Stuff

Strategy vs. Tactics in the Land of Newsletters

While the traditional side of the publishing industry is bracing itself for disruptions in the supply chain, the conversation over on the indie publishing side is all about how to prepare for the coming email marketing apocalypse. For those who don’t pay attention to such things, the low-down goes something like this: Apple has been doubling down on email privacy with updates for a while now, and their most recent update to iO15 adds a feature dubbed “Mail Privacy Protection.” Once activated, this feature disrupts a bunch of tools that email marketing relies on: the ability to track open rates; details about what country the reader is in; triggers that would send you a follow-up email if you showed an interest in a particular thing. There’s a pretty good round-up over here if you want to get into the technical stuff, but all you really need to know is this: a foundational marketing tool for many indie publishers is about

PeterMBall 03/10/2021
Status

Status: Saturday, 2 October, 2021

LOCATION: Windsor, Brisbane, Australia. THE QUICK-AND-DIRTY NEWS Printers have shipped out first print run of Joanne Anderton’s Inanimates, which should arrive around mid-week. First COVID vaccination jab yesterday, which means I’m aching like hell today. I’m searching for a new day job, which has thrown life into chaos. Our cat had an emergency vet visit, which means… I’m open for freelance cover design gigs, and have a few pre-made covers for sale at a discount. CURRENT INBOX: 65 (Officially in drop everything and fix it phase, because anything over 30 usually means I’m ignoring important stuff that will come back to bite me later) WORKING ON Layouts and cover designs for a Corella Press project Writing so many selection criteria Edits and cover design for January and February releases from Brain Jar (currently behind because of cat drama) A very secret project I’ll talk more about in November. Writing a zombie-infested D&D fantasy novella which may or may not be terrible. Contracts,

PeterMBall 02/10/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

On Velocity Models and Leading With Your Backlist

Back when I pulled together the Brain Jar Press writer guidelines, I specifically called out that we use a backlist driven model of publishing. It’s one of those phrases that generates a lot of questions from new authors, and there’s been a project where the author in question wasn’t interested in pursuing publication with us once I laid things out (Side note: this is a good thing: I lay things out because publishing with a small press whose practices are a small fit for your expectations is likely to be frustrating for everyone). What’s really interesting at the moment is the way backlist versus front list models are coming into focus because of the current problems with publishing supply chains, particularly in the US. It often means people have to articulate what a front-list model looks like, and why it runs into problems. My favourite description comes via Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s analysis of the current supply chain problems in publishing:

PeterMBall 01/10/2021
Stuff

52 Blog Posts That Never Came Into Existence

I recently opened the “unfinished drafts” section of my blog and discovered that I had 52 unfinished posts in various states of completion. Some of these resulted from dumping a quick idea using the WordPress app on my phone, little more than three of four words to be fleshed out later. Some are just a title, waiting for the post to arrive. Some are near-complete or actually complete blog posts I never got around to posting, usually because they were a) incredibly negative, b) incredibly risky, or c) written during a week with a serious anxiety flare up and being ‘out in public’ with ideas wasn’t palatable to me. I’ve logged all 52 titles here, from the evocative to the mundane, to give you a glimpse as a blog that might-have-been once upon a time. Reading them aloud makes for an oddly evocative prose poem, especially once you get to the last two entries. Untitled Short Fiction Friday: The Seventeen

PeterMBall 30/09/2021
News & Upcoming Events

Pre-Made Book Covers, Going Cheap

I opened up for Freelance Cover Design Work last week because our cat had an unexpected vet visit and it wiped out my emergencies fund. However, with my small business grant running out towards the end of October, I’m also preparing to open up a few more side-hustles to keep things afloat while I’m looking for a new day-job and keeping Brain Jar Press running. Which brings us to the secondary side-hustle on the design front: pre-made book covers folks can pick up slightly cheaper than getting me to design stuff from scratch. The proper launch for this will likely come in October, when I’ve had time to set up a proper web store to streamline the buying process and built up a decent catalogue (the aim is about 5-to-6 covers for each genre I want to cover at time of launch). Meanwhile, here’s the preview gallery of what’s coming: Like I said, the full store is coming in October.

