by john | Jan 3, 2013 | Appearances, Business of publishing, Travel, Writing
Bullshit.
There, I think that’s enough of a post for one day, right?
No?
Okay, fine, I’ll expand a little. We’ve heard those words uttered for years about various teachers who have failed at various things, and I’m certainly guilty of throwing the phrase around more than once about a professor or two that I’ve had in my day. But now that I’m teaching with something resembling regularity at Carolina Learning Connection (next class Saturday, a few spots still available!), I realize what utter bullshit that is.
I am never focusing more on my writing than when I’m trying to explain writing to someone. This goes for editing as well, but for my post on editing you’ll have to wait until next week when I debut as the newest regular member of the Magical Words blog team! Yep, I’m no longer the pinch-hitter, I’m now a regular member of the team. I’ll be posting every other Thursday, alternating with the amazing and lovely Kalayna Price. So for more craft-specific posts, you’ll be able to find me there.
Eventually. For now, I’ll talk about these classes that I teach. So far, I’ve led three half-day workshops in rotation. One is called The Next Step, and it talks about the various paths to publication for various types of work. Since I’ve published everything from news articles to poetry to novels, I’ve seen a lot of angles of the publishing business in a very short time. The second class that I offer is Self-Publishing for Fun & Profit, where I talk about why people should self-publish, why they should NEVER self-publish, and what to expect if they decide to self-publish. Then I also teach a Social Media and Self-Promotion for the Writer class. This goes into Facebook, Twitter, blogging, why you should, why you shouldn’t, what you should do, what you should never do, and how to avoid my mistakes. :).
And other writers teach as well, frequently much better than me. If you want to see an amazing writing class, check out this YouTube series featuring Brandon Sanderson.
I have a great time teaching them, and am looking forward to this weekend’s class, but I really do work at these things. It’s not like back-breaking labor, I am sitting in a conference room talking to people for four hours, but the prep is sometimes tough. This weekend we’ll be looking at shrinking markets, as mergers in publishing are going to eventually narrow the number of major publishers even further. And with the timeline of corporate mergers, that narrowing will take place right about the time that books bought by those houses today are ready to drop. That means orphaned books, kiddies, so be careful who you’re submitting to for the next six months or so.
Just a little Nostradamus (sp?) action from your favorite hillbilly.
On a completely different tip, I continue to be amazed at the consistent growth in Bubba book sales. All the collected volumes continue to do well, and I’m very grateful for that. If anybody out there has a hookup with the SyFy channel, feel free to slip a Bubba ebook under the door. I think the series would be so awesome on that network. But that’s beside the point. At last night’s writer’s group I knocked out the outline for Bubba Season 2 Episode 1, called Love Hurts. But gimme your feedback – is that too similar to Love Stinks, which I used last year? Leave a comment and let a brutha know.
I’m also hip-deep in editing clients, and do not have any more slots for edits until the last week of January. So if you have a book ready to go that you want to have drop in March, get on board with me now or we won’t make that deadline. It takes a couple of solid weeks up to a couple of months to get a book polished and ready to go, so don’t find yourself behind the eight ball.
I’m out – got a bunch of freelance stuff due and some invoicing to send out. Also booking some travel. Very excited to have snagged a table at MidSouthCon this year, which I’ll be sharing with the awesome James R. Tuck. If you’re going to be in Memphis, please come by and say hello. And if you’re going to be anywhere in the Raleigh/Durham area next weekend, please come out to Illogicon and say hi! I’ll be there all three days!
by john | Oct 19, 2012 | Business of publishing, Writing
So the new Bubba the Monster Hunter story is out. You can check it out here. It’s the culmination of the storyline between Bubba and his psycho father, but at the end of the story I’m a bit of a dick.
I know, big surprise.
Remember, the only thing writers enjoy more than torturing characters is torturing readers. And I get to do both in one shot.
I leave you on a bit of a cliffhanger, but you won’t have to wait too long for a resolutions. I plan to pick back up with Bubba stories in January. So just a couple of months to wait.
But here’s the current plan for Bubba publications.
Shorts 1-4 are collected in Monsters Beware.
Shorts 5-8 are collected in Monsters Mashed.
The next collection will include Sixteen Tons, Family Tradition and Final Countdown. It will be called something like Monsters Everywhere, unless y’all give me a better two-word title starting with the word “monsters.” This will be a $3.99 ebook, a discount over buying all three books individually.
Then I’ll release a collection of all of the Bubba stories to date. It will be called Scattered, Smothered and Chunked: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season One. It’ll be on sale soon as a $9.99 ebook, which is cheaper than buying all eleven books individually.
