It is 7:41 a.m. on a cold, blistery morning. Instead of snow, it has managed to rain for several days and the sky resembles the appearance of dirty cotton. The cinnamon crops on my farm are slowly climbing up out of the ashes (my breeding of chickens is not going well), website tweaks for my new theme are pending my programmer’s ability to break the space-time continuum, and I am dying to return to blogging. So here I am, writing a blog post, because only I can hold myself accountable to my goals and my words.

This year has been a transition year for me in the sense that I’ve had to balance creative concerns with “the day job.” Fundamentally, I am an artistic person who has often struggled to combine my creative nature with a career and my writing goals. It’s challenging because, as you might imagine, the left or logical side of my brain would like to slaughter the right and, as a passionate person, sometimes it is difficult to balance my enthusiasm for storytelling with my desire to do a damn good job. Oh, with that money thing. Because, you know, there’s this thing called “financial security.” In my distant past, creativity was lauded only when it becomes apparent that the right side of the brain is responsible for more than incredible songs, stories, paintings, and sculptures, but when it affects a company’s bottom line. Often, you’d also have to be in the *right* position to be heralded. Worker bees, not so much. I’m of the mind that insight and impressions come from the right side. When you get that a-ha! moment that comes from reading between the lines, this is a very right brain thing.

I am enjoying the Director of Marketing position at Steve Jackson Games because it allows me to merge my professional background with my personality. For this company? It works and it’s also a great fit for what I’m doing with John. One of the larger projects we’re wrapping up with Matt M McElroy and the staff at DriveThru, is to ensure that his back catalog of comics is available for fans to download or print through Dork Storm Press on DriveThruComics.com. Just yesterday, I was admiring a translucent blue Jolly Jumbo d6 which immortalizes his smokin’ reindeer. The whole process of how art gets turned into dice and toys and games just stuns me.

Now that I’m getting into a day job groove, I’m looking ahead at what’s on my storytelling and game writing plate. Short answer? Bigger projects. This means less promotion-related activities because I won’t have the bevy of new (shorter) releases to promote. I’m not certain how I feel about the whole self-promotion thing right now. For me, it’s like jumping up-and-down saying “Look at Me! I’m Awesome! NO. YOU’RE AWESOME! NOW BUY MY BOOKS! WHEEE!” a lot. There’s some who’ve taken to writing advice and done well. Meh. MUCH easier to promote with John or with Steve Jackson or with anyone else than my own stuff. Sure, when I was back in H.S. I could probably do that and not give a flying squirrel, but now (and due to many Real LifeTM circumstances) I’m a *lot* more humble than I used to be. From what I can remember at least. I did one promotional opp for The Queen of Crows on this post, also because we’re offering a print edition. The black-and-white version has been released and the color version is in proofing. So today I’ve done my duty.

Hence, one day… In a weird conflux of Mobius events… I, too, may need to hire someone to do my own damn PR… (I’d rather be stuck in a studio writing and drawing and twisting and painting.) Well, at least I have that business thing down now. These days, one *has* to take a series of small business classes to navigate the publishing waters. I really liked this post by Chuck Wendig titled 25 Financial Fuck-Ups Writers Make.

So, the current plan is to blog more. Promote less. Continue to do things my way. Tell conventional wisdom to piss off. Before I leave you, a small rant minus the swearing:

*AHEM*

Begin rant/

Telling someone they can’t *possibly* know what they’re talking about unless they have direct experience with any topic or living through said experience pisses on the following disciplines/careers: reporters, critics, historians, anthropologists, analysts, therapists/counselors/psychologists, attorneys, writers, and editors. Telling someone they have to be in any said discipline to have a qualified opinion implies that they don’t have a brain. Guess what? People HAVE brains! Not everyone has the IQ of a doughnut!

/End rant

Mood: Contemplative with a Splash of Getting Christmas’d Out
Caffeinated Beverages Consumed: Not enough.
Work-Out Minutes Logged Yesterday: Does laundry count?
Word Count Logged Yesterday: (Pending New Tracking Method)
In My Ears: Final Fantasy X-2 Soundtrack (YuRiPa Fight No. 1)
Game Last Played: Picross 3D for Nintendo DS
Movie Last Viewed: Harry Potter on Blu-Ray
Book Last Read: Dark Faith anthology
Latest Artistic Project: Byzantium chainmail bracelet with pink/iris green/black rings
Upcoming Release: Strange, Dead Love for Vampire: the Requiem

Came across this article from Chuck Wendig today. Steve Weddle talks about e-book pricing from a reader’s perspective and compares it to pricing in stores. The article eBooks Bought, Never Read is definitely worth a read — especially if you’re an author unfamiliar with retail from the business side of things.

