Lately I’ve been delving in the depths of my own trunk stories. This can be akin to pulling one’s on scabs but not nearly as fun. It is also, however, useful, since I’m putting up most of those stories (well, the good – or at least decent – ones) with Goldport Press.
It is also, in a way, an education into how a writer grows. And what (I think) is good and bad despite or besides gatekeepers and all that.
The first thing to shock me is how… mixed my stories are. Years ago, while taking a workshop in Oregon, I had some inkling of this and told Kris “What annoys me is how mixed my quality is.” Brother, I spoke a mouthful. At the time I had no idea, myself. I had some concept that some of the stories were way better than the others – what I had no idea was HOW MUCH better. Take 1999, the year I started selling consistently. It was a good year for short stories. I wrote about fifty of them. Twenty of those are – easily – as good as anything I write today. The others range from bad to appallingly bad to “oh, my heavens, are you going to give me anesthesia before I read these?”
So, what is wrong about the very, very bad, no good, utterly rotten ones? Am I sure they’re not just a matter of my internalizing gatekeepers’ tastes? Um… quite.
Amid the stuff I’m putting up, for instance, is a lot of Space Opera, some of it in the Darkship Thieves Universe (well, one story out, for now) and those never sold, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. I suspect what kept those from selling are gatekeeper issues. First, they were space opera. Second, they were er… heretical when it came to the perspective of what would be a good future. With a little clean up, some of it to make sure the history is coherent, there will be ten to fifteen short stories in the future history up by early next year, and maybe a couple of novellas, as well.
But the very, very bad ones are not gatekeepers. They fall into three camps – the easily salvageable (with work), the “this needs to be seriously expanded” and the “what was I thinking?”
The first one is mostly wording issues. Yeah, I know, I’m used to thinking of English as my native language, even if I acquired it fourteen years after birth – hey, some of us are built oddly – but let’s just say that in a lot of the stuff written in the late eighties and early nineties you can ear the stiltedness, the “not quite comfortable in the language’s skin” of someone who speaks English as a foreign language. These grate on me probably more than they would on readers because that’s the way I’m put together. There are perfectly good authors I can’t read because their language “clangs.” Again, these stories can be salvaged, given a few rainy afternoons during flu season, when I’m not up to creating anything as such, but can spend time line-by-lining it and changing the wording.
The second category is mostly the future history – the stories that are not just gatekeeper-issues. You see, I was learning to Heinlein things in with no explanation. Like any skill you’re learning, I took it to an extreme. It took me years after writing these to figure out that people like some idea of WHERE in future history the story fits. Okay, it’s not natural for your character to think “Now that it’s the twenty fifth century” but you can find other ways to drop it in, and people like it. Being dropped, deaf and blind into the middle of an incomprehensible world irks readers, for some reason. So, a lot of the future history needs a good go-over and I suspect will become novellas. (This is at least partly a gatekeeper-in-the-head issue. I knew there was near to no market over ten thousand words, so I kept things over-lean in an attempt to slid under that bar. Now the bar isn’t there. So, never mind, I’ll grow them again.)
The third category is far more difficult and might have to rest-in-drawer though it might get cannibalized for its ideas. These are wet petards. In some of them I can, just vaguely, glimpse what I was trying to do, but the story reads like a wet petard – i.e. you get to the end and you go “oh, um” And that’s if you get to the end, because you usually know exactly what will happen all along the way from paragraph two.
So, what gives them their wet petardish quality? Well… mostly foreshadowing issues. If there’s only one way for a story to end; if, no matter how big the character’s issue, there is no hope of his succeeding, then why should I read the story? Or, of course, if there’s no way for the character to fail. (Series characters and novels are different here. I’m talking short stories.) Other serious defects consist of making my villain so loathsome that by page three I’m mad at the hero for not having killed him/her yet, and I don’t want to be in the same story with said villain.
However, let me make clear what’s so obvious to me now truly wasn’t then. And yes, over time I wrote fewer shorts per year, but they are all decent reads with the usual “your mileage may vary” disclaimers. I mean, I’m still uneven. The range just has gotten narrower.
So, the take away? If you write a lot, eventually you get better. Also, if you’re in that stage where you know your output is uneven, write a lot. SOME of it will be good.
