Category Archives: Motivation

A guest post by Sherry Peters.

Mabel cover This was not my plan. A part of me still wants to be rescued from this and put back on the track that was supposed to be. But the more I learn about the business of self-publishing, the more I realize that even authors on the track-that-was-supposed-to-be have to go through much of the same. And I’m a bit of a control freak at times, so being in control of every aspect of publishing my book is fabulous and terrifying at the same time.

Making the decision to self-publish Mabel the Lovelorn Dwarf (arriving August 9, 2014) wasn’t an easy one. I waffled on it for months. A number of factors played into my decision, most of them personal. I’d first seriously considered the self-publishing route at When Words Collide in 2013. I was chatting with my friends Adria Laycraft and Gerald Brandt, discussing the industry, when I declared that I would be launching Mabel at When Words Collide 2014. I didn’t finalize that decision until the end of February 2014.

What were the decisions? Most of them were personal, and I firmly believe that everyone needs to decide for themselves whether it’s the right route for them, and their particular book. But here’s what went into my decision-making process:

At When Words Collide, I had taken a workshop with one of the Acquisitions Editors from Penguin Canada. She was very clear in saying that a lot of publishers now look at what is rising on the indie publishing bestseller charts. Those are the manuscripts they’re picking up, not necessarily agented ones. Why? Because the writer already has a readership—a platform—that has been proven. Guaranteed sales.

I had an agent who doesn’t represent YA. I’d seriously considered revising the novel and giving her first dibs on representing it or allowing me to find a YA agent. That process is glacial, but I was willing to consider it. Until I remembered the seventy-five or so agents who had already rejected it (it is a much better novel now than when they read it), and most of those were YA agents, so what was the point? Of the agents who bothered to respond to my query, even asking for partials, fulls, and revisions, it seemed to come down to “it isn’t marketable.” This was before The Hobbit movie had come out. Perhaps I should have mentioned that Peter Jackson was working on making the movie in my query letter. Ooops.

In March, due to serious health issues, my agent had to let me go. Yes, I’d already decided to self-pub at this point, but I was concerned about the six-month window to put out Book 2. As sad as it was for me to lose my agent, and I continue to hope and pray that her health improves, it freed me up to work on Book 2 rather than try and fail to get another manuscript to her. (She had another one, unrelated to Mabel, that she was shopping around).

The Hugh Howey reports on Author Earnings were somewhat eye-opening. Sure, they aren’t perfect reports, and there are probably a million ways to question the data—people have done so on Facebook—but the bottom line is this: self-published books sell. It takes a whole lot of work, but they sell. It isn’t like the old days when you had to print a thousand copies and have boxes in your apartment taking up room and wondering why you weren’t on the bestsellers list or on Oprah’s Book Club.

I have a decent-paying day job, and income from my coaching business. Printing books on demand is inexpensive, creating e-books is free, and I could afford a decent artist and a copyeditor without having to mortgage my home. I am by no means well off, but I do need to be economical in my grocery shopping, and I don’t have as much money for extras like going to a movie, but I’m easily willing to make that sacrifice for a beautiful, professional product that I can be proud of.

This is probably the most personal part of the decision. I was tired of waiting. I can be really impatient about a lot of things, but when it comes to the publishing industry, as frustrating as it is, I accept the glaciality. Mabel has been a character in my head for almost nine years (as of the time of writing). She started as a joke, but she wouldn’t let go. I wrote stories about her. She became my Master’s Thesis, becoming a novel. Since grad school, I’ve had former classmates of mine ask about Mabel, wondering what was happening with the novel. I’d put it in cryogenics, likely to never see the light of day again. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let her go. And neither, apparently, could my classmates. So I had some of them read it. I also contacted a few teens to read it, to see if it was worth putting out there, if it was, indeed, marketable. Their feedback was phenomenal, and a resounding “Yes.”

Between August 2013 and February 2014, I wrote a first draft of another novel, editing Mabel from what had been my M.A. Thesis at Seton Hill University, and researched self-publishing—not a lot, but enough to make the decision and feel that it was the right one.

Publishing has always been a career choice for me. That is to say, I have always wanted a career as a published novelist and I strive daily to be as knowledgeable and professional about it as I can. That’s why I attended Odyssey and Seton Hill. Have I made missteps? Absolutely. For one, I really wish I’d learned how to write short stories better. But that was a somewhat conscious decision on my part, not to focus on short stories.

I have always done my best to be disciplined in my writing, because I truly believe that while I can take all the time I want to write my first book, once I sign that contract, I don’t have the same freedom, and all my excuses for not writing won’t play with an editor and a deadline. The sooner I eliminate those excuses, the better shape I’ll be in when that contract comes along. But that contract isn’t coming, and so I’m self-publishing.

