GenrePunk Ninja

One of the most confronting terms I’ve seen thrown around in contemporary indie publishing discussions is minimum viable product. It’s a phrase we’ve inherited from the software side of the industry, where developers release an early version of their programs with a core baseline of features that will be useful to early adopters. Later iterations of the product then build upon the feedback of that core user base, guiding the future development and building up the buzz around the product.

On the indie side of things, the first person to use the term appears to be Michael Anderle, a coder-turned-author who applied the philosophy to his early science fiction offerings. Books went out with terrible covers, not-so-great copyedits, and structural edits to be applied later, using the speed of publishing to lure in a particular type of early reader and gauge the future potential. These days Anderle is better known as the founder of 20 Books to 50K, but he lays out his earliest publishing philosophy in his 90 Days to 10K white paper from 2016.

I do a lecture on digital publishing workflows for UQ every year, talking to a crew of aspiring editors, and the response when I lay out Anderle’s philosophy and approach to publishing usually involves a physical recoil. He works completely at odds with the expectations of anyone involved in the velocity model of publishing, where books absolutely need to come out in the best viable form in order to nail the one-month sales window. At the same time, Anderle has built a publishing empire in the space of five years, with LMBPN Publishing putting out a hundred or so books a year.

I’ve used the Minimum Viable Product method myself in the past, despite my reservations. There were books I’ve put out specifically so I can embrace the learning curve, starting with the Short Fiction Lab series and its rapid iteration of cover design and formatting. I’ve released books with the wrong title development (Exile and its sequels) and rapidly worked to update those books. That is Minimum Viable Product in a nutshell, although I wouldn’t have called it that: a confidence that shipping now is okay, because there’s always a chance to fix things and redevelop if it doesn’t work. Even indie writers who don’t believe in Minimum Viable Product, preferring to put out a polished product, still use a variation of this philosophy by releasing books to beta readers and review teams, taking on board their feedback in the lead-up to release.

For all my discomfort with minimum viable product as a philosophy, I’ve found the variation of it that works for me when releasing fiction and non-fiction. I frequently warn authors that I’m completely okay with a Brain Jar Press book launching slow and taking time to find its audience, because I know that all our books will eventually. It’s not something you’re used to if you come out of the traditional publishing space, but that’s part of the charm of working with a small press.

At the same time, there is an area where minimum viable product still causes me to have kittens, and that’s here on Patreon.

One of the quirks of crowd-support platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter is the necessity of defining your minimum viable product before you launch. It’s right there in the reward levels and the promised exchange—support me for this much, and you’ll get this in return—and it’s hard to resist the siren song of promising that little bit more. And while most people are largely interest in supporting rather than rewards, at least in my experience, each of those goals comes with a level of psychic weight for the creator. They’re promises that should be delivered upon. 

We’re eight months into me running this Patreon thus far, and I’m staring down the barrel of another evolution as I learn to work around the day job and figure out the new normal. And one thing that’s incredibly clear at this stage is that the minimum viable product I dreamed up back in March is no longer possible with the time I’ve got.

While I put a lot of this at the foot of the time crunch a day job brings to bear, that’s not the entire story. Where I work is also in a state of flux, and simple changes like writing in a coffee shop have unexpected consequences. I can no longer write and post as a single unit of activity, for example, because the WIFI access is haphazard and dependent on a phone hotspot; and even if I can get online, the bandwidth precludes me from using the online AI copyediting program I use to clean up my messy first drafts before they go live. My writing space is no longer surrounded by a huge pile of non-fiction I can refer to for inspiration and quotes, nor do I have access to my research notebooks as I write. 

Similarly, I’d fallen back into the routine of writing my newsletters on a Tuesday for a few months, doing the whole email in one fell swoop. They’d be uploaded on a Wednesday, giving me Thursday as a back-up if my schedule didn’t allow it. All that changed a few months back, when my Write Club days (which are no longer reserved for writing) switched from Thursday to Tuesday and threw off my newsletter game. Being out of the house five days a week has thrown me off even more, to the point where I’m slowly re-mapping where newsletters fit into my week.

It’s trickier than it used to be, because the time I have to work is both heavily compressed and eats into the time I used to spend hanging out with my partner. So it’s not just a matter of establishing new patterns, but also breaking the groove of two sets of older patterns and expectations about how our life works.

All this is one of the reasons I predicted it would take a few months to hit the new normal, and why we’re only just starting to approach it after finishing up old jobs, clearing freelance gigs, and getting the wedding out of the way. Despite being three weeks into the BWF job right now, it’s essentially three days into figuring out what routines and choices are possible within the new paradigm.

I’d promised myself no major changes to projects until we hit the relative normalcy of December (not a phrase I thought I’d ever use), but I suspect there will be a reconfiguring of the Patreon at the end of this month to bring the expected minimum viable product in line with the delivered minimum viable product.

I think I’ve got regular updates licked at this point—they take place in the twenty minute café window before work, after I’ve done three pages of handwriting on the creative project. That’s the sustainable window in my current schedule, with newsletters and blog scheduling left for the weekend when I’m surrounded by WIFI. I suspect the Patreon will have a bit of a different pitch come December too, given that my focus is slowly inching back towards doing new fiction work.

