I know, it’s Wednesday. I know, this is when I’m supposed to do a How to Sell More Books Blog Post.
We’ll get back to that next week. This is more important. One of my best friends had a kid, and he’s got some health issues. This is your chance to get rewarded for helping somebody out.
See that cute little bastard in the photo? That’s my little buddy Wesley. He’s my friends Rich and Kat’s kid, and he need a new liver. Now, I know, a lot of us need new livers, but that’s because of our poor life decisions. Wesley hasn’t had time to make any shitty life choices yet, so he needs a hand. If you could find it in yourself to donate something to Wesley’s transplant fund, I’d really appreciate it.
I’ll even sweeten the pot.
Donate $5 – I’ll send you an ebook of Redemption Song, my Quincy Harker Short Story
Donate $10 – I’ll send you an ebook of Amazing Grace, my new novel release.
Donate $20 – I’ll send you your choice of collected Harker or Bubba ebook (Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, you get the idea).
Donate $50 – I’ll name a faerie after you in the Bubba book I’m working on right now. Plus choose an ebook reward from a lower tier.
Donate $100 – I’ll name the big monster of this Bubba book after you. Plus choose an ebook reward from a lower tier.
Donate $250 – I’ll send you, anywhere in the world, a signed hardback first edition (you can tell it’s a first edition because there’s a typo on the back cover! There were only two of these ever printed) of Harker Year One. This is a limited offer of ONE. UPDATE – This reward is already gone, because people are AWESOME! But don’t let that stop you from giving. I’ll come up with something excellent for you, I promise!
You can also just donate without asking for anything in return. Tell me about it when I see you, and I’ll give you a big-ass hug.
If you choose to donate, please email your receipt to me – john AT johnhartness.com, so I know you did a cool thing.
Thanks, and feel free to share. We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled pimping and promotion soon, but for now, I wanted to try and help a Junior Adventurer.
I’ve had an idea kicking around for a while to write a weird western, so I’m going to give it a shot. Posting chapters here kept me honest on Amazing Grace, so maybe it’ll keep me motivated on this project, too. It’s called Angel in the Dust (for now), and it’s a near-future or alternate reality western set in a world where the United States is very different, and angels walk among us. Much to our chagrin. I’ll try to post a chapter every Monday, like I did with Grace. Hopefully, this will be as good.
Prologue
The sun beat down like a hammer, cracking the hard dirt and sending jagged lines off in every direction to the horizon, where wavy lines of heat spun up off the red dirt to twist and dance along the edges of the purple sky. The man rode, head down, his bandanna shielding what parts of his neck his hat didn’t shade. He looked neither right nor left, just down and straight ahead, riding as if asleep through the blazing afternoon sun. Every so often, once every mile or two, he reached down to his hip and drew a flask to his lips. A short sip of water, just enough to wash the dust from his lips and cut the muck that filled his throat.
If she hadn’t been lying so close to what passed for a road in this blazing hellhole he never would have seen her. If his horse hadn’t tweaked a shoe when it shied away from a rattlesnake he never would have stopped there. If he hadn’t been unusually clumsy and dropped the hoof pick he never would have heard her. If his batteries weren’t dead, he would have been listening to music on his headphones, the one luxury he permitted himself, and he wouldn’t have noticed her lying there covered in sand.
But she was there, right beside the road where his horse pulled up with the beginnings of a limp, just a mile past where his batteries died, and he did drop the hoof pick on the tarmac, and it bounced onto her back, and when he picked it up, she moved.
It was more of a weak twitch than any conscious movement; she was too far gone for that. But when her body convulsed ever so slightly at his touch, just enough wind-blown sand fell off her to reveal that she was, in fact, a person.
So y’all might have heard that I was in St. Louis last weekend, hitting up both Penned Con 2017 and Archon 41. My conversations with several people at both cons raised the question – Is it worth it?
It’s a valid question, and one I ask myself often when I go to conventions. Last week I drove over 1500 miles round trip. I was away from home for six days. I spent five nights in a hotel, and ate out every meal for six days. That’s not an insignificant investment in time, effort, and money, and that’s before we go into the inventory involved with me taking over 120 paperbacks and hardbacks across five states!
So when I evaluate a convention’s worth, I look first at what kind of convention it is. There are several major types of convention that I attend, some more frequently than others, and I expect different things from all of them. Today, we’ll take a look at what cons fit into what type, and what I’m looking for at each one.