PeterMBall 29/09/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

An Intriguing (and Discouraging) Take On Substack’s Business Model

My favourite headline doing the rounds right now:  Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? It seems to originate from Julian Novitz’s article over on The Conversation, taking a quick dive into Rushdie’s decision to publish his new novella through Substack on a Pro deal (where Substack pays creators with a certain profile to use the platform and build up the service’s profile, rather than paying based on how many paid subscribers a writer brings to the platform). The answer to the question, of course, is “No,” but the original article is worth reading because Novitz is primarily interested in using Rushdie’s decision to publish there as a lens through which to examine the current state of the Substack platform and business model. The interesting thing about the question posed in the headline is how familiar it is. People have been looking towards digital reading platforms and considering it for about two decades now,

PeterMBall 29/09/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

STEAL THIS IDEA: Zombie Mode Task List!

I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch of moving pieces I’m trying to lay out and it’s hard to fit it into self-contained, 1,000 word chunks. Imagine my jealousy when a Software Engineer named Lisa wrote about their “Zombie Mode” list over on the Bullet Journal blog. “Zombie Mode” is what I call the state of being when I do not want to think and just want to be told what to do next. I have two collections to use when I am in this state — one for workdays and one for non-workdays. They both contain lists of tasks to be completed for the day, in order, until I snap out

PeterMBall 28/09/2021
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Do You Know The Origins of Frequently Quoted Advice?

Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps. Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find the silent film industry, and writers deciding between conveying information via dialogue card, or putting it into action. Also popular in turn-of-the-century theatre scene of the early 1900s, where “showing” gave actors to display the emotional responses to scenes in ways the writer could not convey. Neither origin makes for terrible advice—ten thousand steps a day is good for your health, and show, don’t tell can be solid advice for a prose writer—but it also gives you wiggle room to escape the tyranny of the ideals presented. Any activity is better than none, when it comes to health, and the health benefits kick in long

PeterMBall 27/09/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

First Envision, Then Figure Out The Compromise

I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends. One insight is this: envisioning a career is a two-step process. The first step is envisioning the kind of career you’d like to have—how much you want to write, what kind of work you want to do, what kind of readership you’d like to develop. Looking to benchmarks—writers whose career (not necessarily work) like to emulate in terms of approach and schedule—then doing research to figure out whether their current approach to work represents the way they built their profile up in the early days. No writer comes out of nowhere, and overnight successes are often the product of decades-long effort and build. The second step is figuring

PeterMBall 26/09/2021
Stuff

The Weird Time Delay on Writing and Publishing Mistakes

So I’ve started publishing books again, after an unintentional hiatus. The weirdest thing about publishing is this: you don’t pay for your mistakes in real-time. Stopped writing because of a serious illness? The books and stories you’ve already sold will keep appearing for another six months to two years, after which there will be a mysterious gap and the deafening silence feels like the end of your career. Did your layout and design computer go boom, preventing work on new books in your small press publishing queue? The books you’ve already developed will chug along for a while, and it’s not until three-to-six months later that you’ve got no new releases and your cash-flow becomes the stuff of nightmares. And the worst part: you forget the awful stuff happened. The flow of cause-and-effect gets muddy, and it never feels like you’re not publishing because bad stuff happened a while back, it feels like some personal flaw that means you should

PeterMBall 26/09/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Window For Raving About Stories You Love

’m sufficiently old that I feel like the window for talking about We Are Lady Parts is over, what with the series coming out in May of 2021 and our engagement with it taking place in early September. I’m old because I’m trapped in a cultural paradigm where immediacy is a primary virtue when recommending narratives—the same paradigm where books have a shelf-life of three to four weeks, television shows get consumed in scheduled blocks and paid for by advertising, and films exist to be shown on the big screen or pulled off the limited shelf-space of your local blockbuster. Talk about a film, a book, or a television show four months down the line in that kind of environment, and the moment is already over. You wait for re-runs or the DVD release that might never happen, scour second-hand bookstores or badger your library to order in a copy. But this is the streaming age; the binge watch age;

PeterMBall 25/09/2021
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Why We’re Primed For Anger Right Now

I’m a lot angrier than I used to be since the start of the pandemic, and I suspect I’m not alone. There are nine potential triggers for anger most people experience, and the one that inevitably catches us off-guard is being stopped. We are hard-wired to respond to any subversion of our forward progress by an outside party with an adrenaline dump and stress hormones. This makes perfect sense when our primitive answers feared being immobilised by a bigger, stronger predator, but those same instincts now fire up when faced with a slow-moving queue, call-waiting muzak, or a change in the expected delivery time changes on our Uber Eats order. It’s also triggered by systemic cultural oppression, by circumstances where we want things to change but can’t see a way out, and the denial of opportunities we’re convinced should be ours. We’re living in an era full of anger right now. The pandemic thwarts our forward momentum in real and

PeterMBall 24/09/2021