And while all that feels good—I’ve got the problem of producing new drafts relatively sorted with the current schedule—it means I start looking at the next round of issues. The next thing to feel out is when work gets revised, and how I can manage the shipping/distribution/posting as a sperate activity, and start incorporating time for engaging with comments.

I predicated my default writing process on having lots of time to work on things. I can engage in a long, sprawling drafting process that is focused on rewriting as I go, embracing the narrative dead ends, and spending days frowning at a passage that needs to resolve itself into something better.

It’s an approach that worked for me through several decades of writing, but in those decades I was time-rich even if I was dollar-poor. I could fly by the seat of my pants and still get things done because I’d structured my life to play to those conventions—organisation and planning were tools for other parts of my life.

There’s a school of thought that says once you’ve written one way for a long while, that becomes your process and there’s no point trying to switch it up. Another suggests that you basically switch up your process depending on the demands of your life and the projects you work on, and even a planner will pants like hell if a project demands it.

I’m frequently interested in the transitional shifts that kicked off changes for writers, whether those changes are real or merely a matter of perception. Dean Koontz started off as a planner, but often cites the transition to pantsing his way through a novel as the start of his reign as perennial best-seller – when he didn’t know what was coming, it was easier to write a thriller that surprised people. Chuck Wendig and Kameron Hurley have both claim to be natural pantsers, but talk about being happier with their productivity and the quality of the work when they learned the dark arts of plotting from screenwriters. Neil Gaiman appears to be one of nature’s pantsers and hasn’t necessarily changed that, but noticed he wrote differently when switching from drafting on a computer to drafting by fountain pen (intriguingly, if you download a copy of The Art of Neil Gaiman, there’s an awful lot of planning/ideating as he goes, it just happens in a notebook and focuses on short-term goals).

So I do tend to default towards you can learn new tricks as a writer rather than fuck off, I’m an old dog, and I’m completely open to switching up my process if I think it’ll teach me something or reshape my approach to work.

And from that perspective the search for a new routine is an opportunity. My routines have changed because of the new job, but so has my relationship to writing. Most people immediately leap to “I can do less work” due to the day job, but equally important is “there’s no longer an economic cost to failure.” This shifts both the scope and the ambition of creative projects, because the priority pyramid is in a state of flux.

Ergo my rule for the rest of October: don’t try to advance any drafts for the rest of the month, but do try to plan them. I’ve got two works in progress that I’m breaking down scene-by-scene, using techniques learned from a couple of different plotters of my acquaintance. One exercise (creating index cards with the prose equivalent of film’s INT|Location|Time) has already paid off – I could tell which scenes had under-developed settings by the description of the location on the card. At a glance, I can tell that the scene at The Last Crevasse bar is probably adequately developed, because I can tell you details about that setting off the top of my head.

Meanwhile, the scenes set in “Café” or “Corridor” need a bit more personality before I can consider them done.

My usual process would normally cover all of this – I’d write the draft and swoop back-and-forth fixing stuff as I went – but it would be a haphazard process and it’s easy to miss stuff. This gives me a bit more rigour to play with once I’m back at the keyboard for drafting in November.

I’m not going to lie: I feel pretty beat up at the moment.

One of the short-term issues with the BWF job is simple: I didn’t expect to get it. Which meant I spent the week prior to starting the job soliciting a metric ton of freelance work to cover the rent once my small business grant ran out (which happens today). And my partner is still two weeks away from picking up the admin side of Brain Jar, which means I’m getting up to speed on an insanely busy full time + doing twenty hours a week of freelancing + maintaining a publishing company + trying to fit personal writing projects around the edges.

And, because I’m a masochist, I’ve thrown in an hour of walking home in the spring heat every day, because running events requires cardio, and after two years of working from the couch mine is pretty negligible.

I tried a little experiment with the first half of my week, forgoing the morning writing shift before work under the theory that sleeping in and getting home a little fresher would mean I could get work done before I keeled over in an exhausted heap at 9:00 PM every night. It had the advantage of giving me a workspace with internet, with is great for the freelancing and publishing gigs, but terrible for writing.

Sound in theory, terrible in practice. By the time I got home, did chores, and ate dinner, there weren’t many spoons left for writing or freelancing/Brain Jar work. Some work got done, but far less than when I started the day in a café, getting some words down, and I’m still dropping balls that shouldn’t be dropped.

So I’m back to the pre-work routine, working my way down the pyramid of priorities, getting as much done as I can in the hour and a half before work begins. Truth is, my day works better when work is the middle layer of the obligation sandwich, rather than the foundation.

The big challenge of this week is reminding myself that OCTOBER IS AN ABBERATION. A confluence of mis-matched expectations collided and created far more work than the norm, and I’ve got about three weeks of clearing the decks before I get a sense of what my routine needs to be going forward.

On the plus side, one freelance project is almost clear. Another two are heading towards their end-point. One their done, I’m closing the doors to everyone except a handful of legacy clients, because it’s pretty clear this is at least one major set of commitments too many.

Which is actually one of the upsides of declaring this an exploratory period, specifically set aside for testing approaches and trying new routines: every failure is actually a success, because it’s one more piece of data that informs the new normal I’m working towards.