Category Archives: Publishing

Paid to Play: Writing Licensed Fan Fiction in Kindle Worlds

We’ve all heard that writing fan fiction is something that professional writers don’t do. Fan fiction has a stigma attached to it of being vastly amateur and a waste of time for aspiring authors who should be cutting their teeth on their own works. The truth of the matter is that fan fiction has a very large fan base and can provide a great opportunity for new writers to hone their abilities. Yet, being paid for writing fan fiction has always been reserved for authors who sign literary contracts to write “media tie-ins.” The media tie-in was essentially the sole professional version of fan fiction until Kindle Worlds came along.

Kindle Worlds is a project from Amazon that allows authors to write licensed fan fiction in any of the licensed world. Authors can earn royalties (typically 30%) from their works in a licensed world. Works can be any length from short story to full novels. The only “catch” is that Amazon and that licensed world own your story in perpetuity. Licensed worlds include the worlds of bestselling authors Hugh Howey, Bella Andre, and Kurt Vonnegut. Other worlds include television properties (Vampire Diaries, Wayward Pines, Veronica Mars) and comic book properties (G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero, Quantum and Woody, XO Man-o-War). All an author has to do is have an idea, check the Kindle Worlds quality/content guidelines for that licensed world, write a story, and publish it. It’s licensed fan fiction, and I can say from experience, a huge opportunity.

A few years ago at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, I met Hugh Howey. We had a great conversation then, and ever since via infrequent emails. I first heard about Kindle Worlds from Hugh. Roughly about the time that I finished the second of his Silo Saga novels (SHIFT), I had an idea for a story in his universe. Knowing that the universe was available through the Kindle Worlds program, I worked up a story and promptly hesitated. On the cusp of submitting the story, I chickened out and emailed Hugh for advice. He told me to publish the story, and I did. I’ve published several short stories via Kindle, but none has sold like my Silo Sage novelette “Vessel.” It’s been out for a couple of years and has never left the Top 200 in Kindle Worlds Science Fiction and Fantasy, topping out at #3. The story has done nicely, putting some extra money in my account while generating name recognition. I never thought about name recognition as a by-product for Kindle Worlds until I had an idea for another story in a different universe.

As a kid, the cartoon series G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero was my favorite series of all time. When I saw that its universe was part of Kindle Worlds, I was amazed and thrilled. In the Kindle Worlds stories, there are some really good ones including those by bestselling author Carrie Vaughn and my friends Peter Wacks and Aaron Michael Ritchey. On a getaway weekend to Breckenridge a couple of years ago, I had an idea for a story in that universe and wrote it inside of a week. After some read-throughs and edits, I used the Kindle Worlds cover builder, formatted the book, and set it live. What happened next is surreal. About 24 hours after I set the title live, I had a Twitter notification on my account (@TheWriterIke). I’d been mentioned in a tweet from Amazon Kindle Worlds that reached almost 35,000 subscribers. They’d also tagged one of the major G.I.Joe toy collector groups, and they then retweeted it to another 6,000 subscribers. The story hit #7 in all of Kindle Worlds within the next few hours. I gained fifty or so Twitter followers. Like “Vessel,” my short story “Friends In High Places” has continued to do very well, and the fact that it’s licensed fan fiction is something I’m very proud of.

I believe firmly that writers should seek payment for our work. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills. Kindle Worlds is a perfect opportunity to play in someone else’s world while earning royalties and gaining exposure. Check them out at KindleWorlds.Amazon.Com and see if there is a licensed world you’re familiar with. Then, if the muse whispers in your ear, sit down and write the best story you possibly can. You never know what might happen with it.

What “Rejection” Really Means

A Guest Post by David Farland

For the last few weeks I’ve been scurrying to finish up judging on a large contest.  I’ve had to “reject” thousands of stories.  I hate the word “reject,” because it doesn’t really express what I want to say.

Very often I will read the opening to a story and it is obviously the first work of a very young writer.  It may have a multitude of problems—from simple typos, to a lack of understanding as to how to set a scene, to clunky dialog.  I know that I can’t accept the story for publication, but at the same time, I wish that I could shout some encouragement to the budding writer, much the way that my mentor Algis Budrys did to a young Stephen King.

