(Cover, Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work)

I’m coming into the homestretch on finishing the first draft of the initial book in my trilogy, The Rise and Fall of the American Republic, currently titled Death and Destruction.  (The second and third are, respectively, Revolution and Rebirth, and Vengeance and Victory).

Unfortunately, just finishing the first draft means the work only continues.  Copyediting is always a necessary PITA.  Because I’d like to sell these books in a package deal, I need to do detailed outlines of the second and third, as well.  Then they go off to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, who was also my editor at Harper Collins, and she will work her editorial magic upon them (probably considerably more magic than I may be able to find at any publishing house, given these parlous times).

The book seems as if it’s taken forever, although it’s only been five months – but I was once used to doing five or six books a year.  This is a big one, though, and my industrious habits had gotten a bit rusty, so I probably shouldn’t beat myself up over it too badly.

I do have to say that Richard Presssfield’s Do the Work was a huge help in getting me back on track with good writing habits.  Yeah, you ought to read it – especially given that it is free.  And in this case, you get one hell of a lot more than you’re paying for.

So, I’m hoping to have everything wrapped up and out of the house by Christmas – which will be a wonderful holiday gift for me.

Then, of course, I start work on the next one….

Quick, Get Me A Flashlight | According To Hoyt

Doesn’t matter anyway. Literary value is a will o’ the wisp and has been used for centuries by those-who-know-better to tell the masses what ’orrible little people they are and what ’orrible ’horrible taste they have. (Shakespeare. All that blood. Ghosts. Inaccurate history. Rotted the mind like cheap candy. A favorite of truculent apprentices and low brows. Why, he had the violence happen right htere on the stage, while all the well bred people knew the way to do it was to have a messenger come and announce it. In the more fraught plays, messengers crossed back and forth on the stage, but it was good taste. Everyone knew that. As a literature major I’ve had to read those plays. They’re very illuminating of the human condition. Like Tolstoi.)

What literary value is not is a predictor of sales, unless you are talking ONLY sales to a small subset of status-insecure people who want to show how intelligent they are. Now, there are any number of those and there are scam– er… authors who make a living off them, but I am not an artist – I work for a living – and I’d rather sell stuff people genuinely enjoy.

The question is… what is that?

And that is the question all writers who are actually serious wrestle with constantly. If you claim you’re not interested in selling – which actually means you’re not interested in having folks read what you write – then you’re probably a liar. If not, the obvious question is, why are you writing in the first place?

Oh, sure, I understand that the internet now gives everybody a platform to blather anything you like, and people don’t need to pay a red cent to read it, so, technically, you have no need to sell your work. If that’s you – if that’s what makes you content – then stop reading this now, because what I have to say will be of no interest to you. Nor will your literary exibitionism have much interest for me, given that I hew to Samuel Johnson’s admonition: “”No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

I’ve spent well on to 40 years trying to figure out what sells. There don’t seem to be any guarantees, and certainly trying to figure out what will bring the Stephen King/Harry Potter/Tom Clancy lightning down on your head is probably a mug’s game.

That said, a good story seems to be a necessity. By that, I mean a plot that makes sense and has a logical, interesting progress to a satisfying ending. Happy endings – that is, where the hero triumphs over the fascinating problems you have littered his path with – seem to work better than tragedies. Everyman characters rising to the occasion are always popular. People want to identify with heroes, although you need to keep your villains reasonably sympathetic as well. Pure black only works with anarchists and hipster fashions.

Oddly enough, it takes many would-be writers a long time to figure out even these basics. I blame the plethora of creative writing courses that populate the modern academic curriculum, wherein wannabes are instructed that lapidary prose and endless character dissection are the ne plus ultra of good writing.

Story? Plot? Attractive, likable characters struggling and triumphing over near-insurmountable odds? How passe. No, even worse than passe. Reprehensible. To be avoided if you value the purity of your art.

Let me tell you this: If you call your writing your art, you are probably going to be able to number your readers without using all of your digits. You want to be rich and famous? Learn what average people like to read, and then do your damndest to give it to them.

The Big Idea: Richard Kadrey – Whatever

Richard Kadrey’s “Sandman Slim” series is one of my favorite sets of fantasy books from the last few years, so it’s a pleasure to bring Kadrey back to the Big Idea to talk about its latest installment, Aloha From Hell. This time around, and with a nod to his series’ main character, Kadrey’s here to talk about the value of persistence, even when by all indications you’ve been entirely left for dead.

Call it coincidence, serendipity, whatever. I’ve known Kadrey’s work for decades, but hadn’t read anything recently, until I discovered (through an Amazon recommendation, of all things – and that will be the substance of another post here shortly) his Sandman Slim series. I read the first, Sandman Slim , and immediately glommed onto the remaining two (so far) in the series and, as it happens, I’m reading Aloha from Hell right now.

I have to confess that, aside from my enjoyment of the books, my first reaction was utter envy. Why can’t I come up with a character/concept like this? The closest I ever came was my Calley/Berg duo in the Dream Trio series, but I’m still looking for that Killer Koncept.

