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Not going to happen (A post for fellow writers)

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Really, anyone is welcome to read this, I didn’t mean to put you off by the title, which feels like a click-bait title. Maybe it is, and I imagine that at this point you’re wondering what’s not going to happen. To put it super-bluntly, Wine Bottles and Broomsticks is not going to happen. More importantly, though this post isn’t about the book, it’s about about the process of getting it published, or to be more accurate, failing to get it published.

There are more than a few ways to get published – the various flavors of traditional, through small indie outfits or big publishing houses, then you’ve got full-on self-publishing, and lastly, you’ve got this odd-ball in-between crowd-funded option, which blends the two up.

The basic difference between a traditional approach and a fully self-published approach is that on one hand you have professionals, experienced in the business, help you though each step of the process. These folks can get you into places you can’t realistically do on your own. On the other hand, with self-publishing, you’re completely on your own for every single step of the book publishing, marketing, and sales process. It’s my perspective that traditional publishing is pretty much the ideal way to go. You can argue with me on that point if you wish, I understand the counter arguments and very many appeal to me. It’s not that I refuse to go fully self-published, it’s just a very hard road to go down and if you can get professional help, well, that’d be just peachy.

I tried the traditional route and got 0 response after 40+ queries, no partials, no fulls, no comments, just form rejections or silence. Normally, this should be a warning sign that the book is not commercially viable, or so poorly written as to be not worth the photons required to carry the words to someone’s eyes. I’m one of my own worst critics, and if it were that bad, I think I’d know it deep in my gut, even if I didn’t want to admit it. I don’t feel that way about Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. Yes, it probably needs one more really good revision before I’d call it final, but on the whole, I think it hangs together. As a person reading the book and not the writer, I actually really enjoy it. It even catches me off guard and makes me smile on reading through -and I wrote the thing. It made me decide that the problem isn’t the book, necessarily, it’s something else – market forces? misalignment of platform? Really badly done query letters? A basic misinterpretation that the work is misogynistic shit?

Anyhow, rather than simply shelve it, because I’m stubborn that way, I put it up on inkshares.com to try and crowd-fund it. The basic idea was to reach at least 250 copies to get it published, though it wouldn’t really be published in the traditional sense until it hit 750 copies. With less than 1 week to go, I got to 56 pre-orders. Personally, I regard this as an extremely respectable performance, but it’s far from enough to even hit that vanity or quill goal. When I started, I entered the Geek & Sundry Fantasy contest as part off this and I landed at 28th place out of 400 entries. Not bad, I wasn’t expecting to be in even the top 10, so I’m pleased with that, but I’m still feeling disappointed in not having done better in general. I’m disappointed not because I didn’t have tremendous support, but because I just wasn’t able to convince enough readers that this book was for them. This is a failure I hold personally, after all of the people who purchased or retweeted or shared or just offered feedback to help me get there, I still managed to fail them. To badly mangle a sports analogy, they threw the ball, and I fumbled on the 1-yard line and now I’m watching the opposing team make an amazing 99-yard return run.

When I look at this critically, like a computer programmer debugging a particularly nasty memory leak, it seems to vindicate the response from the agents I queried. The market just isn’t super interested, or something like that. However, I’m still not 100% convinced that’s it either (I’m at 72% convinced, I think). Many of the readers who did support and began reading along really connected with the book. Last night, I had some friends over and one of the topics of conversation was the book and it’s sequel, which I’ve plotted, and sketched a few scenes for, but haven’t actually written. It was intensely gratifying to find myself in a conversation about the characters and where they are going in book 2 – and getting some pretty good advice on the structure of book two in the process. The conversation also reinforced the idea to me that there are readers out there for this book, and I need to think about book two and really re-consider where I am with publishing and where I go when the inkshares campaign runs out next week.