Now I need to be more disciplined than ever.

Come back tomorrow and join Sherry as she dives headlong into the myriad everyday goals and decisions she now faces as a self-published author.

Guest Writer Bio:
Hailing from Winnipeg, Sherry Peters is a writer and a certified Success Coach for writers specializing in the areas of goal-setting and eliminating writer’s block. She has taught her “Silencing Your Inner Saboteur” workshop online through Savvy Authors, and several Romance Writers of America chapters, and in person at When Words Collide in Calgary and Word on the Water in Kenora. Her book, Silencing Your Inner Saboteur, has sold internationally and has been recommended to graduate students at the University of North Carolina and the University of Winnipeg. Her first novel, a YA fantasy, Mabel the Lovelorn Dwarf, will be available August 2014. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop and earned her M.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. For more information on Sherry, her workshops, and her coaching, visit her coaching website or her author website.

Striking a Healthy Balance

June 2, 2014

Evan Braun

Evan Braun Motivation Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life 8 Comments

When you’re a self-employed, work-from-home individual, establishing and maintaining professional discipline is crucial to being productive. When you can stay up as late as you want, sleep in to your heart’s content, eat at your leisure, take naps whenever you’re even the least bit tired, and choose to watch TV in place of work with nobody looking over your shoulder… well, it doesn’t take long before you’re living in complete squalor/chaos.

At some point, you have to get up and make the bed, put down the remote, and plunk yourself down in your office chair. In short, you have to force yourself to get shit done. There are all kinds of strategies to do this, and you’ll be hearing much about that subject this month. Back in January, we started the conversation about setting goals for the year. Well, guess what? Here we are, nearly at the midway point, and it’s time to check in and see how we’re doing.

But today’s post isn’t about progress bars and project checklists. I’m not here to espouse productivity tips. I’m here to talk about something quite a bit more personal.

Where to start? How about this: I’m a big guy. Well, maybe I’m being a bit too delicate. I’m fat. There, I said it. It’s true. I’m not proud of this. (I’m also not particularly ashamed, but that’s another subject entirely.)

My point is this. It’s one thing to make myself sit down in my office chair for long stretches of the day to both take care of my professional commitments and write enough new words on a regular basis to keep afloat my burgeoning career as an author. It’s another thing to recognize that I also need to make myself get out of that chair for long enough periods of time to keep my productivity high and my health in check. Add to this a couple of medical problems that make substantial physical exercise difficult to maintain for long periods of time, and you see just how tough a balancing act it is to pull off.

Writing and editing are extremely sedentary activities. I was never exactly slim, but back when I was going to college and waiting tables, I didn’t have much trouble regulating my weight and overall physical well-being. My lifestyle was active enough that I simply didn’t have to worry about finding time to exercise. Now? Well, now I basically have no reason to leave my house for half of my workweek, and that’s a problem.

There was a time when I could embark on a 45-minute-walk every day, eat a few more salads, and get by. But then, about five years ago, this came to a sudden end when I began to suffer the effects of a still-undiagnosed medical condition which makes it difficult to impossible for me to bear any weight on my feet for days at a time on a completely random schedule. I’ve certainly found some truth in the old adage that when it comes to exercise, habit leads to ease; in other words, when you do something every day, the momentum of that schedule takes over, making it easier all the time to get off your butt. But when you come to a screeching halt every few weeks and basically don’t have the luxury of moving? Let’s just say it’s hard to stay motivated.

And yet it’s so important for people in our line of work to set realistic (and even ambitious) health goals. I won’t use this space to recommend any particular diet or exercise regimen, since everyone’s recipe for success is highly individual. I do, however, want to start the conversation. We all need to constantly strive for a healthy balance of work, exercise, and diet. Right now, my goal is to get in thirty minutes of moderate walking every day, except on days when walking is impossible—and I have a food plan that kicks up to a level of higher intensity during periods of low exertion to compensate for burning fewer than desired calories.

Let’s talk more about our health goals, and how we get around our sedentary tendencies. See you in the comments!

The Right Thing

April 28, 2014

Evan Braun

Business Conventions Goals Motivation Self-Awareness The Writing Life 2 Comments

I’ve written before on this blog about my experience attending conventions and seminars, but today I want to revisit that subject and take a different perspective. My previous posts have been about professionalism, about making contacts, meeting editors, etc. Today I want to look at the convention experience from the perspective of a fan.