Other things I’ve learned from this going over old stuff and putting some of it up: the story that’s outselling all the others ten to one is a seriously flawed story I couldn’t sell anywhere. Note I didn’t say a BAD story. It is enjoyable to read and kind of cute, but it’s one of those where things happen to the character – he doesn’t do much. Is this a gate keeper preference but not a reader preference? It would seem to be so. Not that I intend to make an habit of writing flawed stories, but, it’s interesting.
Another observation is that most of my short stories are seriously, seriously depressing. This is funny, because my novels aren’t. On the other hand my shorts have gotten more cheerful as time goes by, so perhaps I’m finally growing up. Or maybe the depression was the search for an emotional punch, which was difficult to come by when I was a young mother with two toddlers in the house the whole time.
One thing my limited marketing – I have less than a dozen short stories up – has shown me is that cheerful sells better. (Give the lady a duh.)
So, if you’re writing stuff for the public, so far: Avoid wet petards plus write cheerful stories seems to equal profit. And if the public includes Sarah Hoyt, for the love of heaven smooth that language. (Like nails on the blackboard, it is.)
And that’s the week that was. Now that I’m getting over the dreaded crud, I shall go back to writing and relegate the editing/putting up stuff to the evenings, when I’m useless for creative work. (There is a time when my head feels empty and echoes.)
Oh, the other thing I have found out is that, given the fact I know stories will no longer need to languish in a drawer unless I put them there, I seem to have unleashed something. I am writing MUCH faster than I ever have and keeping up that production longer. No, I’m not going to write down numbers, because you’ll either not believe them; assume it’s bad if it’s being written that fast; or think I’m bragging. BUT I’m truly laying down words at a prodigious rate – fast enough to scare me a little. And I’m enjoying it more than I have in years and years. Dean called this effect (not on me but in general) “the writer coming back.” It is the best way to describe it. And it feels good.
According To Hoyt 
I’m afraid to ask which is the “flawed story”. [Wink]
Seriously, I suspect that it’s the “Littliest Nightmare” as the POV character really doesn’t do anything but it is “cute”. [Smile]
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Actually, no. In The Littlest Nightmare he CHANGES. I meant Dragon’s Blood.
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“Also, if you’re in that stage where you know your output is uneven, write a lot. SOME of it will be good.”
That’s my mantra right there.
I’m gonna cross-stitch that on a pillow and sleep on it each night.
Just out of curiosity, which story is it that you think is seriously flawed but is outselling all the others? I’d like to read it.
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Yay! More stories! YAY! The writer coming back!!!!!
Of COURSE the writer is coming back! You’re no longer doing the equivalent of giving birth to babies and taking them to some stranger who will decide whether they live or will be sacrificed to Moloch. You’re writing for the joy of writing and not worrying “will this one be found worthy” as you’re doing it!
What a fantastic world this is becoming! Hooray!
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Now, thanks to the Interwebs, she can instead follow the Spartan practice of putting her newborns out on a hillside to see if they’re hearty enough to merit feeding.
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ROFL. Keep threatening the kids with this still. :) My dad told me until I was about fourteen that if we’d been in Sparta I’d have been killed since I was born extremely premature and fit inside a size eleven shoe…
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Are there places in your writing where you can restore the stilted English-as-foreign-language voice just long enough to put words in an Alien’s mouth?
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Steve,
It’s weird, but I REALLY don’t have that many aliens in my stories….
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Just translate it into German using Babelfish and then translate it back word for word into English without rearranging the order.
Your aliens will end up sounding like Yoda in no time, or possibly B-movie Indians from the 50’s
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by page three I’m mad at the hero for not having killed him/her yet, and I don’t want to be in the same story with said villain.
You know, that’s exactly what’s wrong (for me) with the one and only Heinlein I ever actively disliked, _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_. Oh, I still found it compulsively readable, but I so hated Maureen Smith that if that car in Albuquerque didn’t get her I was gonna kill her _myself_.
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It depends. Some bad guys are really awful and by the first act I want them to die with the intensity of a thousand white hot suns aaaaand then it crosses over for me somewhere around the second act and I just want to see what they are going to do next, how low they will go.
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I love the Nero Wolfe mysteries. Read any one I can get my hands on multiple times. They’re very popular. They’ve made Rex Stout a household name and — I dare say — a pile of simoleons.