Anyway, read Richard’s inspiring tale of ultimate success after a period of depressing failure. It will help you keep the dream alive. And a big thank you to John Scalzi for the interview.

Another Nail in the Coffin | madgeniusclub

But the Amazon story first. On the 16th of this month, the New York Times published an article about Amazon bypassing publishers and signing authors to contracts to publish through Amazon. For some months now, Amazon has been introducing “imprints”. Several well-known authors signed exclusive publishing contracts with Amazon. There were a few ripples when that happened, but nothing like the response to the Times’ article last week. The specifics are pretty simple. This fall, Amazon will publish 122 titles. These titles will be across a variety of genres and some will be digital and some hard copy. Among the authors will be self-help guru Tim Ferrias and actor/director Penny Marshall.And the cries of foul were heard far and wide from legacy publishers.

According to the Times, “Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.”

So let’s look at that statement. While I can’t speak to whether or not Amazon is “aggressively wooing” top authors, it would be a fool not to. The same publishers who are crying foul are the ones who backed the agency pricing plan for e-books. This is the plan that lets the publishers set the price for their e-books so there is no competition across the different e-book retailers. Worse, the general reading public doesn’t understand that Amazon can’t control the prices for those books from the agency model publishers, and it is the one on the receiving end of the bad customer feelings.

Look. People still like to read. The digital transformation is changing the delivery mechanism that lets them read, but they still like to read.

The entrenched publishing structure is demonstrating that it is entirely unable to adjust to the digital transformation, and so, sooner or later, it will collapse and be swept away by new, more savvy, competitors. That’s just the nature of markets and creative destruction.

If Amazon comes up with better models, then it will prevail. It certainly seems to understand the implications of digital creation, marketing, and delivery far better than the dying dead tree houses.

I don’t think we are heading for unalloyed chaos in terms of book marketing. Just what the new structures will look like is still up in the air, but that new structures – including gatekeeping functions – will emerge is, in my opinion, inevitable. The amount of money at stake more or less guarantees it.

Witchfinder — Free novel — One | According To Hoyt

*As I said, I’m going to start posting a novel here, a chapter a week. This is being posted as I write it, so it’s in pre-earc (for those from Baen) or in close-to (but not quite) -first draft state. Once it’s finished it will undergo editing and then it will be published in some form. I’m going to put this up with its own category so you can find it. And yes, I’m going to put up a donate button eventually — as soon as I figure out how to do it. Yeah, I know, what can I say? — and those who donate $6 or so WILL get this, revised, when it comes out. I’m also going to have a cover for this soonish. Until then, bear with me. Yes, those of you who are in Baen Diner have seen two chapters of this before. The difference is, this time I finish it “in public” which is a bit of a window to you on how things work out. Oh, yeah, this is a fantasy set in the same universe as the Magical British Empire, but not in the same world (at least to begin with.) And it uses a Scarlet Pimpernel archetype, which I ALWAYS wanted to do.*

The blueprints for the future of publishing are being drawn via a process of trial and error right now. Here is another experiment.

Unringing The Bell | madgeniusclub

At cons, I still run into authors who look down on self-published authors. I still run into authors who parrot the line about how much the publisher is investing in them: when it is patently obvious they’re lost in mid-list hell; I still run into authors who say “if you want to make a living at this, you have to publish with the big six.”

I had the dubious privilege of hearing a mid-press published author telling a self-published author whom I happen to know makes more in a month on one book than the mid-press published author has made for any two or three of his books that “most of what’s self published is crap and no one would buy it. The future is finding a publisher and convincing them to accept you. In two years, all this e-book stuff will be gone.”

Ity seems hard to believe that in this day and age you can still find writers – yes, even SF authors – who think this way. I suspect it has a lot to do with how much, over the years, they have invested of their own self-esteem in the fact that they have managed to get published by a major dead tree house. When that was the only gate, negotiating it was a significant accomplishment. But why pin so much on that one marker? Well, writers labor in solitude, and always worry, deep in the back of their minds, that they are frauds writing crap, and any day now, somebody is going to expose them. Anything that serves to soothe that existential fear is welcomed, and all published writers, I’d bet, have felt at least a whiff of that thought.

On the other hand, the amount of balls it takes to think you can successfully plant the same fields already plowed by Shakespeare, Milton, and King is sort of amazing, isn’t it? But that’s not really self-esteem. It’s just insane bravado. And we know it.

The gate has been torn down, though. Anybody who doesn’t understand that and start trying to adjust is going to be trampled to death in the stampede over the rubble.

Got an email from Amazon flogging books they called “Epic Science Fiction.”

Uh huh. Fully 90% of the titles were Star Wars stuff.

Since I know way more than I ever wanted to, from a personal perspective, as to how that sort of sausage gets ground, I decided to give them a pass.

…about me continuing to put up my old Analog short fiction?

Frankly, it’s a pain in the ass. Either I pay somebody a lot of money per page (by my standards) to scan and copyedit the stories, or I dictate them via Dragon Naturally Speaking and then copyedit the transcriptions myself.

Still, I’d sorta like to get these permanently into the cloud, so…is there any interest out there?

The title pretty much says it all, but here are the links.

