Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

Back in April I stayed awake until 1:00 AM and recorded an hour-long chat with for Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Reflections podcast. It went live last week, and over the course of the interview we tackle many writing and publishing topics, including my start as an RPG publisher in the pre-Kindle days of the early 2000s.

One thing I dig about Stark Reflections is Mark’s habit of ending every interview by reflecting on the things he can take away and apply to his own practice as a writer/publisher. It’s possible one of my own reflections is “don’t do interviews at 1:00 AM”, because oh wow, I was getting a big loopy towards the end, but such is the curse of writing and publishing in a different time zone to the vast majority of your contemporaries.

Check it out on the Stark Reflections website.

Here’s the summary of what we cover:

• Peter being a night owl who is most comfortable starting to write at about 10 PM at night and working through the night
• How, through necessity with a regular life schedule, Peter will get the writing done first thing in the morning
• Peter having wanted to be a writer since he was quite young
• The way that most of the work he has taken on in his life has been somehow affiliated with the writing world
• Describing the Gold Coast of Australia as Miami with slightly less charm
• The undergraduate degree focus which mostly avoided genre fiction
• How you can never escape poetry once you’ve done it, even years later being introgued as “Peter the Poet”
• How in the early 2000s Dungeons and Dragons open-sourced their rules, allowing people to provide material within their realm
• Getting involved in DriveThruFiction back in 2005
• The hunger for content that came out in that time period
• How changes in the RPG industry that happened were later echoed a few years later in the eBook fiction publishing space
• The issues Peter recognized in 2006 in creating role playing game material where somebody else held the licensce for it
• Challenges of submitting fiction to markets from a country like Australia
• Spending six weeks at an Australian branch of the Clarion Writers Workshop and how that dramatically changed the perspective forced on him from his university education
• Continuing to submit his fiction to the traditional markets but paying attention to what was going on in the self-publishing, digital publishing, and indie publishing space
• Launching Brain Jar Press in 2017 largely as a vehicle for publishing his backlist
• Why cutting your teeth in short fiction can be great
• Having a plan to indie publish his own books for about ten years, make all the mistake on his own books, rather than someone elses, and getting solid learning and experience from it to benefit his press
• Working with Kathleen Jennings on a poetry collection right at about the time her first book with Tor went huge
• The idea for a series of short chapbooks with four or five essays per writer in order to bring these remarkable articles the authors had already written back into availability
• Borrowing the cultural capital of all the people they’re publishing so that they can grow and eventually launch new writers
• How Peter fell in love with print quite accidentally
• The requirement of having to have an online store for the press
• The joke that it’s cheaper to get things to Narnia than it is to get them to Australia
• The thought exercise Peter does regarding how many books he has to sell to make it to $100
• Understanding the market base that you’re likely selling to as a small specialized indie press
• Peter’s impatience for just replicating what midlist are publishing is doing in the face of such wonderful, free, and dynamic digital tools when one can be breaking the model, expanding, and forming new ideas and new products
• ether Peter has been doing much of his own writing since launching Brain Jar Press 2.0
• The flash fiction writing Peter has been able to do during a few 8 minute breaks at work
• What Peter is most optimistic about with what’s happening in the publishing world now
• And more…

Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished. 

It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way that wasn’t useful; they could service clients in Europe or American at a reasonable price, but shipping POD products to Australia was…well, prohibitive.

But the nice thing about the new job is having the spoons to dig and research/try stuff out, rather than staring at my to-do list in abject horror. Over the last few weeks, I dug into POD merch options and found a place that actually ticked all the boxes I had around POD products. And since Eclectic Projects exists to try out stuff, serving as Brain Jar’s R&D, I’ve been testing just what I can do with flash fictions, my beloved Futura font, and a plain white mug.

Of course, the point of doing something like this isn’t “oh look, I’m going to sell a billion of these.” The point is to do it, and figure out just how simple it is, because once I’ve got a handle on it there’s so many interesting possibilities. A huge number of writers have a vast back catalogue of pithy, interesting ideas under their belts that they haven’t even thought about monetising (I refer, of course, to Twitter feeds and Facebook Feeds and even Instagram images, plus short forms like poetry and flash fiction); the speed of something like a mug is quick, compared to producing a book, so it’s possible to take something that’s got attention today and offer a product based on it within the space of a few hours.

And, of course, we all have books that are full of pithy, interesting pull quotes that might sound interesting out of context. Books that can suddenly have merch once we wrap our head around the idea, and start thinking about what the world looks like when that’s built into our business model as creators…