I think that people need encouragement. It may be the only thing that will spur a young writer to greater effort.

So what does the word “rejection” mean to you as a writer?  I think it’s simply: “Try harder.”

A lot of fine works get rejected.  The bestselling works in nearly every genre experienced rejection.  Lord of the Rings was rejected by several American publishers.  Dune was rejected by all of them.  Gone with the Wind made its rounds through every major publisher.  Harry Potter was rejected by all of the biggest houses, and Twilight was rejected by a dozen agents before it got picked up—yet all of these novels became the bestsellers in their fields.

So does that mean that these were all bad novels?  Of course not.  It means that the author didn’t find an editor with a matching taste, a matching vision, right at the first.

Very often when I read a manuscript that is close to being publishable, I think, It’s a shame that the author didn’t try a little harder to . . .  That’s what “rejected” means to me.

I was talking to international bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton last week, and asked her to confirm a rumor that I’d heard.  With her first novel, she received over 200 rejections before she made a sale.  She said, “When people tell me that they’ve been rejected five or ten or twenty times, I just tell them that ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’”

Laurell has the perfect attitude toward rejection.  Try harder.

davidfarland_storydoctor

How Bad Can It Get?

If you have a writing career that ultimately spans decades, it will inevitably fluctuate with highs and lows—and so will the exultation and despair that follows such fluctuations. Contracts and literary agents may come and go. Publishing companies can dissolve and your rights lost in a morass of legalese and bankruptcy. The “Mid-List Author Death Spiral,” as it’s called, is a phenomenon well-known to several of my author acquaintances. And this is beyond the usual barrage of rejections we all have to cope with. Unless you’re prepared to go quietly into that good night, you will have to find ways to bounce back from setbacks like these—or else you won’t.

In the mid-1990s, I was one of those young writers desperate for industry validation, ripening me into the perfect fruit for the illegitimate predators out there. These were the days when the Web was in its infancy. There were no valuable websites like Writer Beware, Preditors and Editors, and the Association of Author Representatives out there waving red flags about snake-oil peddlers and con artists. Of course I was delighted when the Deering Literary Agency agreed to represent me. All they wanted was $800 to do it. I studied the contract closely, consulted a lawyer, but everything seemed legit—except for the fee. Young (erm, naïve is the more proper word) and desperate as I was, despite being broke, despite the warning bells, I went through with it.

A year passed with no word. Eventually the Deerings (an entire family of con artists) came back to me asking for another $500 for another year’s representation. More warning bells, more phone calls, but like I said, they were con artists and knew exactly what to say to get me to fork it over. So I did.

Six months later, they called me with contract offer. Joy! Exultation!

The contract offer was from Commonwealth Publications, of Edmonton, Alberta. Hmm, never heard of them before. The sample covers they sent sucked, comparable to a middle-school art class. I mean, terrible, not even by the talented art students. Warning bells, warning bells. Calls to agent—who are these people?—much reassurance. And what’s this clause they’re calling “joint venture,” wherein they require the author to contribute $3,850 to “share the publishing costs”? Oh, well, that’s a pioneering new publishing model. Authors share the costs but get a much higher royalty percentage.

So, despite the warning bells, I borrowed the money (remember, I was broke) and handed it over. This was about 1995. I was 25 years old.

I’m going to abbreviate this long, wrenching tale and say that my book, an epic fantasy titled The Ivory Star, was published in the spring of 1997, a year behind schedule. Dozens of other Commonwealth authors never even saw their book published.

Three months after publication, Commonwealth Publications evaporated. Their owner/CEO, Donald Phelan, looted the company of millions of dollars and fled to the Bahamas, leaving his company to implode and all the authors to drown in a pile of steaming excrement.

I never saw a dime of royalties.

One silver lining: the authors formed a class-action lawsuit, sued in Canadian court, and received our rights back, plus a judgment of $10 million. None of this judgment was ever paid because Commonwealth possessed no real assets, and Donald Phelan agreed to the settlement only on the condition that he not be named personally as a defendant. He was able to take the money and run, leaving authors holding the empty sack.

