Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

I spend a lot of time fascinated by the mutability of words, which is one of those things that’s seeped into my fiction from time-to-time. This made me a sucker for Something Something Soup Something, a concept that’s part-online game and part philosophy experiment about the mutability of a simple concept like “soup”. The narrative behind the game is simple: it’s the future; aliens are making soup and teleporting it into your kitchen, but their understanding of soup is often flawed and needs a level of oversight. You stand by the teleporter and look at their creations, saying yes or no to each, and after a round of 20 or so serves the game will put together your personal philosophy of soup based upon your choices. It’s a really simple concept and a similarly simple bit of coding, but the gameplay is secondary to the experiment going on behind the scenes – while there’s a general consensus about certain elements that make

Yesterday, I sat down to read Zoe York’s Romancing Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series, and she impressed me immensely with one of the most incisive opening salvos ever included in a writing book. To whit: The truth is, writing is hard, and publishing is a brutal business—and not always a meritocracy. To survive, and thrive, you need to be tough. You need to believe in yourself and trust your gut. You need to see through smoke and mirrors. You need to shut out all the noise, and find your own path. But it’s just not that simple, because that takes resources and support. You need a solid platform in life in order to get a really good leap. I know that. I struggle with the reality that there are a lot of asterisks on good advice. Mental health, physical health, financial stability, access to opportunities—they all factor into our ability to do what someone else has done.

It’s May, 2009. Approximately four years after the release of A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Readers are getting antsy about Martin’s insistence on doing other things: editing books in his Wild Carda universe; writing stories that are not A Dance of Dragons; consulting on the HBO television series made from his work; writing blog posts all of the above, rather than working on the now overdue fifth volume which turns out to be two-and-a-half years away. A phrase rolls across the internet, a little viral moment shared by booklovers: George RR Martin is not your bitch. We know this, because Neil Gaiman told us so, responding to a fans question about what readers are owed when a series is plagued by delays and gaps the Martin’s series is. It’s still another two and a half years before A Dance of Dragons drops in June, 2011. The final two volumes

On her Wednesday blog post, The Trainwreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch laid out her vision for just how bad COVID will get for traditional publishing and the next steps she recommends for authors working with that business model. Her prognosis is fairly dire: traditional publishing is in grave danger, and likely won’t really understand how grave for months after the pandemic is over. It’s also touched with a longstanding, negative around agents and traditional publishing practices that runs through Rusch’s non-fiction work. Not necessarily a reason to avoid reading it, but something to be aware of before you go in and maybe treat this is as a useful data point rather than a gospel advice for what to do next. I don’t know that I see quite the level of gloom that Rusch does for traditional publishing, but I do see an awful lot of bad coming down the pipe. More importantly, I see a space where lots of business assumptions

There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as the brands attached rose to prominence. Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability. As a young comic fan, I preserved thousands of individual issues in longboxes, each comic wrapped in a mylar sleeve with a backing board to ensure they weren’t creased. A collection that provided a sense of pride, a bourgeoning curatorial instinct sending me through back issue bins to find issues I might have missed. As an adult, I prefer the issues collected in a different way, reading comics once the individual issues are bound up into trades and graphic novels, or

Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition. Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions. As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.” I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt. Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and

The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over. I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there. Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was

I’d like to talk a little about writing (and, really, just surviving) in the age of contagion we find ourselves in. This is a tricky subject because I loathe the impetus that capitalism puts on being productive at all costs, especially when you’re sick or stressed out. It’s the same impetus that makes COVID-19 so tricksy, because we’ve all spent far too long soldiering on at work while ill, and that’s seeped into the western mindset. On the flip side, writing’s important to me. It’s a big part of my self-identity and it’s the thing that keeps me calm. And, as I wrote in my newsletter today, a goodly part of the challenge in writing through the age of contagion isn’t working while sick, it’s working while the world is trying to scare the pants off you. The tactics that make it possible for me to write through the age of contagion largely coincides with the tactics I use to

A few months back, I went to see Garth Nix and John Birmingham in conversation at the local library, and Birmingham busted out a little bon mot that’s stuck with me: If we write something, and we do our jobs right, it’s going to get published. It’ll go to our publishers, and if they don’t want it, we can publish it ourselves and take home that sweet 70% self-pub royalty. This doesn’t imply that it’s going to be massively successful or make scads of money, of course, but it puts writers in a really interesting position. For the first time, publication is guaranteed if you start a project, and that frees you up to take chances you wouldn’t necessarily take in publishing environment focused on brick-and-mortar bookstores. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, because it feeds into the research I’ve been doing on writing series for my thesis. Series fiction has traditionally been one of those things

Two years ago, when I kicked off Brain Jar Press, I dropped a bunch of cash on tools designed to streamline my processes. It started with a shiny new MacBook Air, breaking years of I-don’t-use-Macs ideology so I could run the mac-only Vellum software. That was something like two grand of expenses right there, coupled with an ongoing Adobe subscription and access to delivery tools like BookFunnel. I knew I’d struggle to earn back that money in the first year, and I was totally fine with that. The point wasn’t making the money back, it was making every project I took on a little cheaper to publish. For instance, there was software that did everything Vellum did, but it was a pay-per-project concern or an ongoing subscription. There are tools that could create covers instead of using Photoshop, but those tools aren’t as advanced or had a steep learning curve. I would be investing time and subscriptions fees to get

For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books. This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things. As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on