Everyone who writes genre fiction is also a genre fiction fan. This is perhaps obvious! Last spring, the Fictorians devoted a whole month to discussing various bloggers’ inspirations for being a writer, and not surprisingly a large number of those posts ended up being about genre books, movies, and television shows. People who are caught up in the genre milieu are often the same ones who later become the most prodigious content creators.

Certainly some conventions are more for fans than they are for writers and other content creators (as Randy McCharles discussed here just a few days ago). The most recent con I went to was World Fantasy, which going by McCharles’ metrics is probably 95–100% craft, with just a fringe of commercial around the edges. This is a convention for writers to mingle with other writers. The number of con-goers is capped, so it never felt crowded; in fact, as I wandered the hotel hallways and worked my way from one panel to another I found myself coming upon the same faces over and over again. This is kind of wonderful, because you start to make friends and contacts almost without trying.

And some of those faces? They be famous faces.

WFC is a convention for writers, not hordes of screaming fans in Chewbacca costumes (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but as I mentioned earlier, the writers are fans, too. And as someone who wasn’t accustomed to sharing a table with the people who wrote the books I grew up with? Well, this was heaven.

If someone told me I’d sit across a table listening to L.E. Modesitt Jr. wax eloquent about the time he and his friend constructed a makeshift bomb as children and blew a hole in their family’s shed, I’d have told them to bugger off. I chatted on several occasions with Guy Gavriel Kay (and one of my friends who shall remain nameless—never mind, it’s this one—may or may not have stolen his swag bag of books after the con was over). In a very brief exchange, I met Robert J. Sawyer, with whom I later had the pleasure of becoming much more closely acquainted when he visited my city. I also got to meet two of my favorite writers of all time, the husband-and-wife duo of Gar and Judith Reeves-Stevens. I had been sitting just one row behind them during one of the panels; I have no idea what the panel was about, because I spent the whole time staring at the back of their heads like a serial killer. Fortunately, I kept it together when I finally approached them. They were ever so gracious to speak with me for a few minutes, even though they were obviously on their way to somewhere more important. And the crème de la crème? Me and several other Fictorian contributors had the unique opportunity to pick Brandon Sanderson’s brain in a small and exclusive two-hour Q&A session.

If I haven’t convinced you yet that cons are awesome, you’re beyond hope. Over the years since, I’ve been to a few different cons, and this experience has been mirrored several times. I’m so accustomed to meeting well-known writers now that I’ve started to view them as colleagues—much more experienced and successful colleagues, sure, but colleagues nonetheless.

I’m sure there are some authors who don’t have the time of day for their fans. I’ve heard horror stories, but I’ve never met them, which tells me they must be in the minority. Or at least, you’re less likely to bump into this kind of author at cons, because they have other places they’d rather be.

The authors I met were all polite and approachable. I never felt awkward around them. When we chatted, it wasn’t all about them; they asked me questions about myself as well. They seemed to enjoy connecting with the masses. And you know what? Meeting these authors only made me want to run home and buy as many books of theirs as I could find. The moral of the story is that being a good and decent human being is not only the right thing to do, it probably has some economic benefits as well.

So it turns out the authors whose jacket cover headshots I lovingly gazed at with hero worship as a preteen, and then as a teenager, and then as a young adult, and then embarrassingly even as a nearer-to-middle-age adult, are just people, not much different than I am. That right there infuses me with hope and optimism.

One day, if a fan ever comes up to me and wants my autograph, or even just wants to say hi, no matter how busy I am or what I’m doing, I’m going to smile in the memory of all these wonderful genre fiction luminaries who came before me and pay it forward. It’s the right thing to do.

What is Horror? Really?

February 19, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts Motivation The Writing Life 1 Comment

dan_wells[1] A guest post by Dan Wells.

I sold my first book about a year and a half ago, and I was bouncing off the walls more literally than you probably care to imagine. It the was the first step in the fulfillment of a life-long dream, and I was so happy I couldn’t stop telling pretty much everyone I knew or met or interacted with. I quickly learned there were only two basic versions of this conversation.

The Good One
Me: I just sold a book! I’m going to be published!
Other Person: That’s awesome!
Both of Us: Yay!

The Other One
Me: I just sold a book! I’m going to be published!
Other Person: That’s awesome! What kind of book is it?
Me: Horror.
Other Person: I don’t read horror.

This basic template held true in almost every situation, including–and this surprised me–dedicated genre fans. People who have read more fantasy and science fiction books than most people have ever read anything. The thing is, there’s a lot of crossover between the rest of the speculative genres: if you read fantasy, you probably also read a bit of SF, and a bit of paranormal, and a bit of historical, and so on and so on. There are exceptions, and most of us tend to group around one or two subgenres that really get our motor going, like hard SF or cyberpunk or urban fantasy or whatever, but horror, for most of us, is the odd one out. Except for a relatively small group of self-identified horror fans, nobody reads it.

