the doubt. There are still people on the political left who can break bread with and hold reasonable conversations with those on the other side of the aisle. Likewise, there are still short story markets that tend to lean left, but will still publish good stories by authors across the political spectrum.

Second, it’s also important to point out that just because an editor hits one or two—or most—of the woke intersectional checkboxes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the market itself is woke. This isn’t a matter of balancing transgender people of color with straight white males—that’s merely wokeism in reverse! People are people are people, no matter how they identify. Anyone can become ideologically possessed, just as anyone can choose not to be.

So with that in mind, what are the red flags?

1) Has the market won any awards that have gone completely woke?

Specifically, I’m thinking here of the Hugo Awards. They were trending to the left for a very long time, but 2015 was the year that they specifically went woke by voting “no award” over several deserving authors and editors. The transformation was completed in 2017, when the new rules shut out the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and both of those movements died out.

Therefore, if a short story market has won a Hugo since 2015 or been nominated for a Hugo since 2017, I’m not going to bother submitting to them. And if a market has had stories that have won or been nominated for a Hugo in those years, I’m going to ignore the market as well, unless it appears to be a fluke or a one-off.

2) Does the market have an explicit diversity statement in their submission guidelines?

Diversity statements are not actually about reassuring minority authors that they are welcome to submit their stories. Instead, diversity statements are all about signalling. You can see this with the term “latinx.” The vast, vast majority of actual latinas and latinos have either never heard of the term or absolutely hate it, but because it’s a gender non-binary term, the woke absolutely love it—and use it primarily as a signal to other woke people just like them.

Therefore, if a market has an explicit diversity statement that contains woke signaling language, it’s going on the blacklist. Even if the market only put out a diversity statement to keep the woke mob from descending upon them, that’s still a sure sign that they’ve bent the knee.

Occasionally, a market won’t have a separate diversity statement, but will include language like “we welcome submissions from authors of all races, genders, and backgrounds.” In that case, it’s probably best to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they use the word “latinx,” even once (or “folx,” or “black bodies,” or “indigenous,” or…), then that’s a clear signal that they’re woke.

3) Does the market publish content that is explicitly woke?

Editors always say that the best way to know what they’re looking for is to read a couple of issues or listen to a couple of episodes or stories. That seems like a reasonable standard, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t hold them to it.

Do the editors ever go off on explicitly woke political rants, or try to explain the message of the story in woke ideological terms? Do the author bios read like a checklist of woke intersectional identities? Are the stories themselves often thinly veiled rants about woke issues? Again, it’s important to apply the benefit of the doubt here, but you can tell a lot about a market by what they choose to publish. I won’t be wasting my time with the markets that regularly publish any of those things.

Conclusion

I believe that the culture is changing, and an anti-woke backlash is forming that will shock the people who are too deeply esconsed in their echo chambers (here’s to you, File 770) to see it coming. If I had to guess, I’d say that we hit peak woke in our culture about a year ago, and now that the pendulum is swinging the other way, nothing will stop it until it goes as far to the anti-woke side as it did to the woke side.

I’m not yet sure if this is good or bad. If we reject the lies that wokeism is built upon and embrace the individual rights and liberties that informed our founding documents, it could be very good indeed. But a lot of damage has already been done, and if we merely exchange leftist-flavored collectivism for rightist-flavored collectivism, it could be very, very bad.

That’s why writers and creators like me have a very important role to play—that is, those of us who aren’t afraid to speak one word of truth. That alone is reason enough not to waste one moment of time on these woke science fiction markets whose great day of power is swiftly coming to an end.

My short story strategy has changed a lot in the last year, much like our country. I still need to work through all of the implications of this change in order to formulate a new publishing strategy. But I’ll leave that for another post. This is sufficient for now.

A New Short Story Plan

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:

  • Publish single short stories and charge only 99¢.
  • Publish single short stories and charge $2.99.
  • Bundle 3-5 stories together and charge $2.99 to $4.99.
  • Bundle 10-12 stories into a collection and charge $4.99.
  • Give the singles away for free.
  • Turn the singles into newsletter magnets to gain new subscribers.

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:

Stage One: Submitting to the Traditional Markets

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.

