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.

To Submit or Not to Submit?

Themes of Creation. Leonid Pasternak.

Louis Shalako


To submit or not to submit?

That might not even be the right question these days.

What to submit, and what not to submit, might be a better way of putting it.

So far this year I’ve been focusing on short stories, an art form in their own right.

The only way to master something is to do it, and when I run out of steam, only then will I worry about my next novel, (or novel #13.)

Other than blog posts, a poem, something unfinished, something ready to begin, (another blog post,) it looks like the one I just started working on is story number seventeen for 2014.

So here’s the question: should I submit it and keep on submitting it until it is sold, (according to Heinlein’s Rules) or should I just go ahead and publish it myself?

It’s not strictly an either-or question.

There is always a chance, right?

But think about it first. If there are fifty-one pro markets listed on Ralan.com, then those fifty-one markets probably get anything up to ten or twenty thousand submissions a month between them. It might be more—a lot more.

Do the math. Calculate the odds. I’ve got one new story, and maybe a dozen worth submitting. They’re already out there and many markets won’t accept multiple submissions. They don’t want to see the same story twice, either.

Right now, I have a handful of stories under submission. When I submit a story, it could result in a sale, although it is a hit-and-miss thing. It’s not even a question of quality or competence at some level. I just have to put the right story in front of the right editor, in the right genre, just when they’re looking for just that certain kind of thing. The right time and place sort of thing.

But I do submit stories in the Pro, Semi-Pro, (fifteen listings at time of writing) and Pay, (35 listings, mostly closed to submissions right now) as well as checking out token markets, looking for other markets and finding new lists independently. I’ve also checked out Mature markets, etc.

But here’s the thing.

Let’s say you’re not making any pro or big-bucks sales. Never mind if they’re listed with the SFWA or not. 

You need some pro sales to get into the SFWA, right?

How important is that? What does it actually do for you? Those have to be pro sales.

Are you going to let a good story go for five, ten or twenty dollars? Will you give it up for free and some kind of validation?

Are you looking for mere justification?

What does that get you? Publication, yes. Your story is even kind of safe for awhile—it’s safe from being published on the blog or being lost if the computer goes down. People can read it if it’s accepted, and maybe you really will be discovered.

But that story might not appear for a few months. When it does appear, they have a license for a stipulated period of time. Afterwards, your story might be archived on their site in perpetuity.

You might give all that up for five, ten or twenty dollars and the chance to say you got published.

And it doesn’t even help you get into the SFWA, either. Assuming that’s important to you.

So we have to make the comparison.

Let’s take a story I just wrote. It was 10,200 words. In that particular genre, there was nowhere to submit it, even to a minimal pay or token market. There wasn’t even any place to submit it for exposure, although, there is at least one historical fiction market listed on Ralan. But my word count was way over their limit. No point in submitting it there...

Part of the challenge was the nature of the material.

So, being too short for a book, and with nowhere to submit it, what was I supposed to do with it?

Answer: publish it. That even sort of follows Heinlein’s Rules, in the here and now—the Brave New World of Publishing.

Think about it.

Say it costs five or ten bucks for a cover. It took four and a half days to write, edit, format, find an image and make a cover, get an ISBN, etc. You need a blurb, right? It probably took a minimum of ten or twelve hours just in the writing time—it’s 10,200 words after all.

A story which would otherwise be useless is now in the store.

If it sells for $2.99 and ten or twenty of them leave the store per year, then that, honestly, sounds like peanuts. I admit that.

It is also something like twenty or forty bucks a year for a story that might have gone for even smaller peanuts. Over ten years that’s two hundred to four hundred bucks, for a nice little story that might have gone for exactly that much (once) in a professional sale at two to four cents a word.

And, I write a lot of stories. Do the math. Calculate the odds.

But consider those odds over the long term—the next ten to twenty years, when, arguably, I should be submitting that story, over and over again until it is sold.

But there's nowhere to fucking submit it.

Reprints are admittedly worth fifty percent of the original sale price. This holds true at four hundred dollars. It also holds true if you sell your story for five or ten bucks. There is a judgment call here, and you have to decide before publishing it yourself, just exactly what it is that you are risking.

Mike Resnick or Robert J. Sawyer can sell any story they write.

So far, I have not learned how to do that in that traditional sense—I have to rely on what few readers I can get!

It’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

I have never claimed that this is any easier than the traditional path.

It is merely the path that seems to be open right now, in this Brave New World of Publishing.

In the very early days of a long and distinguished career, we’re not risking that much, right? It depends on where you’re at and what you hope to achieve. It depends how much time you have left.

Now, assuming I have a story in science fiction, fantasy, horror, or mystery, maybe a little something in the romance or erotica line, then of course I would know where to submit it.

There are also ways of finding more markets.

Even then there is some kind of judgment call. If it’s talking cats, then one editor doesn’t want it, and if it’s vampires or werewolves, some other editor doesn’t like that. You might have already submitted a story or a book to all the markets that you can find in a genre.

Or maybe you just don’t care to keep looking.

Now, my next story, or number whatever for this year, has the sort of material that’s not going to make it into iTunes. There are themes of non-consensual sex in the story. If you read the submissions guidelines, you will see that in some markets they have very specific guidelines as to what they will and will not accept. Many magazines would not want to see this story.

So, again, write it, edit, format it…make a cover. Stir and repeat, right? And now another pen-name, has another new product, this one in an edgy, erotica-for-hetero-males sort of a way. It’s 5,000 words, took a couple of days to produce, and I had total creative control over something that has social redeeming value, but might be offensive to some readers.

Essentially.

And I can mark it at $2.99, give discount coupons on Smashwords, set it for free sometimes, whatever it takes to move a few copies of that story on the long list of bookselling platforms…a list that will grow over time.

Some other story might be a good candidate for the blog ( or, an unpublished book of dubious nature could be published as a serial.) Or as a free promotional book or short story. It still only costs five or ten bucks for the cover.

At some point down the road you get to set a price on it and set up your next freebie.

Once you’ve paid for the cover image, it’s all gravy, folks.

If I write three or four stories for one pen-name, then at some point I write one specifically for a free giveaway. When I’m working in a specific genre, I generally know, or soon figure out, who I’m writing it for, whether it’s for the blog, my lady-erotica writer or my thriller guy. Sooner or later they’ll all have pretty long lists of titles.

Everything involves a judgment call and some assessment of the benefits, the rewards and the costs.

Other than that, you put in the time, you do the work.

Have fun doing it and you’ve got the world by the ass.

That’s what it’s all about, ladies and gentlemen.

It's all about writing things and putting them out there into the world.

END