Bump in the Night is the current Bubba print collection, collecting stories 1-8 for $15. It will go away, never to be seen again. I will soon (probably early next year) have a print edition for Scattered, Smothered and Chunked, so it’s easy for readers to get the whole story in one place. It’ll probably be about $20.
Then next year I’ll work on getting even more adventures of Bubba, Skeeter and Agent Amy. Assuming they all live through Final Countdown.
Just wanted to give y’all a publication update on everybody’s favorite redneck, so you know where we are with things. Lemme know if you’ve got title suggestions or any other feedback on the stories. They’re a lot of fun to write, so I’ll likely keep turning them out on the order of one about every month, with a little break now and then.
by john | Aug 10, 2012 | Appearances, Business of publishing, Real Life, Vampires
Still pushing for the finish line on Black Knight revisions. Also up to my ass reading submissions for The Big Bad, and learning a new respect for editors the world over. So far my co-editor and I have picked five or six stories out of fifty or so to go into the anthology, but there’s still a LOT of reading to do. I’m bouncing between reading stuff for my critique group, reading submissions, and revising Knight Moves right now, so no progress has been made on any new work. I plan to be done with critique group stuff and Knight Moves this week, so then I can focus on reading subs and writing new words between now and Dragon Con.
Speaking of Dragon Con, that’s rushing toward us faster and faster, and I’m so far from ready it’s ridiculous. Last week at Charlotte Comicon I sold out of Back in Black and Knight Moves, and I’m not going to re-order those until the new versions are ready from Bell Bridge. I have about two dozen copies of Hard Day’s Knight that I’ll take with me, and once those are gone, they’re gone forever. I need to order a few more copies of Headshot, Genesis and Bump in the Night, but I’m not sure exactly how many to order yet. And I have to do new bookmarks and postcards. My publisher is doing Black Knight Chronicles bookmarks, so I need some to promote my other stuff. I was thinking one for Bubba & The Chosen and one for my YA work. That seems to make the most sense, to me at least.
I have plenty of t-shirts for Dragon, so at least I don’t need to order any more of those. But I definitely need to get a new episode of Literate Liquors out to y’all this week. It’s technically AJ Hartley’s turn in the hot seat, but since Richard Kadrey has a new book out next week, he might get moved ahead in the queue. Or I could get off my ass and edit both of them, what a concept!
And I still wanna go see Batman. Maybe for my birthday. Yeah, my birthday is next Tuesday. Y’all can click here to give me presents! I don’t really expect my blog readers to give me presents, but it’s awesome if you want to (thanks!) and it never hurts to ask. Besides, as I near the big 4-0 I find myself even less shy about asking for shit that I want.
But here’s something you want – the cover for the Black Knight Omnibus. I love it, I think it captures a darker feel, but still got some funny stuff going on.
by john | Jul 31, 2012 | Business of publishing, Vampires
Some folks have wondered where things are in the process of re-working The Black Knight Chronicles for re-release now that I’m working with a traditional publisher. And even more folks have wondered when they’ll be seeing Book IV – Paint it Black.
The short answer is – I don’t have a firm answer. The long answer is that the rewrites took me longer than I expected, and were more in-depth than I expected. These editors really pushed me, making me look long and hard at the boys and Sabrina and their motivations for doing things. “Because it seemed like fun” was no longer an acceptable answer, so I didn’t even bother with “because I was drinking when I wrote that scene.” They’ve done wonders for my writing, and I think that the books you get when you pick up the Omnibus of Books 1-3 will be so much improved that it’ll be just like reading whole new stories.
In some places, you will be. There are so many changes to things that I feel like a DC Comics editor! But these books are going to be amazing, and I’m prouder of them than I ever have been. But the truth is that I still don’t know if they’ll be ready for Dragon*Con. It’s almost August, and we’re all – me, my editor, my publisher, my copyeditor, the cover artist, the typesetter, the proofreader – everyone working as fast as we can to get the books out. I’m not sure we’ll have them for Dragon, which is a bummer. But if it takes a couple weeks to make it a better book, and the length of time of these revisions is all on me, not the publisher, then I’d rather take longer and have a better end product.
So the omnibus of Books 1-3 will be out sometime this fall. I’m not sure if Paint it Black will drop this year or not. The first draft is complete, but I’ll have to do some major rewrites on that as well once we finish the omnibus. There are story lines that need to be woven into the book, some that need to be enhanced, and continuity to be checked. Plus it’ll take several revisions just to get the story right. So I don’t know if I can finish with it this year, much less get it in the queue for a cover and a release from the publisher this year. But once we get this flood of four books out in short order, we’ll have a better idea of how much time it all takes, and can realistically schedule the following two books. This is a learning process for the publisher as well as for me – it’s not every day they buy six books from one guy, three of which have already been released.