But — think about it — what’s the plot of a Wolfe mystery? Archie gets up in the morning, dresses in casual elegance, winces while shaving because he’s touching a bruise acquired in Wolfe’s service. They have breakfast. Which is interrupted by the doorbell. There’s a frightfully attractive woman there who needs Wolfe’s services but excites Archie’s ardor…
And there’s Wolfe’s reluctance to leave the house — that will come into play. A threat to the orchids? Never. Will Fritz burn the vichysoise? Give me a break.
Think of them as comfort food fiction. And don’t get so down on yours.
M
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Back when Timmy Hutton & Maury Chaykin were dramatizing those tales on A&E a perceptive reviewer noted that the Wolfe & Goodwin stories were actually domestic comedies with a mystery thrown in to give them focus and shape. A variant on Jeeves & Wooster Solve The Case, if you will. There is indeed a pleasure in literary formulae that makes for quite comforting food. John D MacDonald, in an interview shortly after the release of (what proved to be) his last Travis McGee novel described the genre as a form of “folk dance” — everybody knows the basic steps and only a few fillips and variations are to be tolerated.
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Quite right about Travis McGee. They sit in the same place in my mind as Wolfe. Or the Saint. And, I suspect, (albeit on a different level), for their fans, the Remo Williams stories or The Executioner books.
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That I think is the most important point. Glad you are having fun.
Wayne
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Likely your writer is simply frolicking over being off the leash and no longer forced to obey the whims of arbitrary and unloving masters. Trying to make a Great Dane or Lab behave like a German Shepherd or Australian Kelpie simply frustrates the former without filling the function of the latter. Let your inner Beagle cavort!
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I might be a boxer. The one book I’ve written so far without those constraints has the HIGHEST body count ever and is as close as someone with no military experience (though plenty of general fighting experience) can come to mil sf. No clue why, but it felt right. What if I’ve been wearing this pink bow and getting poodle cuts and I’m really a boxer?
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So glad to hear you are enjoying writing, and putting down so many words. When I’m finished with the round of stories for various anthologies I’m submitting to this year, I’m going to go through my story vault and see how good/bad/uneven my early writing was compared to where my skills are at now. I know a lot of those stories will need a lot of work, but it will be fun to see what I have since I haven’t looked at them in years.
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Glad to hear you are feeling well. May the muses smile down on you as you work.
The part of me that works in marketing winces a little every time you put up a story to sell. “Dear Bog,” it whispers into my ear. “Tell me she has some kind of a marketing plan, and is not selling her fiction all willy-nilly.”
You are of course free to ignore this voice. Alas I am not.
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tolladay, you’re assuming that there’s something stable enough to be called a “market” and therefore susceptible to planning.
At the moment, that’s about like observing meteors smashing things and working out what to do with the insurance money when one hits your house.
The right strategy is to have enough chips in enough games that some payoff is statistically likely. Go Sarah!
Regards,
Ric
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With all due respect, Ric, I suspect you did not quite grasp my intent. There is always a market, even if it is selling fiddles while Rome is burning. In addition, markets function to scale; much like the macro economy of the national GDP may have no relation to the micro economy my income. From what I see, the turmoil in the book market has more to do with the distribution of one’s fiction, and the effects (if any) on gatekeepers. Neither of these change the needs of readers; we still want to be entertained via words. The only real debate is how we get our fiction, and whom we trust to recommend it.
While the macro book market right now is in turmoil, that is completely secondary to the micro market of Sarah’s fan base (actually several fan bases) and their willingness to pay money in exchange for good stories. Moreover, her goals do not change regardless of any book market turmoil. She still has the goals of increasing her fan base, adding value to the experience of being one of her fans, getting her fans of one book line to cross over to the others, and to monetize her existing back stock.
In my mind, the right strategy for Sarah is the one that best meets her needs. A shotgun approach is not a bad start, but it is not nuanced or controlled. By analogy one could assume that the best approach to finding a spouse is to concurrently date as many people as possible. While this might work, and has been known to work, it is also not necessarily the “best” approach.
And just to be clear, my intent is that Sarah attains the most possible “value” from her hard labor. Normally this value is spoken in terms of money, but if apple pies make her happier than Benjamins, then I wish her a house full of wonderfully made apple pies.