The one thing I can say with certainty about inkshares is that I’ve learned a lot about the process of marketing a book. The biggest thing I’ve learned is that this publishing platform works really well if you’re already a well known person, whether it be as an author or in some other realm. If you already have ‘fans’, you’re probably going to do alright. If you’re like me and still trying to make a name for yourself and connect with readers who will find your work entertaining and interesting, you will have a lot more trouble (your friends and family will probably buy, but don’t expect a tremendous amount of interest from folks you haven’t engaged with in some way.) I also learned that just like with self-publishing, you’ve got to advertise. I did a lot of this with wine-bottles and the return on that investment was fairly minimal. I managed to get 2 articles in different newspapers, and paid for some advertising on social media. The newspapers were great because of local exposure and for ads, Facebook ads worked the best, Twitter adds were like throwing money into a black hole – organic reach is better than paid reach there. In all likelihood the overall failure to pull this off on inkshares has to do with the fact that books from new authors tend to be impulse purchases and if you have to pre-order then wait for a book from an author you don’t know, you’re probably not going to do that.

I suppose this article could have been an angry or frustrated rant about who bought copies and who didn’t and authors needing a pay-check. I’ve seen them, and can see it from the perspective of the frustrated author, but that is NOT how I feel. Sure, I’ve missed the mark, but it’s not for lack of trying. Nor, and this is important, is it for the lack of so many individuals across the internet. Everyone I know has been incredibly helpful in getting my campaign out to as many potential readers as possible. I look at this as having failed them. Someone asked me if I’d consider doing this again. My response was pretty wish-washy at the time, as that was fairly early in the campaign, but right now, at this point, the answer is an emphatic no. Not because inkshares was bad or anything like that, in time it might prove to be a vehicle for getting something else published. The NO is because after all that effort on the part of so many people, there’s no product. Not because I didn’t write it, but because I couldn’t sell it. It’s an interesting perspective on crowd-funding that I hadn’t truly appreciated until now. Anyhow, that’s where things are at, I’m off to go see about the daily Sunday dose of the domestic arts.

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Back in the captain’s chair

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Warning! This is not a blog post about writing or any of my current projects, even though NaNoWriMo has kicked off. It’s about life in general. I could have posted this on www.bakedgoodsandbourbon.com , but it didn’t feel like the right vibe for it. So here it is.

Today, I went to work as a ‘boss’ again. Not the boss, and not the chair I left just over a year ago, which is a position I still hold in high regard and sorely miss. There are so many ways the new situation is different from the last. First off, I’ve got a much smaller team, and that team isn’t really in my full charge. I’m more of a lead, I think. Further, I don’t have a budget and the constraints I have in terms of direction and strategy are far more restrictive. I can’t really see past February, strategically speaking. As part of the new gig, I’ve got a shiny new office that’s larger than any office I’ve ever had before. I feel like a solitary pea rolling around in a big unfriendly can.

This all started coming together some weeks ago and has been in motion for months. Even after I was given the new title and a modest pay-rise, the whole thing remained in limbo. Even right now, I’m still not really sure I understand why, but I have some guesses. Even in my new spot, with my new badge, there are still irregularities that have me assuming I’ll be bumped back to my cube by next week. In truth, this ‘boss’ thing doesn’t change much, it’s the same situation I had last week excepting that I now have authority to directly delegate and assign tasks. I don’t know that my authority extends beyond that, and that’s okay, but it gives the whole thing a different flavor.

Tuesday this week was a hard day because it was the first day I’d taken up residency in my new office. I’m going to be honest. That didn’t go well. The space has been vacant for a year, and was beginning to attract a lot of attention. There also happens to be a certain emotional attachment some folks have to the place because of it’s previous occupant, whom they all liked very well. To complicate things further, I am nearly the most junior member of my larger group, yet I am among the most seasoned supervisors in their ranks (one of my new team members is, I think, perhaps as experienced in this realm or possibly more.) In any case, just moving into the office seems to have lobbed a political hot-potato over an already uneasy fence. If rumors are true, and I suspect they are, that potato was more of a dirty bomb, and I still have yet to see the full effects of the poison. My least favorite comment started with, and yes this happened, “Don’t Take it personally but…”

I took it personally.

It may be the person who said those words even reads this blog, and will be offended, but frankly I’m not certain I care, I see it as the height of unprofessionalism to waltz into someone’s office, someone who heartily believes he has done what needs to be done to demonstrate the best possible qualities necessary to do the job, and tell them they should not be there. Regardless of who you’re mad at, that’s personal.

I made it through the day, did what needed to be done, spoke to one of my new team-members (she was finally notified of things), though everyone else had to hear it through rumor, which is also going to make life difficult over the coming weeks and months. I made it through the next and into this morning.