But as that release comes nearer – the books will be removed from all venues other than Amazon. That’s because I only have ebook rights on Amazon as per my contract, so to make sure the books aren’t for sale in two versions, I need to pull them from the other online venues to make sure they’re down before the release date. So if you need to get them for your Nook, either haul ass or wait for the omnibus. Or do both. I won’t mind.
So that’s where we are with the books. I hope this was a satisfactory answer for you guys, and please don’t get grumpy with my publisher for delaying the release. They’re not. It’s me, and my editors, polishing the books until they shine brighter than you’d ever believe!
by john | Jun 16, 2012 | Business of publishing
Please don’t take away my indie author badge just because I have a hybrid career, y’all. It’s no secret to people that follow me on Twitter or Facebook that I’m a fan of Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles. Not just because I think the few men writing urban fantasy have to stick together (me, Hearne, Butcher, Tuck and now D.B. Jackson are the ones that leap to mind) but because the books are funny as hell, well-crafted and feature an awesome dog as a main character.
Not THE main character, unless you ask the dog. But I digress.
But here’s the interesting thing about Hearne’s series. He sold his series to Del Rey, an imprint of Ballantine, one of the Big 6 publishers. These are not people typically considered to be welcoming of change, or open to new ways of doing things. But when they bought Kevin’s series, he already had the first three books finished. They went through what I’m sure was an extensive process of editing, revising, cover stuff, etc. But they did this on all three books at essentially the same time, and then they released them.
One each month. All last summer. So instead of readers having to wait a year for the next book in the series, they got three books all last summer, kept their appetites honed for the characters, fell in love with the characters and the series, and then, when they had to wait seven or eight months for Book 4, they were chomping at the bit. Book 4 released earlier this year, and Book 5 will release this fall. This breaks the traditional “one book a year” pattern that traditional publishers had used in the past to manage their release dates and was very effective in Kevin’s case. He came from out of nowhere to become a very popular upper-midlist fantasy author in a very short period of time. This kind of market awareness and adaptability deserves a little shout out for the people at Del Rey, because it shows that they were paying attention. They understood that fun books like Kevin’s are great summertime fare, and people are going to want a lot of them. So good for them. I hope more publishers pay attention, because the idea of only putting out one book a year is anathema to fast writers like me.
The pic is from Kevin’s signing at Park Road Books in Charlotte last week. Yes, that is my book beside him. I gave him a copy of Hard Day’s Knight since I rode the coattails of his also-boughts to great sales numbers last summer. The pic below is how I spent my Friday night, finishing Book 4 of the Iron Druid Chronicles. It was my favorite of the series since Book 1. Really recommend it if you haven’t already gotten hooked on that series.
This is a good Friday night, right here.
by john | Mar 21, 2012 | Book Spotlight, Business of publishing, Writing
KJ Hannah Greenberg has a new book out called Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things. Check it out and check out her views on the short story market today. I’ll be back tomorrow with photos from the last couple of weeks and stories from my fevered hallucinations while high on cough syrup.
Given the advent of convergent media and their impact on the world of publishing, these days, editors and writers agree that the contemporary short story market is much like the seemingly amorphic colossus described in “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” More explicitly, whereas groups or individual gatekeepers and creatives get the gist of some aspects of this bold, new bazaar, no one understands this souk in its entirety.
Contemporary social expectations have evolved alongside of contemporary telecommunications, too, in a race to determine not who has the most toys, but, furthermore, whose toys are the shiniest. In simple terms, burgeoning innovation has complicated the industry. Championship, to a significant degree, has become a guessing game. It seems, nowadays, that it’s better to be morphed into a gelatinous wildebeest, transported to Planet Nine, or else exposed to outer world experiences than to win a Pushcart Prize or National Endowment for the Humanities monies. Fortunately, feelings are not facts.
What continues to be true is that “the rules” have been vaporized. In their place sit poorly fitting literary brannocks. At the same time as meagerly fashioned fluff rules “popular,” i.e. mass market publications, the literary and the pulp markets, the publishing world’s extremes, respectively, are shifting. No longer do writers sell only science-based speculative fiction. Instead, we sell an array of imaginary stuff including, but not limited to: alternate history, bizarre fiction, cross-genre fiction, cyberpunk, slipstream fiction, soft science fiction, steam punk, and weird tales.
Despite this upheaval in what constitutes content fit to be marketed, we writers, and the folk who befriend us, remain motivated to broadcast patterned words. Presently, electronic and audio venues vie with traditional print forums for the best short fiction. Roll call URLs such as Ralan’s SpecFic & Humor Webstravaganza and Duotrope’s Digest help established and emerging writers, alike, find homes for their short works.