In truth I wish this of every author I read because the more they get paid, the more they can write. And their writing feeds my addiction.
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Eric,
With all due respect, you’re wrong. Yes, there is a market both micro and macro. What there isn’t is a “marketing plan” that can reach it. From talking to other people doing this, there are two ways to market at this point: ONE method of marketing seems to work best and that’s to give some stuff away for free to attract buys. Another method is to put out so much that people are bound to stumble on it. From POV the second is better because my main problem is that the people who know me are a very limited group. The more I have out there, the easier it is for people to stumble on my work. Interestingly, this is what I’m seeing. A story sells, then everything follows.
Most book marketing plans are not adapted to THIS type of market, which is by definition an “abundance” market or perhaps an infinite market. I.e. my stories have a potentially near-infinite audience (defined as enough people to give me enough money that I can build Uncle Scrooge’s money bin for daily swims.) Aas for “infinite”– it’s not limited in time. Once a story is out it stays out. If it catches a hundred readers today, and they each talk to their friends, I can be a bestseller. OTOH if it catches a reader today, and he tells a friend, who tells a friend, and it takes ten years to sell 1k copies, I’m still getting the money, and the story is still there making more fans and readers, anyone of which could ignite an explosion in readership.
We’ve been used to regarding books as produce. They hit the shelves for a limited time — now six weeks? — then vanish, but books are not produce. They don’t spoil. Yes, some age, but not the majority of them.
I’m selling shorts at 99c because I can’t charge less. I have enough short stories, that 50c per would still add up to a lot of money even if I sold five of them worldwide per month. My motives are pure. I work for money. I don’t want power. Fame is only useful so far as it sells books. Mostly, I want to tell stories and I want to be paid. But that doesn’t mean novels only and top price only. There are such things as loss-leaders (arguably what I’m doing with Witchfinder is JUST that) and there is the math of a near infinite (for my purposes) market. If I put out my 200 already written short stories (not counting grouping them into collections which gives me more money and the public a better deal. With collections, that expands to about 250 properties, and I’m not including the fact a lot of these shorts, once re-written, will be short novels at about 20 to 30k words, justifying a price of $2.99 per) let’s say I sell on average 10 of them a month, which at current is sort of the “bobbing along the bottom” sales for ANYONE’s short or novella out there — now, this is on average, meaning some of the 200 stories will sell 50 copies, and another will sell none. But, for ease of calculation, let’s say, each of them sells 10 copies, and I’m getting, rounding it out, 30c per copy. I’m making three dollars per story. 200 stories. Six hundred dollars a month, for things that either were in drawer and not even sent out, or published, paid for, and forgotten. Tell me where it’s not criminal insanity for a writer with two children to put through college, a mortgage that pinches, and a recessionary economy all around to refuse to do this because of some sort of artistic pride. (Though let me assure you, even when proofreading and formatting might be iffy — I need to redo a couple of the stories, which is easy with electronic format, btw — none of them leaves the house without satisfying my “artistic sense” of storytelling.)
Two observations, and I’ll point out with 12 shorts out, this is early days yet, and I’m still learning what I can and can’t do, which means some of my format, etc, will be screwed up (some things you learn by doing and only by doing) — but the observations accord with those of friends who have put a lot more out: 1) the more stories I have out, the more each individual story seems to sell. So, if I’m making 30c per week, per story with two stories out, when I have five, I’m making 60c per week per story. And with ten I’m making $1 per week per story. I don’t know why this is, but it seems to be so. (I could hazard guesses, like higher visibility, or simply that if you put something new every week, people come back for it, mention it to their friends, etc. But I don’t KNOW.) 2)I seem to be doing slightly — very slightly — better than the “bobbing along the bottom” average, from the beginning. Will this continue? I don’t know. Early days yet. However given my objective is “write stories, get paid” so far, so good.
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Hmmmmmm, just a thought, and certainly I am not wanting you to undercut your prices, y’unnerstan’, but … if teh [sic] goal is to entice readers with bargains on the theory that the more they read the more they will want to read … are you able to offer a “Buy 4, Get 1 Free” package? (or buy 3, or two or for every ten Hoyt stories bought, I dunno, a free kitten?)
OTOH, do you want to be positioning yourself as a “discount” brand, offering generic [sic sic sic] stories for those unwilling to pay for “brand-name” authors?