Amazon:

Epub Format for Sony Reader, iBooks, and Nook:

Click here to download Bank Robbery.

As always, these editions are DRM-free.

This drew a great deal of discussion over at Daily Pundit, but I thought it would work well here, too.

Daily Pundit » Just As The Map Is Not the Territory, The Book Is Not the Story

Boston Review — Richard Nash and Matt Runkle: Revaluing the Book

Why do we think that a person won’t buy a print book because in theory they could read it for free online? What is it that people are buying? What is it that people want? In many respects what people want is to read it on their own terms, so in many cases, people don’t want to have to read it on a screen.

This is an interesting discussion, and you really should read the whole thing, but I believe the above is a misperception that lies at the heart of most wishful thinking about the future of books and publishing.

It’s all tied up in the notion of books and objects. What they really should be thinking about is the objectification of perception as related to the story form.

A book is nothing more than one way of presenting a story – or some other discrete bundle of information – in a particular physical form that allows a reader to perceive the story itself.

We have had other such objects – scrolls, chapbooks, writing on walls, whatever. We have also had non-object methods of accomplishing the same goal – storytellers, chants, songs, and so on.

The form of the object of choice for presenting the story is changing. We are rapidly moving away from a form that has been ubiquitous for several hundred years: the bound paper book. There are a number of reasons for this, but suffice it to say that the shift is proceeding with ever greater rapidity. That tipping point is long past, and will not be reversed.

That particular story presentation object – and the production, marketing, and distribution system that grew around it, is dying. The many object, one story model is now a relic of the past, as we quickly shift into a one-object, many story model. That object is your digital book reader. You buy a Kindle, say, or just a Kindle app for your smart phone, and then you buy many stories that do not come inextricably attached to individual objects (books), and read them on your single book-object (your digital reader).

This shift is exposing another huge fault line in our understanding of books and what they are. For several centuries, book-objects and stories have been one: in order to perceive an individual story, you had to buy an individual book-object. That is no longer the case, and because that is so, we need to take another look at the difference between the story itself and presentation/perception object that channels the story.

The core of the matter is story, not object! I cannot emphasize this enough, because it is a basic understanding that seems all too often to go entirely missing in discussions of the future of books and publishing.

Books have no real future. Stories have just as much of a future as they ever did, perhaps more.

Where do stories come from? They come from human minds. They have certain rules and conventions and talent requirements that have been developed over thousands of years to mesh with inputs that give pleasure to human minds. We have certain basic understandings of what makes good stories and bad stories. Writers whom we consider to be good (ie, we enjoy them more than writers we don’t think are good) usually follow conventions and use techniques (and draw on talents) that appeal to lots of people like us – and, for the purposes of this analysis, most people are like each other when it comes to making judgments about what is, and is not, a good story. Why? Because story is perceived far more deeply than on conscious levels. We like stories in which heroes survive, because we subconsciously become those heroes and our own survival instincts are triggered in support of the hero. If the hero fails and does not survive, at some level we fail and die as well.

We mostly don’t like those stories, even if they are beautifully crafted and all the hard-learned conventions and techniques are employed, that force us to “die,” if only in our own imaginations and subconscious identifications.

And then there is the issue of craft.  We don’t like stories that are, for reasons of spelling, punctuation, grammar, style, continuity, and a host of other reasons, make a story difficult for us to immerse ourselves into.

“Good” writers generally craft stories that many, many people like. That word “craft” entails a lifetime of hard work, trial and error, self-education, and, yes, native talent. Not everybody can do it. In fact, not very many people at all can do it relatively well or successfully. And therein lies the issue over which the dying world of book-object-story is currently dashing itself to pieces. The commercial structure undergirding our previous method of story delivery – the mass-marketing of book-objects that present individual stories – acted as a gatekeeper that prevented all but those regarded by hard-eyed editors using a definition of quality that included notions of profit – Will this story sell enough books to make a profit in our current commercial structure? – from reaching a significant number of readers.

That structure is dead – and the gatekeeper function it performed is equally dead. And that is what the argument is about these days, because here is a simple truth: Good writers are few and far between, and good writing is very difficult to produce. In short, producing good writing is very hard work, and should therefore command a certain amount of value in the marketplace for the person who can do it. If it does not, then good writers will not, for the most part, make the effort. We are talking about simple matters of opportunity cost here. If a writer puts in 40 hours a week producing a good story, that is 40 hours a week that cannot be devoted to other income-producing endeavors. If the time devoted to writing produces zero income, then the writer starves, along with his family. This is why most writing prior to contemporary times was produced either by religious writers supported by their churches, or by aristocrats or others with private wealth who didn’t need to work for their daily bread.

As with so much else that the onrushing technological singularity transforms, we have here yet one more vast, long-developed cultural structure, accepted and well-understood by all, being destroyed in a few short years, far more quickly than the replacement structures to support a new paradigm can be established.

That’s what we’re fighting about right now: How are we going to incentivise the production of good stories within a framework of an entirely new delivery system that does not involve the marketing of individual physical books-as-objects? I’m sure that we will eventually find ways of doing so, but until we do, the outlook for publishing – and for story-creators – will remain unsettled.