Stage Two: Self-Publishing as Free Singles

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.

Stage Three: Collections and the Reprint Markets

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!

Algorithms, social media addictions, and the endless churn of content

In the last 5-6 years, I’ve noticed a shift in most of the media content that I consume. Content has proliferated at an unprecedented rate, and the churn—or the rate at which new content pushes out old content—has become one of the driving factors for those of us trying to make our careers in this way.

We see it on YouTube, where three or four adpocalypses have massacred various channels, and where copystrikes have become part of the game. YouTubers who don’t put up content every day, like Tim Pool or Pewdiepie, quickly lose views and subscribers even when they do put up new content.

We see it in video games, where companies like Paradox are now making the bulk of their money on DLCs, some of which make the vanilla version almost unplayable. Back in the 90s, a game was a game was a game. You could get expansion packs for some of them, but that was just bonus content, not a core part of the gaming experience, or the business model.

It’s a huge issue in journalism, where the news cycle has accelerated so much that weeks feel like months, and months feel like years now. Remember the Kavanaugh hearings? That was less than a year ago. The Covington kids controversy happened this year. Everyone is in such a race to break the story that the quality of journalism has fallen considerably, but by the time the corrections come out, the news cycle has already moved on. Fake news indeed.

The churn has also become a major thing in the indie publishing scene. For the last few years, the established wisdom (if there is any) is that you need to publish a new book about every other month—preferably every other week—to keep your entire catalog from falling into obscurity. There’s a 30-day cliff and a 90-day cliff, at which points the Amazon algorithm stops favoring your books over new ones. And now, to complicate things, AMS ads are taking over from more organic book recommendation methods, like also-boughts. The treadmill is real, and it’s accelerating.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I can think of a few things that may be driving it. I don’t have any statistics or firm arguments to back it up yet, just a couple of hunches, but it’s still worth bringing them up to spark a discussion.

First, social media has taken over our society, not only in public life, but in personal life as well. Now more than ever before, we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media to interact with each other. The problem is that these social media sites are incentivized to get us addicted to them, since we are the product they sell—our data, our time, and our eyeballs. Every like is another dopamine hit. Every outrageous headline is another injection of cortisol.

We have literally become a society of drug addicts. The drugs may be naturally produced by our bodies, but big tech has figured out how to manipulate it like never before. And as addicts, we are always looking for our next hit.

That’s not all, though. There’s a feedback loop between the end-users who consume content, and the algorithms that deliver content recommendations to the end-users. When something new gets hot on social media, the algorithms act as a force multiplier to drive it even further. But because of our addiction, and the fact that we’re constantly looking for the next hit, things can fall off just as quickly as they rise. Hence the churn.

It’s also a function of the massive rate at which content is proliferating across all forms of media. I’m not sure how many millions of English-language books are published any year now, but it’s much, much more than it was back when tradpub was the only real game in town. Same with videos, music, news blogs, etc. With so much new content coming out all the time, and so many people on social media ready to share it, the conditions for churn have never been stronger.

But there’s another, more sinister aspect to all of this, and it has to do with the biases of big tech and Silicon Valley. Yes, there is a feedback loop that governs the algorithm, but it goes both ways: the people who write the algorithm can, within constraints, use it to reprogram all of us, or even society itself.

I don’t think it’s a mistake that the churn is worse on sites that are run by big tech, or worse on content creators who depend on the platforms that big tech provides. The authors experiencing the worst burnout all seem to be exclusive with Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, and news sites that are getting hit the worst now (Vice, Buzzfeed, etc) all depended on clickbait tactics to ride the Facebook algorithm.

There are a few content creators who seem to have escaped the churn. As a general rule, they seem to be scaling back their social media usage and developing more traditional income streams, like subscriptions, sponsorships, and email lists. Steven Crowder, Tim Pool, and Pewdiepie are all examples. A few of them, like Alex Jones, Carl Benjamin, and Paul Joseph Watson, are learning how to swim by getting tossed in the deep end. Big tech has deplatformed them, but they’re learning—and showing to the rest of us—that it’s possible to make your own path, even when all the algorithms conspire against you.