And about the time Commonwealth was imploding, the Deerings had decided to launch their own version of the same scam. Dorothy, Charles, and Daniel Deering formed a company called Sovereign Publishing and started bilking more naïve, desperate authors out of “representation fees” and then “selling” those books to Sovereign Publishing, which then garnered another round of “joint venture fees.” Unlike Commonwealth, however, Sovereign never published a single book, because the FBI came sniffing around.

The good news? The Deerings were all convicted of various types of fraud, and spent several years each in federal prison.

The bad news? They’re out of the pen now, and I suspect working on similar schemes, heedless of the dreams they crush.

FBI agent Jim Fischer has written a book about the case called Ten Percent of Nothing. There’s also plenty of information on Commonwealth and the Deerings on the website Writer Beware.

But there’s one more kick to the solar plexus in this Insult to Injury Extravaganza.

An unscrupulous few of Commonwealth’s former employees banded together, cooked up a scheme, and bought up the company’s stock of books for pennies on the dollar when all of the company’s assets were sold at auction to cover some of its debts. With this warehouse full of almost-free books, these people formed another “publishing company” called Picasso Publications, and attempted to present themselves as the publisher of these titles and sell the books on Amazon. Authors were never contacted nor informed of this move. As soon as wind of this spread and Amazon shut them down, Picasso evaporated just like Commonwealth did, and an unknown number of books along with them.

Whew. Long story, wasn’t it?

Try living through it.

But this is just the prelude. I still haven’t reached the point of my essay.

After three years in total of this sort of emotional pummeling, when it finally all unraveled, I had stopped writing. I just couldn’t do it anymore. As far as I was concerned, my career was a smoking wreck with a flaming oil slick trailing behind. The self-flagellation never quite reached the clinical level, but only because I found other outlets for my grief and shame.

I plunged myself into other creative avenues, such as minitature wargames, roleplaying games, video games. The storytelling urge that had turned me into a writer made me a pretty good GM. I painted hundreds of miniatures. Orc armies, dark elf armies, Norman armies, troll armies, samurai armies, Viking armies, space marine armies. I got pretty damn good at it over a couple of years.

For about two years, I didn’t write a word.

But then something happened. Not all at once, but more like someone slowly turning up the volume knob on that voice in my head that had started saying, “You should be writing,” the urge to write again slunk back like a coyote hovering around the campfire of my consciousness. Eventually I decided to feed the damn thing.

So I started on a new project. A samurai novel. I threw myself into research, into nights at the library, into reading history books and encyclopedias, and into watching more samurai films. The story I was writing became Heart of the Ronin, the first book of my Ronin Trilogy.

And over the course of the next decade, this decision—to write again—turned my life around.

With my shiny new chapters in hand, I attended my very first writing conference in 1999. At that conference, I met real agents, real editors. Lo and behold, they were just people! Kind people! Friendly people! People interested in what I was working on! One of the agents took the time to offer me some feedback on my samurai novel project, and even though she ultimately declined to represent me, I still feel very much indebted to her for that guiding hand. For the first time, I had the professional validation I had been lacking.

Writing the story that became the Ronin Trilogy led me to throw my life out the window and start over. I moved to Japan and lived there for three years. During this time, I found representation with a real literary agent, one of the big NYC ones, who sold Heart of the Ronin to Gale-Cengage’s Five Star imprint. After a decade since the Commonwealth/Deering cesspit, my career train was back on the tracks.

I returned to the U.S. then and went to grad school, like I had always wanted to. I started going to conventions and networking with agents, editors, and other writers. I wrote more books and sold them to small presses. I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009. My train was starting to roll out of the station. Nowadays I feel like it’s moving at a slow but steady pace, with opportunities to pick up some speed popping up occasionally.

I have more books to write, and I’ll be damned if I ever suffer another setback like what Commonwealth and the Deerings did to me.

What I would like the Conscientious Reader to take away from all this is a number of points.

Lesson 1: Money always flows to the writer, never, ever, ever the other way around. Not to agents, not to publishers, not to anthologies or magazines.

Lesson 2: Trust your instincts. If something stinks, best pay attention and start digging. These days, the internet is a powerful research tool that I didn’t have twenty years ago.

