ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume in October, and some of the ideas in this week’s entry might be expanded out. Mainly, though, if you’re hungry for great advice about writing and publishing, however, I’m going to direct your attention to Cory Doctorow’s recent speech about Disenshittifying Online Spaces (watch it on youtube | read it online).  Doctorow is speaking to a room full of tech folk and coders, but what he’s saying is incredibly important to anyone involved in the creative industries. It’s important he’s pointing out the problems with online spaces and we, as writers, use online spaces to promote our work and build community. They are a boon in many ways, but their usefulness can be short lived. Tech and social media companies thrive by capturing attention and communities, then locking you into those spaces and turning your attention into profit.  Usually, they do this by making things shittier. Amazon started as a bookstore that offered incredible organic reach to independent publishers, with a recommendation engine that was scarily predicted. Now that they’re the place to read ebooks, for most folks, they have turned their attention to selling advertising tools instead. Authors hoping readers will stumble over their work now pay for the previliege. The same cycle has played out again and again. Facebook used to be great for keeping in touch with readers (and, hell, your friends), but now it’s an

Like many of you, I have good weeks and bad weeks on the writing front. This week has been rocky, and if you’re feeling like things are unsettled and unfocused too, that’s a pretty natural response to this point of the year. Ordinarily, my response in this newsletter would be offering advice: here’s how to bounce back when life impedes writing. Or I would point out that sometimes a rough writing week is a natural flow-through from good things, and you’re just figuring out the new normal after a big success. I had some good news this week—I’m officially Doctor Peter M. Ball now, with a degree to frame and put on my wall. It’s big news, but also…confronting. This was my second attempt at getting a PhD, and being a student has been part of my self-image for a long time.  Now, that phase of my life is over. I’m not the student anymore. I have to redefine myself and what I do. All the things I’ve been putting off “until the PhD is over” now have to be done.  The narrative I’m telling myself no longer fits the vision of what I should do, and so I’m flailing a little. Course-correcting my internal narrative isn’t as easy as I’d like.  And here’s the important bit: that’s how it goes, sometimes.  WRITING AND RESILIENCE I’m always fascinated by psychologies framing of resilience, which represents our emotional and mental ability to respond to a crisis, then return to a pre-crisis

This week’s newsletter is the second of a trilogy, dealing with a fundamental challenge of being a writer: not all the advice you’re offered is a great fit for you, even if it worked perfectly for the person offering the advice. Over the years, I’ve routinely found this out the hard way, applying advice indiscriminately and realising too-late that the result it promotes isn’t necessarily a god fit for my goals or my practice. As a result, there’s three things I like to figure out before taking any advice on board. Last week, I broke down the biggest: how much capital does this advice require, and do I have the resource base to implement it? In a world where countless ‘gurus’ are advertising courses and services, working to your resources rather than the promise of the add is an important survival trait.  Today, we deal with the second question: What’s the philosophy behind this advice? Once again, a relatively simple question hides a surprising amount of complexity. For instance, philosophy will involve a whole bunch of sub-questions, such as: There are all sorts of outstanding advice out there that simply isn’t a good fit for some people.  For example, I have a huge amount of respect for Dean Wesley Smith as someone who writes about indie publishing and practice, but he operates with a different philosophy of what art should do than me.  More recently, there’s a considerable debate about the role AI plays in creation that is bringing these

I run into writers who think the reason their book isn’t selling is the price. The first question, when a new release isn’t working, revolves around discounting. “Should I make this ebook 99 cents?” or “Should I give this away for free to generate interest?” These are both solid strategies when used the right way, but they’re not magical. I’ve got a reader full of free ebooks I’ve picked up over the last decade, and many more deals I got for 99 cents.  I read very few of these free and low-cost books, and rarely do the ones read incite a desire to go find more work by the author.  At best, the author or publisher has made 35 cents out of my curiosity. At worst, I’m one of the masses some indie authors derisively call “freebie seekers” and deride as a plague on their business.  Here’s the thing to keep in mind: the actual cost to readers isn’t the price you put on your book. It’s the hidden costs involved in reading a new author: We don’t talk about these things out loud, but they’re part of the calculation every reader makes when deciding whether to buy, and then read, a new title by the author. Your price point isn’t a barrier–it’s a hurdle. Do I think your book will provide value when weighted against all these hidden costs? Is that promise worth more than whatever price point you’ve put on the cover? Some books are a steal at

What is the story of your writing right now? Not the story you are writing, but the story you’re telling yourself about who you are and how you work as a writer.  We all have a sense of who we are as writers, which shapes the projects we take and the way we approach our work. This story makes up part of our self-image, to borrow a phrase from psychology, and it’s more complicated than it seems. Actually, it’s multiple stories. Self-image is often a complicated, layered thing that involves not just our belief in who we are, but sub-beliefs around whether other people see us this way, how accurate those perceptions are, and which data from other people we take onboard and use to adjust our self‌-image or validate its accuracy. I’m not a psychologist, though. I’m a storyteller and an editor, and at the end of the day I work with stories, just like all of you. I’ve just been privileged enough to spend my career listening to other writers’ stories about who they are as a writer, and I’ve noticed some trends. And here’s the thing: for people who tell stories for a living, writers often tell themselves pretty nasty stories about who they are and what it means to do what they do.  SETTING UP AN UNHAPPY ENDING Over the years, I’ve helped a bunch of writers unpack the story of their writing. I spend inordinate amounts of time unpacking my own, too, paying attention to