Let’s start with the ones that are frequently the most expensive, and have the lowest opportunity for immediate return on investment, but may have the greatest long term ROI – industry cons. In the writing business there are several different types of industry con, and they are usually the ones that have the highest cost to attend. When I talk about industry cons, I mean World Fantasy Con, World Horror Con, RWA Nationals, and ThrillerFest. Regional writer festivals like the NC Writers’ Network Fall Gathering also fall into this category.
Industry cons often cost everyone but the volunteers and Guests of Honor to attend. Unlike comic cons or fandom cons, even the vendors at some professional cons still have to buy their badge on top of their table fee. And if you don’t have a table, even if you’ve been a pro in the field for decades, you may still have to spring for a badge. That’s not a knock on the convention, it’s just the way they are structured. The target audience of the con is the pros, so they aren’t using your work on panels to draw in the Muggles, they are putting you on maybe one or two panels to speak to your peers.So at these cons you pay for your badge. And they ain’t cheap. Some of these cons will cost several hundred dollars to attend, and it’s less likely that you’ll have an opportunity to make that cost back by selling books, as the number of fans in attendance is far lower than the number of pros. You may find yourself laying out $300 for a badge, then $150-250 per night for a hotel, plus travel. These cons can easily set you back a grand or more, with little to no opportunity to recoup that money quickly.
So why go? Because it’s a long game, remember? I had a great meeting at Dragon Con with an editor that I’m working on a proposal for. If it goes through, it’ll take most of 2018 before I see a dime off that meeting, and I’ve been building a relationship with that editor since 2014 at Dragon. It’s the long game. He’s not going to leave the business. I’m not going to leave the business. If it takes us four to six years to make any money off being friends, so be it. If we never make any money off being friends, so be it. But the connections you make at industry cons have so many more ancillary benefits over dollars and cents and immediate sales. Maybe a drink in the Westin bar turns into a cover blurb given or received. Maybe a panel on the Urban Fantasy track results in contracts for eight novellas (See: Mason Dixon, Monster Hunter). Maybe you meet somebody that you can give advice to, or somebody that you can learn from. Industry cons are great for that kind of networking, that kind of relationship building. I didn’t sell a single book at World Horror Con, but spending the weekend hanging out with Alethea Kontis, Jake Bible, Chris Golden, Charles Rutledge, James Tuck, and other friends was well worth the expense of the con.
That’s not to say that you should jump in on every industry con that’s within driving distance. I’ve never done the RWA national conference. I write very little romance, and most of what I publish can only be called romance in the very loosest of terms. So I don’t go to those cons. I don’t go to the NC Writers’ Network Gathering except when it’s in Charlotte. It’s mainly a literary fiction, historical fiction, and poetry conference, without a ton of genre fiction writers or readers. So while I really like the organization and support their programming, I can’t justify it as an every-year con. I’ll be there in 2018 when they’re in Charlotte, though. That’s for damn sure. So you do have to balance potential return on investment with your attendance, but you don’t have to look at it as a black and white set of numbers on a balance sheet. I plan to attend World Fantasy Con next year in Baltimore because it’s drivable, and I can sell some books, raise the overall profile of Falstaff Books, and maybe sign up some more writers to our stable. It’ll take years to see if that investment will pay off.
Long. Game.
Next week we’ll talk about fandom cons, and maybe move into pop culture cons or comic cons/vendor hall cons. Later on we’ll look at what I call Starfucker cons, then we’ll talk about what you’re trying to get out of a con, how many you should do in a year, and when is it too much of a good thing?
Until then, I had a new book come out yesterday, so I’d love it if you’d go buy Amazing Grace. If you scroll back through the archives, you can hear me read the prologue. If you’ve already bought it, and enjoyed it, leave a review! They really matter.
As a little “Thank You!” to all of you who read Amazing Grace in its serial form, and offered encouragement as I wrote it, I gave you a little present –
This is the recorded Prologue to the novel, in my own voice, because I enjoy doing this piece at readings and thought y’all might like to hear what it sounds like to me.