Today, I sat down in my chair, fired up my computer and had a visit from the other new team-member. She had finally been told what the plan was, and asked if she was going to be okay with it. She was. For my part, this removes all ambiguity from our working relationship. I have been in a position where I necessarily needed to give tasks, guidance, and make decisions for a few months, but it’s been an odd dance for me not to over-step, as I may have done when I was in my 20s. I now finally get to do that without the reservation of treading on my supervisor’s authority, even if a bit of dancing remains necessary.

By this afternoon, I remembered why it is I enjoy this role. I remembered how being ‘the boss’ give me satisfaction in my job that’s impossible to describe. To be clear, it’s not about taking credit for a project or product, that’s always a ‘we’, it’s not about being in charge for ‘power’, because being a low-level manager is never going to get you that anyhow. To me, it’s about being the guy who helps facilitate the team’s work in a more abstract manner. I like being the guy the team can go to with a question and get a reasonable answer with background, without double-speak or obfuscation, and with certainty that a decision or discussion will not be reversed without a specific explanation, or even the person who isn’t just going to turn a problem about into ‘your problem.’ To me, it’s a good day at work to have a team member come and say – ‘I think we should do it this way,’ and be in a position to respond with. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea, do it.’

Before today, I never felt I had a team in this job. Sure I’m in a team, but they never took to me. Even my most trusted source of information and guidance tells me things like ‘your project is going to fail,’ routinely. This feedback only manages to come across as ‘I like you well enough to be honest, we don’t like you here and really don’t like what you’re up to’ Nothing makes it clearer that you’re in the out-group. So, it feels good to be with a supportive team again, even if the team too small to accomplish even half of what we have ahead of us in the next four months. Sitting in that over-large, unfriendly office where covetous stares challenge me while I sit at my desk, and many co-workers, uncertain of my status, pass awkwardly by, and others who stop in shock realizing the office is no longer empty and possibly available, I am reminded of what it is that makes me smile in the face of a challenge.

If nothing else, this situation is teaching me what I really want out of a career, what really give me motivation when I drop into my seat in the morning. With all that off my chest, I’m off to NaNo!

Photo credit: Tom Mrazek Sit down and watch the world pass by… via photopin (license)

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NaNoWriMo 2016

I plan to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve got 4 separate projects I could conceivably work on during this period. None of them are just blank screens. I feel like this is a pretty good situation to be in. What if I were in the situation of not having a project at the ready? What would I do? Honestly, I don’t know. Usually, I start a project with a single concept, maybe a sentence or a few words. Deep Space Help Desk was a concept that I’d been kicking around for a while without much luck. Then an overheard conversation at work, jostled my mind into the right place for it, and things started coming together. For Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, I had a single phrase that I built a story around. The other two WIPs, one I’m calling The Dark Queen of Darkness, and the other Thittlebod or Penelope H. Adventure (That one doesn’t have much of a name yet), these both came from something much less tangible. 

In the latter two cases described above, I started with characters. I love it when a viable story starts out this way. Immediately compelling characters offer that illusive hook that writers so often talk about. Not only that, it gives me a non-flat character right away, as my wife will tell you, I struggle with character. When a character jumps off the page with what, as a writer, feels like a bit too much force, that’s the sweet spot. The only thing to be done is to observe the world through their eyes. I particularly enjoy characters who are either completely hopeless at what they do and really don’t belong wherever it is they happen to be, or they’re full experts, but in either case are inexplicably surrounded by nonsense. I love walking the character through the nonsense because it makes the dialogue much more interesting and gives me a lot of freedom with respect to what other characters say and do. Not to mention, as a writer, I can add twists that make little sense, because the main character will be quite as confused as the reader. This is excellent. If the main character is saying “Wait. What the hell just happened?” At the same moment this occurs to the reader,  the reader is on the side of the protagonist and much more likely to follow along with whatever is going on.

I think if I were starting fresh, with no real sense of where I was heading with NaNo, I think I’d start with a character and a vague sense of setting. I’d let the character’s motivations determine the plot. After all, the plot is just a series of events that prevent the MC from getting what they want and the process by which that MC overcomes the obstacles and changes as a result. Anyhow, now I’m off to pound away on my non-NaNo project before I have to switch gears. Good luck to all the NaNo participants out there!