Except that everybody reads it, they just don’t admit it, or maybe even know it.

Ask people what horror is and you’re likely to get one of two answers: “Stephen King” or “slasher movies.” Never mind that Stephen King hasn’t written a full-on horror novel in decades, or that slasher movies are in a medium so removed from novels as to make the comparison meaningless. These are what people think of when they hear the word “horror,” and that colors their entire perception of the genre. Our concept of horror is frozen in a single period of history, let’s call it 1973 (the publication of Carrie) to 1988 (when movies like Child’s Play represented the last hurrah of the slasher movie before they tipped fully into self-parody). Horror films have never truly left, because they’re cheap and profitable, but their quality and popularity have gone in waves; I count two horror film renaissances since the heyday of the 80s, maybe three depending on how you define them. But horror novels have never achieved anything like their 15-year peak, possibly because of the way the giants of that era (King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, James Herbert) so thoroughly dominated the genre.

And the truth is, this shifting definition is kind of correct, in its way: if we define “horror” as “the kind of stuff King and Herbert wrote in the 70s,” then you’re right, most people don’t read horror anymore, and that’s fine because most people don’t write that kind of horror anymore. The genre has moved on, and King and Koontz and Barker and a giant host of others are still writing it, but the genre label is still stuck in the past. Today we hide our horror in a jumbled pile of other labels, secretly infecting almost every shelf in the bookstore. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro writes “vampire historicals,” but they’re really horror. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books are “urban fantasy,” but they’re really horror. Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville books are “paranormal romance,” but surprise, they’re really horror. F. Paul Wilson writes “thrillers” that are obviously horror. These books and more are incredibly popular–Dresden got it’s own TV show and roleplaying game, for goodness sake–and the odds are incredibly good that the same people who claim they never read horror will, when pressed, admit that they’ve read a lot of these other things. They just don’t call them horror, and the bookstores don’t call them horror, and thus horror doesn’t sell and thus the myth perpetuates.

Trying to tie horror down to a single genre or representation is missing the point. Some say that horror is defined by its supernatural elements, but I think horror goes beyond the trappings and the props to get at something much deeper and more meaningful; it’s less of a genre, in my mind, than a style or a perspective. Let’s go back to the roots of modern horror and steal a definition from H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” So we could say that horror is about fear, and in that sense we can find horror everywhere. In military fiction much of the plots are driven by the uncertainty of who will live and who will die; they’re about the fear of death and the loss of honor; they’re horror. Espionage novels are about the fear that an enemy nation will subvert or conquer your own, literally stealing your way of life; that’s horror. Romance, at it’s heart, is about the fear that the person you love doesn’t love you back; that’s one of the most horrific things I can think of.

So what separates these genres from “real” horror, whether we label it as such or not? Let’s go back even further to Anne Radcliffe, the original godmother of gothic horror; roughly paraphrased, she separated terror and horror in a fascinating way, saying that terror is the emotion we feel while waiting for something bad, and horror is the emotion we feel while facing it. Terror is about dread, but horror is about confronting the thing that we dread–it’s about our revulsion, our shock, our struggle to understand and adapt. In a thriller we race the clock and stop the bad guy, but in a horror, the bad guy wins: the bomb goes off, or the protector dies, or the true love marries someone else. We have to pick up the pieces and survive. Horror is about facing our losses head on, and being either crushed or strengthened by your reaction to it.

In light of this definition, we can see the rise of horror in all our media, from The Hunger Games to Man of Steel. We are a society that has faced true horror (9/11 is the obvious one, plus any number of other terrorist attacks, military actions, mass shootings, and so on), and we’re dealing with those emotions and repercussions in our art. We are primed for horror, because we are searching for stories about survival. This, in turn, makes us a culture primed for heroism: we’ll face the horror, and we’ll live through it, and even if the characters die the readers will still be there at the end, breathless and alive and shaking our head in relief. Horror gives us a chance to overcome the things that try to break us.

Horror is everywhere. Go out and make some more of it.

Guest Writer Bio: Dan Wells writes in many different genres, including supernatural thriller (I Am Not A Serial Killer), psychological horror (The Hollow City), and science fiction (Partials). He has won two Parsecs and a Hugo for his work on Writing Excuses, a podcast for aspiring writers. Visit him online at www.thedanwells.com, or say hello on Twitter: @thedanwells. His newest book, called RUINS, is the climax of the post-apocalyptic Partials Sequence, and launches on March 11.