You can buy Amazing Grace in your favorite ebook format here – books2read.com/u/4DoRWQ. Print copies are releasing 10/17/17, in softcover and hardcover.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? If we write more, we can publish more, and then we can sell more. I publish roughly 2-3 novels per year, plus a couple of short stories, plus anywhere from 9-14 novellas. This year, I will finish up with eight novellas, a couple of short stories, and two novels. Somewhere between 375,000 and 400,000 words of published fiction, plus around 100,000 words of blogging. I don’t count FB posts, but I do count the stuff I write here, because it’s written with intent and forethought, and usually some level of narrative thread. So close to half a million words, or a little more if we take into account the 60K of Black Knight #7 that I trashed, and the 25K of TECH Ops that I’m still working on.
That’s a lot of words. That’s what it takes for me to make a living. I don’t make any kind of extravagant living, but I am the wage-earner for my wife and I. That word count allows me to do that. It also allows me the time to work on Falstaff Books projects, and we will probably end the year producing 20 titles, every one of which I had some level of direct hand in producing.
So the question I get from a lot of writers is “How do you write that much?” Well, here’s how, and I have to give credit where due to Dean Wesley Smith, who wrote some very good blog posts in 2010-11 on a workmanlike approach to writing, and how much you could produce in a year if you just write 1,000 words per day. I shoot for a little more than that, but I also don’t write every single day.
But here’s my basic approach.
Divide and Conquer – I typically work on two projects at once, one main project and one side project. This lets me have a palette cleanser project that I can fiddle with when I need to let my lizard brain work out a plot problem.
Break Down the Project – My chapters are almost always 2,000 words long, so I shoot for one chapter per day on my main project. When I’m working a novella, that means that working Monday-Friday for three weeks gets me to 30,000 words. That’s the average length of my novellas, with a couple thousand words for an epilogue. Since I usually get to the last chapter and binge right through to “THE END,” I write a novella in three weeks. That’s a pretty relaxed pace. Then I use the 1K/day on my side projects to do things outside the Bubba or Harker universes, my novels, or work-for-hire stuff. I’m currently working on some work-for-hire serialized stuff for a client, and they want 5K per part. So that’s one week per serialized chunk.
Don’t Kill Myself – I mentioned that I write 3K per day, and I consider that a pretty relaxed pace. I can do 5K/day, but it’s tiring. I could train myself to write more, and faster, but I’m in this for the long haul, and I have yet to meet more than a couple of people who can do 5K/day for more than a year or two and make it consistently good. That’s pretty important to me – being able to do this for the long term. I’m seven years into my fiction writing career, and 11 years into my professional writing career, so I know what I can do consistently to make the words come out tight and requiring as little polish as possible. I want to turn in clean copy, and about 3-4K/day is my maximum sustainable pace for that. Much faster, and I spend so much time scrapping shit and rewriting that I am better off just writing slower in the first place.
Let Life Happen – I mentioned above that my output this year wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be. I had some months where I didn’t write much, and it was a struggle to get 2K per day. That happens, especially for those of us with depression, anxiety, bipolar (that’s me!) or other mental health issues. Or physical health issues, if you have those. Or family issues. Shit happens, and sometimes you have to deal with that. Hopefully if it shits all over your writing productivity, you either still have a day job, or you have enough of a backlist selling through to carry you. But you can’t freak out about that shit, or you’ll just create a whirlwind of doom and never write anything.
Hop Around a Little – I write four series currently, or more like 3.5, since the Harker books and the Shadow Council books are so intertwined. But that keeps my ADD appeased, with the occasional bone thrown to my distractions by doing something like Amazing Grace (which is out for preorder now). I would likely make more money if I just hammered out Harker novels as fast as I could. But I’m not in this just for the cash. Yes, this is how I make my living. Yes, I need this income to pay my bills. But as I keep saying, I am in this for the long haul. Amazing Grace could turn into a Hallmark movie series, for all I know. What I know about that book is that while writing it may mean that it takes me two years to finish the Harker plot Quest for Glory, I wrote a book I absolutely love and think is the best thing I’ve ever produced. That will pay me more dividends in the long run than jamming out another Harker novella or novel.
That’s what I do. That’s how I work, and how I make a living in this business. Am I killing it like some of the newer self-published Urban Fantasy authors? No. Am I still going to be here in five years? Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of people flame out in the past seven years, and I’ve found the method that lets me continue to produce at a reasonable pace and not burn myself out. You’ve got to find what works for you, but for me, writing for 3-4 hours each day gets the bills paid, as long as I’m doing all the other stuff that goes into being a full-time writer, more than half of which has nothing to do with actually writing.
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