S2 E9: Milo Yiannopoulos: Past, present and future

I recently listened to a fascinating interview on the Jordan Peterson podcast, where he talked with Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo fell out of the public sphere when allegations of pedophilia emerged, getting him banned from CPAC in 2018. His career isn’t over, though, and his future prospects look quite bright, especially with the plan he’s been putting together. If he succeeds, big tech and the algorithms will never be able to touch him.

In my post a couple of days ago, I argued that one of the unique advantages of books over other forms of media is that they are timeless. As Kris Rusch puts it, books aren’t like produce—no matter how long they sit on the shelf, they don’t spoil. We are still reading books that were written centuries ago.

If that’s true, then there must be something about books that makes them resilient to churn. In fact, books may be the antidote to churn. That’s basically Jeff VanderMeer’s thesis in Booklife. It’s also worth rereading Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff, where he offers some helpful rules to keep social media and the algorithms from completely taking over our lives.

So as indie writers, what’s the best way to deal with all of this? I’m not entirely sure. Back in 2011 when I first started indie publishing, slow-build and long-tail strategies seemed a lot more viable than they do now. But if there is something inherent in books that makes them the antidote to churn, then there has to be a way to take advantage of that.

I’ll let you know when I find it.

Rethinking free

I recently read an interesting blog post on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, about how, how not, and whether to make your books free. The conclusion he comes to is this:

Free is short time, limited supply, and never on the major bookstore shelves.

In other words, no permafree, no free pulsing, and no publishing free online content on sites like InstaFreebie unless it’s for a limited time.

Three or four years ago, I probably would have pushed back pretty hard against this advice. There are still points of it that I disagree with, such as the idea that giving anything away for free devalues all your other work. Perhaps that’s true for physical product, but for digital content I think there’s a solid argument to be made that the rules have changed.

That said, a lot has happened in the last three or four years. Permafree worked really great until about the middle of 2014, at which point I noticed that it was a lot harder to generate any kind of interest in my free books. I switched to a free pulsing strategy in 2015, which was a lot more effective at giving away free books, but that didn’t always translate into more sales.

In fact, there’s a passage from Dean’s blog that sums it up real well:

A customer walks through your door and you have a wall of twenty pies in glass cases, all the smaller short story pies in a case in the center, and some specials near the cash register.

And there on your wall are three pies that say, “Free.”

And a bunch of short stories that are “Free.”

The customer can take an entire pie for free or buy one. As a customer, what would you do? Duh. You take the free pie and leave.

…

And pretty soon your customers start to change. The only people who come through the door are people who only want the free stuff. They would never buy something under any circumstances, but you are giving your pies away for free, so they take one.

Pretty soon there would be lines out the door to get your free pies and you would make nothing. The free takers would crowd out and devalue the pies you are trying to sell.

Now, I don’t entirely agree with Dean here. My 90-day sales chart on Amazon shows a predictable uptick in sales every time I set a book free and send out an email to my list. Most of my subscribers signed up through InstaFreebie, which means they’re probably not quite fans yet (and probably signed up for a bunch of authors’ lists).

But my long-term data tends to agree with Dean. Back in 2012 and 2013, there was a very clear correlation between free downloads and royalties / paid sales. Then, in 2014, that correlation started to become fuzzy. Over the next several months, it got progressively fuzzier (even though I was giving away more books), until today there’s really no correlation at all.

Obviously, YMMV and I can only speak for my own books. But there have been a lot of major shifts in the ebook market over the last five years. Kindle Unlimited has had a huge impact on the effectiveness of permafree, or any kind of free book strategy for that matter.

Point is, it may be personally useful to rethink my free strategy. I’m not going to stop doing the free book thing altogether, since I do think there’s still value to it (if for no other reason than that little sales bump, plus the handful of “thank you!” responses I get from my email subscribers each month). But instead of free pulsing two books each month, usually including a first-in-series novel, it may be better to do a 99¢ novel and a free short story.

The two biggest mistakes I’ve made so far in my writing career have been 1. underpricing my books, and 2. unpublishing books that were still selling. (I still can’t believe how stupid I was) Holding onto a free books strategy that isn’t working could easily become a close third. I’m not going to throw the bus into reverse while it’s barrelling down the highway at 70 mph, but some experimentation and a course correction may be in order.