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No. I don’t want to position myself as a discount brand. I WOULD like Amazon to allow the 50c price — I wasn’t clear — for some shorts. Sorry, insufficient coffee yet, and I’m editing a story that is only 3k. Right now I’m selling stories that are 3k and stories that are 6k at 99c and that seems… odd. I wish I could sell the 3k word ones somewhat cheaper, but since 99c is Amazon’s bottom, so be it. (MOST of my stories are 6k and seem to be becoming 10k as I free myself of artificial restraint, and for those… well… 99c is okay.)
I DO the buy five get two free with collections. Getting ready to release a five sf collection (Five From the Far Future) which are, in effect 5 for the price of three. ;)
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Oh, and under “utter bafflement” there are people buying each short story individually but NOT the collection. In fact, so far, most of them do JUST that.
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What, you’re selling fiction like fabric – by the yard???? Stories are piece goods, each one compleat in itself. Call me peculiar (certain it is you won’t be the first) but I have never bought into the idea that “for $7.99 I expect at least 600 pages” is a reasonable approach to fiction. It is the quality of the story, its compleatness, that produces satisfaction, not its length. Worry not about charging $0.99 for 3K words if that is all the story’s telling requires; worry more about using 4K words to tell that story (I acknowledge that paring the story down is a major part of the authorial art.)
Think in terms of compleatness, not wordage, else you risk finding yourself like the restaurant in the classic Woody Allen joke:
Oh, DUH. Thanks. See, the new paradigm (I hate that word, but it’s true in this case) requires all these MINUTE adjustments and you just administered one. I’m such an idiot not to have seen it. See, I’m used to being paid BY THE WORD for shorts, so of course… There, all better.
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Dear Eric,
Right now marketing plans simply don’t work. It is questionable how well they’ve ever worked. Yes, they seemed to work for the big houses, but how much of that was “market control”. Ric Lock is right. Right now it’s a matter of buying lottery tickets. Mind you, I can probably get enough sales, anyway, from the fans who want to be completists and buy everything I ever wrote, and many of these shorts are not available.
However, if it makes you sleep better at night, most of my space opera falls into two “future histories” so each of the shorts and novels builds those future histories. My intent — unfortunately a lot of the space opera NEEDS rewrite — is to eventually collect them, by order into Future History I, II, etc (probably with catchier names like Seacities Ahoy.) with reference to the novels in between. But, honestly, most people who are making a living now are not using a marketing plan. The stories are their own best advertisement.
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I see you got in your reply before I finished mine.
I agree 100% with you that stories are their own best advertising. Since I do advertising for a living, I tend to see them as exactly such. So let me ask you this, when is the best time to release an ad?
Mind you, there might not be a “best” time. Then again there might.
For instance, if you are in between novels in one of your universes, then your fans will be starting to get hungry. They will have liked your last novel, and will be waiting anxiously for the next. Since you know your writing, and have a pretty good idea of your schedule, you can predict a “reasonable” date that your next work will be available. One way to market your new work might be to release a short story from that universe about half way (or maybe three-quarters way) from the release of one novel to the release of the other. In a sense, you would be using the short story to both advertise yourself (which we both agree works well), and to ALSO advertise your future work. Two birds, one stone.
Make sense?
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Oh, yeah, within the constraints Amanda mentioned — like, I don’t know when books will come out. No, I’m serious. Books delivered two years ago and six months ago are BOTH scheduled for October next year. Another is in limbo. I also can’t use same characters, and it’s also insane because you can’t count on having the readers find the shorts, so nothing IMPORTANT can happen — I INTEND to use the stories to keep interest in some books. OTOH the stories ARE properties in themselves, and sitting on them while going “no, no, I’m reserving this one” is stupid. They’re money, sitting in the drawer. Look at my comment too, where I have NO clue WHAT will sell. Also, sorry, but books aren’t cans of food. I’m not bringing out baked beans only, to remind you I do baked beans. It’s been my experience that, with few exceptions — like people who read mystery only — MOST of my fans cross over genres for ME even if not for anyone else, so stumbling on one of my silly shorts can open the door to EVERYTHING. I like that.
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Kristen Lamb has written about that. In her opinion marketing for writers has to be about selling the writer.
