Works in Progress

Posts where I talk about stories, novels, and other projects as they’re in the process of being created

Picking Places to Exist: Writing, Publishing, & Social Media

PETERMBALL Works in Progress
Picking Places to Exist: Writing, Publishing, & Social Media

Over the past few months Brain Jar Press has released a series of chapbooks and short story collections at a pretty decent clip. Both Kathleen Jennings Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion and Angela Slatter’s Red New Day and Other MicroFictions have sold in surprising numbers (and, in Kathleen’s case, really surprising numbers). We’ve brought Angela’s Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales out in paperback and ebook for the first time, and I released the second issue of the Kaleidoscope’s Children series, Unauthorized Live Recording.

Meanwhile, things chug along behind the scenes. I’m gearing up to announce a big project that will run through 2021, incorporating work from a half-dozen different writers. There are individual releases all the way through the year, including a nice mix of reprint projects and original works.

Which means this week is all about contracts, doing a short course on micro-business management, and figuring out the current thorny problem du jour: where do I want to exist, online, as a publisher and a writer?

One of the side-effects of setting up Brain Jar as it’s own brand, rather than making it an offshoot of my writerly presence, is the way it doubles the workload of being online and engaging with people. There are two Facebook pages, two Twitter feeds, two Instagram feeds, and two newsletters that need to be maintained. There are also a handful of professional groups I maintain a presence in, and some old webforums I like to post to (because I am older than dirt, and still miss the early days of the web). There’s also a small litany of ‘should-do’s’, like starting a reader group or building a YouTube presence.

When you’re a one man shop, wearing all the hats, that’s a lot of places competing for time and attention.

At the same time, I don’t feel comforting winnowing down and focusing on either Peter M. Ball or Brain Jar Press alone. Doing heavy promo of my own work through the Brain Jar Press brand seems dicey and problematic, and my personal presence has always leaned deeper into the lets-talk-about-all-the-mucky-details-of-the-work than is appropriate when you’re working with other people’s art.

Part of my goal for this week involves carving out time to do some deep thinking about all of the options, the processes I use to develop content for them, and models I might be able to use that are feasible with the time and technological proficiency I posses.

It’s also a chance to think about why I’m using these tools. I’m wary of the fact that maintaining a social media presence can be highly reactive and habitual, rather than strategic and focused on a particular goal.

I’m a believer that social media can sell books–not necessarily in a directly measurable way, but as a lightning rod for fan interest and conversation.

The danger is that it’s a long-term game played using tools that offer quick dopamine hits for short-term activity. It’s easy to get suckered into doing things because those short bursts of attention and likes can feel good when you’re having a bad week, even when working on social media content isn’t the best use of your time.

Similarly, there are approaches that I’ve used because they were fun at the time, which aren’t necessarily the best choices for the content or current context.

For example, a lot of the stuff I used to blog about has found its way into my Newsletter in recent years, because Notes From the Brain Jar is where folks were reading. But, as Kathleen Jennings keeps pointing out to me at Write Club, it’s much harder to link people to great newsletter content than it is a blog post.

Which becomes one of those things I keep stewing on as I consider all the places to be as a writer and publisher: what are the strengths of the form? The weaknesses? What’s the best way to take advantage of those?

It’s a huge amount of stuff to think about, on both the strategic and the tactical level, and I don’t really have answers yet. I suspect a lot of this week is really about setting the terms of engagement.

Process Journal: Immutable Laws of the Brain Jar

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been following the Observation Journal template laid out by Kathleen Jennings, pushing myself to pay attention to creative patterns and sites of attention. Structurally speaking, given my focus on Publishing rather than Writing at the moment, my right-hand pages tend to be a lot less on creative exercises and a lot more on wrapping my head around what I’m doing with Brain Jar Press.

This week, I tried the Immutable Laws exercise from Mike Michalowics’z The Pumpkin Plan, which aims to break down the three core, non-negotiable beliefs at the heart of what you do as a business. Essentially, the codes you live by, and the strictures you don’t go against because it’s pulling you away from the reasons you do what you do (it is, in essence, a very you don’t want to be published kind of exercise, applied to businesses instead of writing). They’re also the three things that other people should know about working with you, as the immutable part is pretty iron-clad.

When it came to Brain Jar Press, some of mine where…surprising.

IMMUTABLE LAW 1: ADD VALUE

The first question I’ve asked myself with every book we’ve taken on thus far is ‘how do I add value to this work that the author can’t (or won’t)’. It’s an important starting point for me because Brain Jar Press doesn’t offer advances, which means I need to have a firm idea how and why it’s going to be profitable for an author to trust us with their work.

How we add value tends to be a bit different for every project, and likely to evolve over time. Right now, as I’m fond of telling the authors working with us, I’m very conscious that you are more valuable to brain jar than brain jar is to you. Angela Slatter and Kathleen Jennings both have profiles that draw attention, which we are gleefully leveraging to build the profile of Brian Jar Press as we build, so the value-add is largely one of being open to weird, small projects and having spent three years investing the time in learning how to do all the publishing things in a way that makes the chapbooks feel like valuable objects.

We’ll be announcing a project next month that’s a bit more ambitious in its value add (and, tellingly, it’s a project that involves authors who have similar self-publishing chops as me, so the pitch needed to be a bit stronger to bring them aboard). Then there’s original projects we’re taking on for next year because I think there’s value I can add editorially, as well as the publishing end.