When assessing the short story market, in addition, it behooves us to appreciate that writers are no more likely to make a living being word players today than we were ten or one hundred years ago. Most short stories authors sagaciously keep their day jobs. Despite the fact that odd ducks, because of merit, fortune, or both, make five and six digits on works issued by traditional presses, by print on demand presses, or by vanity and self-publishing presses, most skilled folk are happy to get, if not membership in SFWA, then bylines at respectable locations.
All things considered, even the end that is peer recognition is not freely given. Half of the problem is the tonnage of garbage that gets mindlessly submitted to people populating mastheads (I can vouch for this phenomenon since I edit for Bound Off and for Bewildering Stories). Many newbies, but also a good per cent of older, cantankerous sorts, think it costs nothing for them to submit, at the touch of their keypad, work to multiple outlets, and to do so simultaneously; they forget someone has to read the received work.
The other half of the problem is the half-baked efforts offered up by otherwise good writers coupled with the diminishing energies available from good periodicals’ exhausted staffs (see above for the rationale for droopy masthead members). Although getting published takes more than a roll of the dice, it can be very confounding either to find a welcome mat or to find work worth welcoming.
What’s more, not each and every published morsel is created equally. I remember, during my stint as a literary critic at Tangent, feeling loss at the nearly formulaic, i.e. safe for sales, nature of most of the stories that managed to squeak onto the pages of renowned magazines. Fortunately, we have places as Critters.org, where “the best and the brightest,” alongside of newcomers unafraid of risks, send their work for peer feedback. I’ve enjoyed proportionately more of that latter group of manuscripts, bumps, warts, and so forth, then the methodically published, albeit technically “well written” stuff splat on the big guys’ pages.
Auxiliary to the aforementioned, in publishing, as in many other industries, the socio-economic activity of networking counts. Publishers who enjoy their authors’ work often open back doors for them. Less frequently, but more astonishingly, publishers invite their favorite writers to contribute tales. In my own modest experience, I’ve enjoyed both modes of getting my writing into print. I’m disinclined, however, to name where I enjoy such accommodations.
Related to the boons of networking are the drawbacks of scams. From publishers who insist that their naïve contributor must buy copies of anthologies, in which those writers’ work is presented, to broadcasters who create unrealistic literary contests, money is being made from the energies of innocent writers. Watchdogs such as Preditors [sic] and Editors and such as Absolute Write Water Cooler exist, yet writing remains a “sellers beware” business.
More exactingly, we live in a span during which base individuals have no compunction preying on we creatives’ longing for success. Just as labdanum was produced mainly for the perfume industry, but was used, by unscrupulous sorts, as an adhesive for royalties’ fake facial hair, Internet opportunities have both multiplied writing outlets and have attracted hoards of nasties. It’s of small wonder that some writers prefer to obsess over pretend beasts than to struggle to get our short works to audiences.
Nonetheless, in the end, we writers can’t help but respond to our urge to reveal, to scrutinize, and to gather together fantastic moments, no matter the state of the publishing industry, specifically, or of the economy, in general. Writers write and will often do amazing things to make sure that their readers can read.
As for me, I confess to continuing to be incorrigible when it comes to generating texts. Happily, my gatekeepers and readers encourage me to do more of the same. To wit, my latest book, Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things, published by Bards & Sages Publishing, was born.
When readers find that their work day has diminished their endorphins, that they need a new reason to slip under the covers with a flashlight, or that they simply want to laugh a loud, a bit more, they ought to open Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things. This book’s anthropomorphic tales are populated with: spacelings, with anxiety-prone rabbits, and with literate penguins. This collection of seventy yarns includes stories of: postpartum tree hoppers with libido problems, multi-headed aliens intent on altering Earth’s fiduciary systems, couch potatoes on notice for otherworlders’ attack, and juvenile chimera chicks tilting against human culture’s prejudices. Besides being good for a few hours’ worth of entertainment, the existence of Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things demonstrates that writers can find means to broadcast their musings in this upside down, contemporary short story market.
About the Author:
KJ Hannah Greenberg has met few imaginary friends with whom she hasn’t wanted to consort. Her short, speculative fiction, particularly, blows bubbles at many addresses, including at: AlienSkin Magazine, AntipodeanSF, Big Pulp, Danse Macabre, Morpheus Tales, Strange, Weird and Wonderful, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and Weirdyear. More globally, her short fiction can be found at dozens of outlets, including at: American MENSA’s Calliope, Fiction365, The Medulla Review, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Raphael’s Village. Look for her online, “Jewish” Science Fiction, writing class this May.