In other words people will buy your stuff if they like you.
And I think she’s got a point. Back when I was still in good enough shape to attend conventions, if I meet a writer, and like them, I would try their books. If the writer turned me off, I wouldn’t try reading them.
Wayne
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Yes, to an extent, but the best way to sell yourself is by people realizing they like your STUFF. Look, Portugal, we never got authors visiting. Even the bios often weren’t in the back of the books, or if they were they were often weird. (Like Heinlein was supposed to have two kids.) So, how did I become a fan of Heinlein, Simak, Asimov and Anderson? By noticing I LIKED their books. And looking for more.
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I ‘spect I am not the only one who’s noticed that Baen frequently includes pages in the back of books they publish, claiming “If you enjoyed this author you might also enjoy … with a list of authors Jim, Toni or whoever thought were not so dissimilar to the book just read as to annoy readers who’ve acted upon the advice. Baen also provides lists of authors in the format of “If you enjoy reading Robert Heinlein/David Weber/Phil Intheblank then you would probably also enjoy reading …” with list of authors not so dissimilar as to yadda-yadda-yadda.
For long time Sciffy readers like me the lists provide amusing references, for newbies they can be invaluable in directing the reader to books that will provide further enjoyment (coincidentally published by Baen, but the ploy is sufficiently transparent as to be inoffensive.)
This all helps folk notice which authors they enjoy and which might prove similarly enjoyable. And it avoids the problem of authors with annoying personalities cough*Harlan*cough you are nonetheless demmed fine writers.
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Wayne, are you saying that you would never read an author *unless* you’d met them? Or only that, once having met one that you didn’t like, you’d *quit* reading their stuff?
Because if you only read authors you’ve personally met, there are a bunch of excellent ones who don’t get around much anymore — Piper, Heinlein, etc etc etc
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Lin,
Well, I have stopped reading writers who I didn’t like in person. I’m not going to name any names, but the first time it happened was at a con in 1976, and the writer was a major name at the time. The meeting just totally turned me off. Bad personalities can do that (and yes, I know, my personality can turn people off – my only defence is I have Aspergers, and I can’t tell when I’m upsetting people).
As to the first sentence, that’s silly. If the writer is alive I will often read their blog (if they have one) to decide if they are worth checking out. That’s how I ended up on Sarah’s blog.
However I don’t think you need to worry about that. Everyone knows that I’m weird. I’m also a non-fiction writer whose usual reaction to anything new is to research it. Or him. Or her.
And then when I saw that Sarah was writing about writing, I stuck around. I had a YA fantasy trilogy which I was working on, plus non-fiction books on antique farm equipment, one room school houses, forklifts, and catalytic converters. And then I got into publishing, and she was writing about publishing. I’m publishing the Poet Laureate of Temiskaming District’s back list, my own non-fiction, and now I’ll be publishing Shirley Meier’s huge series of books set in the Fifth Millennium (about one million words total). I’ve also got a whole bunch of people who are interested in using me as a publisher so they can get the “Canadian Content” tag (don’t ask, it would take a week to explain).
So reading Sarah, along with Joe Kornrath, Bob Mayer, Dean Wesley Smith, Kris Rusch, and a bunch of other people is now business research (as well as fun – all of them are damned good writers).
This would make an interesting poll. The problem would be getting it to enough writers, so that they could ask people to take part. Hmmm…
Wayne
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Actually I find that I’d best not meet writers I love. Yeah, I might really like them: Pratchett and Wilson for instance, are wonderful men as is AFA I’m concerned Jerry Pournelle. BUT at least one writer of historic mysteries got me to stop reading him forever because I attended a panel he spoke at. Let’s just say it’s amazing other people fit in the room with his ego. And while a healthy ego helps in this business, his was… Oh my heavens. Was it just… Anyway, could never read him again.
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Forgot to mention.
Yes. Talent matters. But what is talent?
1) The ability to produce literature
2) The ability to produce something people want to read
I’ll go for number two every time. Which is why when Terry Pratchett’s Snuff wandered in the house tonight, I grabbed it.
Wayne
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Tolladay, I suggest you go back and read all of Sarah’s posts about how and why she is putting her short stories up. They aren’t going up “willy nilly” as you seem to have suggested in one of your comments. If they were, believe me, she wouldn’t be worrying about how well written or edited they were. She wouldn’t worry about how her fans would react to them. She’d just put them up.