At the same time, I’ve turned down projects that weren’t a good fit for me and my skillset–Young Adult is not my jam, and I cannot market it as well as I can fantasy or SF). Strategically, I want to pay to my strengths, and this rule keeps me focused on them.

At the same time, the Brain Jar Team (aka me, my partner, and our cat) is already thinking about how we start applying this to the reader side of things. One of the nice things about the Brain Jar Press store is the level of control it offers over the delivery and packaging of books, and there’s plenty of ways we can add value in small and neat ways.

It’s a work in progress, but the nice thing about publishing is that each book teaches us something and gives us a new set of tools we can use to add value to the next.

IMMUTABLE LAW 2: PINPOINT THE COOL

I originally thought this law was going to be push boundaries or take risks, but it wasn’t quite the right the fit for the way we operate. Nor did get excited about every project. Some of our projects do these things, but there’s other things on our coming list that are reprints where all the boundary pushing and risk-taking was done long before Brain Jar Press came along and the initial burst of excitement was caught up in the initial release.

But coolness? That I can work with. In fact, I have to work with it, because being able to articulate why a project is cool is a big part of being able to sell it to other people. The project is not ready to launch until I can explain why I think it’s cool, and whether it’s cool because of content, the creative process, the publishing approach we’re taking, or the person I’m working with.

Interestingly, the projects I’m finding hardest to market at the moment are the ones I hadn’t done this with, and they all get a little easier to talk about as I pinpoint the reasons I was interested in publishing them.

IMMUTABLE LAW 3: PETER GETS PAID

One of the immutable laws I used to apply to writing was Treat Your Business Like A Business, and this is largely an evolution of that idea. One of the immutable laws at the heart of Brain Jar Press is the notion that I get paid for the time and energy that goes into putting books out, even if that payment isn’t a huge amount of money (right now, depending on the week, it’s about $0.50 to $5 an hour).

This proved to be a hugely useful law to articulate because it applies at every level, and asking myself how do I get get paid from this project will iterate out into doing right by the authors.

This one’s a bit ooky to put in public, because the phrasing is easy to misconstrue. I thought about using people get paid, but I think being clear about the mercenary self-interest is important. I focus on getting me paid because not doing that is ultimately detrimental to everyone–publishing at a net loss in terms of the investment of time on my end will gradually grind the press down to nothing.

On the flip side, knowing how much I can afford to pay myself from the monthly Brain Jar budget means knowing how much I need to pay authors from recent sales, how much needs to be set aside for the infrastructure and next print run, and how much is getting hoovered up by postage and advertising costs.

Applying this rule means there’s careful bookkeeping put in place to ensure I know what I can afford to pay myself, but the knock-on effect is a whole lot of clarity about what I can afford to do and how much I owe my authors.

That same clarity means controlling risks and thinking about long-term build, rather than just looking at the profits from one successful book and throwing it at doing something bigger with the next book in the queue and risking burn-out. Scaling for its own sake is not high on my agenda; scaling up because it will pay off for me and the authors we work with is on my agenda, and this rule means there’s a really useful metric in play when I evaluate every opportunity.

At it’s heart, this is also a promise to the authors: this isn’t a hobby. I may play fast-and-lose with publishing convention and take risks with some of the stuff we publish, but at it’s heart this is an extension of how I make my living. Most importantly, I’ll respect your right to make a living from your work just as much, and the writer/publishing relationship should be a mutually beneficial partnership that proceeds from the assumption that working together pays off for both of us.

Research Links 20200413

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Years ago, when I first discovered Tumblr, I’d intended to use it as a public dumping ground for research links and images I might want to use later.

Resurrecting the idea here, since virtually nobody comes to blogs anymore, but the folks that do probably share my obsession with seeing how ideas manifest some five to ten years after a writer first discovers them.

Gravstar unleash a new bluetooth speaker design which looks like a battle-scarred war robot from an episode of Doctor Who you haven’t got around to watching yet. Watch the accompanying video for a full sense of their commitment to the motif, and ponder what these choies say about human ideas of authenticity and aesthetics.

As sports stadiums prepare for the resumption of play amid lockdowns, some of them are replacing the crowd experience with robotic stand-ins. Some of them are being given fan’s faces in Belarus. Freaking me out, because I’ve been writing scenes like this for an upcoming project about MMA in space.

Every SF writer who reads this is probably making Mythos jokes right now. Flagged because I need to steal the line “Fungi are basically the digestive track of the plant” for something.

Think about the amount of difficulty into getting an SF-concept like self-driving cars to work, and please shut the fuck up about not having a jetpack already. The future is trickier than anyone thought, but also more amazing.

One lesson from searching for a house to buy: concrete doesn’t age well unless it’s tended for. Much as I adore the design of this, it feels like the “before” picture of a very grungy dystopia.

For all your “I want to go work in a silver-age-of-sci-fi spaceport” needs. Flagging this because it seems likely I’ll want to revisit it for a project I’ve got planned for the second half of the year.

A 53,000 square foot office building in Italy that has minimal technical needs due to the placement of chimneys that handle the lighting, heat, and airflow issues usually relegated to electrical systems. Incredibly beautiful design. Go check it out.

Then ponder why this doesn’t feel anywhere near as sexy as a bluetooth speaker designed like a beat-up war robot.