When In Doubt, Write a Blog Post.

Louis Shalako

When in doubt, write a blog post.

I’ve just finished a romance, a short story of about 13,000 words. At some point we have to start a new story, but until I know what it is, it’s kind of hard to get going. What you can do is to create a doc file.  I take it from Calibri, 11-pt and set it up as TNR, 12-pt. Set that on the desktop and it’s a reminder that you need to keep moving.

What I learned in 2015.

I learned I can write five novels in a year. I had never done more than three before that. I learned quite a few things, some of which are personal and some of which pertain to the business and craft, the art of writing.

When I first started writing short stories, they really were short—six or eight thousand words seemed like a lot. All of the early stories were meant for the submission market. There are markets where the word count is only one, or two, or three thousand words.

Writing a short, tight story for submission is a skill. The trouble is, when you’re not getting any action and you want to publish it yourself.

On virtually all of the available platforms, the minimum price is either zero or $0.99. I’ve seen people charging $2.99 for a 200-word children’s book (an ebook).

I’ve got stories that are less than 2,000 words set at the same price.

While it is true we give a lot of books away for free, and we do have to make at least some of our costs back, the person that does actually purchase a book has to overcome their reservations.

They could just as easily buy a $0.99 full-length book as your short story. This is why I always put that in the product description. "A short story of love and murder," or whatever.

So at some point I had to learn how to take the nugget of an idea, and pound and hammer on it, to heat it up and draw it out into a long, fine wire. I had to weave that into a tapestry, and rear up a great fabrick, if I was going to sell it for ninety-nine cents. Most of my more recent short stories are in the 10,000 to 15,000-word range. I don’t have a big moral problem with marking that at $0.99.

People will scream when I say this, but for the really short-shorts, there’s no reason why there couldn’t be a 49-cent price point. I would use it without hesitation. I might be making more sales than I presently enjoy, and the fact is that we need to get some results once in a while.

In 2015, I decided to throw off a lot of hero-worship or something, and to learn to think for myself.

Why was I following a lot of famous writers on Facebook, for example? I couldn’t afford their workshops. I didn’t agree with some of their marketing advice. I did in fact take the writing tips to heart, I listened for all I was worth, and in the end, I ended up making a lot of decisions based upon what other people were saying. For the most part, they were all traditionally published, and trained, and had all of those expectations. They had the experiences that I probably never will--and might not actually need, in order to succed in an indie and evolving market. They're always giving advice on the mass market--where the indie market might be just a bit different from trying to produce big-budget blockbusters, time after time, trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience, because that was the only commercially-viable way to do things...their logic is as circular as mine, possibly even more so.

I wanted to do some non-linear, intuitive, marketing experiments. For that, I really don't need them guys. The funny thing is, they know a lot.

They were talking about a lot of things, from pricing, and layout and formatting, and covers and agents, and contracts. They talked endlessly about traditional and indie publishing.

At some point I just got tired of it. The other thing was, what exactly, did I expect some of these guys to do for me? I never got into any really long and involved discussions with them. It’s not like some really big hand is going to come down from the sky and lift you up—that’s just not the way it works.

As far as making myself useful to them, they were all traditionally published authors, with careers going back twenty, thirty, forty or even more years in one or two cases. I was clearly incompetent in their eyes, and that was probably true on some objective level as well. They clearly wouldn’t want to waste too much time on a guy like me.

The fact is that I really didn’t know much when I started. I was brash, and untutored. I was also a hard worker, fairly well organized, and showed all kinds of heart right from day one.

And still, what in the hell did I expect them to do for me?

There really isn’t much of anything they could have done—with our mutually-irreconcilable points of view.

Some guy comes along on their Facebook feed and he’s editing his first two books for self-publication.

Any number of them must have thought I was either a total idiot or the complete asshole, whichever one fit better into their world-view. It must have comforted some of them greatly indeed to know that I must inevitably fail.

That hasn’t happened yet, but oh, well.

I took the better influences that I got from them and used them to the best of my ability.

Throw in a pinch of showmanship, put a little mustard on there, hit the first fuse on the pyrotechnics and you really got something.

Now start singing your lungs out baby, because these nice people are going to feed us…

END

Photo by Louis. Perch Creek Habitat Management Area.