As for your comment that she should have a reasonable idea of when her next book will come out, well, that only works if she is self-publishing that book. Believe me, what the legacy publishers can and will do with books once they’ve been turned in ought to be a crime. One of Sarah’s mysteries has been with the publisher — and has been accepted by that publisher — for a year or so. For months, she had no idea when it would be published. Even now, she only has a general date and that can be changed at the whim of her editor.
With regard to putting up short stories using characters in the last book, well, again, that only works if you are self-publishing. To many publishers, legacy or not, would be more than a bit upset if an author started putting out short stories or novellas using characters from books they had published, at least as long as said book is still in print. Some even had contractual language preventing the author from doing that. Then there’s that little right of first refusal clause that goes into almost every publishing contract these days. That means Sarah could not only be in breach of contract but that the publisher could cancel any future books from Sarah if they were of a mind.
So, what is an author’s marketing plan right now? To make sure you put up quality stories and novels that will entice readers to not only buy those titles but others as well. To do so in such a way you aren’t in breach of any current contracts — and, if you don’t believe that publishers get touchy about authors self-publishing while under contract, go over the Mad Genius Club and look at my post from a month or so ago where I discuss that very thing — all the while making sure their out of print back list as well as new titles are getting out. Check out both Kris Rusch’s blog and Dean Wesley Smith’s.
As Sarah said, marketing isn’t the issue right now. Business is and that means betting titles out there. The more you have available, the better chance you have of making a go of it as a writer. That means getting your digital titles into the main venues — Amazon, B&N, iBooks/iTunes. Everything else is gravy and most folks who are making it in publishing will tell you it is quality and quantity, not social networking, not money spent on advertising that sells books.
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It does occur that, in a market in chaos, the goal of a marketing plan ought be to determine what will work in that market. While marketing may now be luck, or art, it should be possible to induce it to science. So tossing out shorts (really, the impulse to engage in lingerie puns is barely resistible) willy-nilly is practical if you use the sales information to “zero” in your marketing, finding out what methods and venues are most effective.
Advocating for the Devil, OTOH, the market is in such a state of flux that what constitutes effective marketing this week will likely be bollocks next week, so drop your hooks into the stream and trawl for what you can get.
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Amanda,
You are absolutely correct (though I think you mean getting, not betting, though that makes sense too. It’s a wordo!)
I will add that I have done extensive marketing for TWO of my titles and as far as I can see, the effect was pretty close to zero. Perstige, and dissimination within the field resulted, but NOT out.
An interesting thing, Amanda, is that though I calculate the effect of my particular stories (some of them I simply don’t want under my name. Let’s say my outlook on life changed in the last ten years) on my fans, what sells and what doesn’t is… incalculable. And everyone else doing this seems to find the same. Some of the stories we think marginal sell like crazy, and vice versa. But I gather from reading bios of writers of the golden age that it was always so.
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The worst thing for a writer is to be unknown. Always true, but now more than ever, in the current chaos.
This blog, Mad Genius Club, Facebook, Baen’s Bar, conventions, book signings . . . It’s all a fight to get your name out there and Sarah’s very good at it.
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Well it appears I still have some things to learn. My apologies if I offended anyone. My primary concern was that Sarah was applying some kind of thought behind her story selling. Had I been here longer, or simply paid more attention then I would have know that she was.
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I doubt anybody was offended. Part of the price of conversation on the internet is that, like conversations in bars, restaurants, cons — any public place — people will enter at various points and not necessarily catch portions previously covered. A desire to helpfully provide personal expertise is laudable, especially when the person does not insist that their experience trumps all.
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But my expertise *does* trump all. ;-)
Thanks for the kind words RES. I’ve found that on teh interwebs I have an innate ability to not see when I am pissing other people off. (what can I say? Its a gift) I’ve learned to stop talking, and apologize at the first sign of trouble. In person I can speak the same way, but also have the added input of facial expression and such to gauge the effects of my words. Here, especially as I am new to this party, it is difficult to tell exactly how my words are effecting others (if at all).
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tolladay
You didn’t offend me. If I sounded impatient, it was because it is SO hard to explain to people outside the field the very peculiar restraints this field has.
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