Lesson 3: If you’re a writer whose Muse has scarpered off to grace someone else’s lap, whose desire to write is just gone, the urge to do so will return. Doesn’t matter if you’ve experienced your own train wrecks of whatever scale. The Writer Instinct may be retreat into a dark, little hole, but it’s still there, waiting for the coast-is-clear.  And if it doesn’t?

Your heart would certainly be safer if it stayed away.

But writers don’t believe in playing it safe. We’re already insane, and we embrace it.

If it’s gone for now, trust that it will come back, and it just might change your life.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6death-wind-front-coverTravis Heermann’s latest novel Death Wind, co-authored with jim pinto, was published in September 2016, by WordFire Press.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Apex Magazine, Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

He recently returned to the U.S. from New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and toting more Middle Earth souvenirs than is reasonable.

You can find him on…

Twitter
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Wattpad
Goodreads
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Website


Damage Control

Guest Post by Aubrie L. Nixon

Damage Control is such an odd concept to me. How can you really control damage? By the time something is labeled as “damage is is far past the point of being able to control. Damage is essentially uncontrollable. Yet, as human beings we still feel the need to give everything purpose to make things matter, even damage. As a writer, who is working on getting published, I have made my fair share of mistakes. One that stands out the most is rushing into sending out Query letters.

Being the creator of my fictional world, I hold it very dear to my heart. There can’t possibly be anything wrong with my baby, I would know! I created it. How very, very wrong that attitude is. My current work-in-progress, while awesome, is far from perfect. It took multiple rejections from agents for me to realize that. Now, I like to think I got overly excited in finishing my precious book, and sent it out too early. And that very well may be the case. But, I should have never had it sent out without proper revisions and edits to begin with.

I should have realized that while I see my baby as perfect, I would need an outside perspective to love my book enough to help me make the rest of the world see it as perfect. Thankfully, I have awesome friends and beta readers who helped me see that my book can be so much more than it is right now–perfectly imperfect.

I have been hard at work revising and adding the changes that my world needs. The thing about edits and critiques is that you need people who aren’t afraid to tell you what they think. Though, it might be painful to hear, those extra set of eyes are needed in order for you to become a better writer. You owe it to yourself and those characters that you have created to give them the best possible chance to succeed. You need to find people you trust and respect to help keep you motivated when you’re at the end of your rope.

People who will continue to love your world and the characters in it, even if they have to help you tear them apart first. Revising is one of my least favorite things. But, it is essential to do it. In order to get better, you need to revise. I have never in my life heard of someone who had a perfect first draft. It is called a first draft for a reason.

While I like to think I am all that and a bag of chips, and my writing is the tops, it’s not. I need my friends and beta readers to knock me down a few pegs and pull me back into reality sometimes. Looking at where my manuscript was, to where it is now, and where it is headed… phew, I could have never done that on my own.

I shudder to think if I had sent my baby into the world unprepared. It would have been torn to shreds, my career and potential as an author would be ruined by my own ego. So, to say the least, my people saved me from myself and utter humiliation. I have since learned from my mistake, and laugh at how terrible my first draft was.

So fellow humans and lizard people, don’t pull an Aubrie. Learn from the mistakes I made, that could have very well ruined me. Get yourself a few critique partners, take the advice you agree with, even if it hurts. Scrap the advice you don’t like, and revise, revise revise. You owe it to yourself and the world you have created to make sure you have done your very best. Trust me on this.

aubreyAubrie is 24 years young. She plays mom to a cutest demon topside, and is married to the hottest man in the Air Force. When she isn’t writing she is daydreaming about hot brooding anti-heroes and sassy heroines. She loves Dragon Age, rewatching Game of Thrones and reading all things fantasy. She runs a local YA/NA bookclub with 3 chapters, and over 200 members. Her favorite thing to do is eat, and her thighs thank her graciously for it. If she could have dinner with anyone living or dead it would be Alan Rickman because his voice is the sexiest sound on earth. He could read the dictionary and she would be enthralled. Her current mission in life is to collect creepy taxidermy animals because she finds them cute and hilarious. She resides just outside of Washington DC.