When you offer folks a bargain price for your ebook, you’ll get folks who are looking for bargains. Not all of these folks care about a good book. — QUOTE: eBooks Bought, Never Read

Powerful statement and very true. Here we get back to the value of an e-book. Does the price reflect the potential for readability? Weddle argues “Yes.” I say: “Let’s find out for sure.”

There should be a technical way to track digital files read and/or opened on an e-reader. I’m not aware if this big brother-ish tactic exists, but I’m thinking more along the lines of iTunes and personalization at its finest.

I feel a lot of these pricing initiatives boils down to how much authors want to become a merchant in addition to a publisher, too. e-Commerce is a different skill set that adds on top of crafting a compelling tale and publishing it in a specific format. Not to mention, what works for one author doesn’t work for every author, either, and with online marketing there’s a high learning curve.

If you’re interested in hearing about my own experience with pricing, read The Queen Of Crows, a One Year Retrospective.

Been in a very contemplative mood lately, in part because I’ve been focusing on background work for a novel, some re-organization (although my office is currently a disaster zone) and my fascination with the Occupy movement. It’s hard to talk about Occupy without getting political, but the reason why I’m interested in what’s happening is due to my love of futurism.

When I wrote Tailfeather, which appeared in Apexology: Science Fiction & Fantasy, I used a dystopian world I had been creating for some time. Overpopulation (and population control) is a huge part of that setting. What Occupy has reminded me, however, is that even though some things may change, others stay the same. Initially, I had counted on people remaining apathetic because the “horror” of the world happens gradually, over a long period of time. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, the Occupy movement shows that people aren’t as apathetic and listless as others might believe.

There’s been some parallels made to what’s happening now versus what happened in the 50s and 60s. Meaning: after 9/11, instead of a Red Scare steeped in Communism we had (and still have) a fear about people who are Muslim. The Civil Rights Movement has been replaced with a Gay Rights Movement. We now have a growing Women’s Rights Movement 3.0 to piggyback on the bra-burning one and the Women’s Suffrage Movement. (Looks like we’ll always have a Women’s Rights Movement. What does that say about our culture?) And, in place of war protests, we have economic or “class war” demonstrations. (Both were told to get a job…) All of which I find incredibly fascinating because history is repeating itself right before my eyes. No, I wasn’t alive in the 20s or 60s, but we have lots of documentation in the form of books, movies, etc. that we didn’t have before. Can we, as a society, learn from the past? Or do we negate what has come before and assume we’ll do it better because we’re that much smarter?

What’s compelling to me is how we deal with our fear. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” seems to be the strategy. In other words, we’re creating policies based on what people could do wrong versus what people are doing wrong. I also feel this is why we’re seeing more outspoken folks profess their religious beliefs, too. Innocent until proven guilty? Now it seems you’re guilt-free if you fit a certain profile.

I’m just an observer, but I wonder what the combined long-term consequences of profiling, economic downturns, and attacking education are. You don’t just give a man an injection and he’s instantly educated. The Matrix does not exist. (Or does it…) I’m of the belief that literacy is crucial for the foundation and maintenance of a healthy society — including giving people and their families the right tools to make the right decisions for their financial and medical health.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there; sometimes I think it’s hard for people to get facts nowadays which is why they turn to trusted sources. Trust is a weird concept, though, because it’s based on a feeling. So a source can be rife with inaccuracies provided it speaks on some subconscious level to either a) what people want to hear (bias) or b) told by someone the listeners respond to (another form of bias).

The challenge for me is — right now I don’t have any trusted sources. I want “the facts” but often that’s clouded under opinorting which has escalated in the past twenty years. (My word for editorial reporting.) So it takes me longer to have an opinion on something unless I am knee-jerk reacting to photos or violence. (Which is, sadly, what some outlets want to get eyeballs on the page.) Sure, the internet helps because I get international news outlets to give me a different perspective, but it’s very frustrating that our American reporters have lost their core ethics in favor of advertising dollars. For a long time, I wanted to be a reporter because they were “the seekers of truth.” It seems like our modern-day “seekers of truth” has to be a comedian like Jon Stewart to simply say with laughter what we cannot say with a straight face.

Well, now I tell stories and explore truths in my plots. Without even realizing it, Redwing’s Gambit for Bulldogs touches on some deeper issues without bogging down the story. How would you react to a cyborg? A former slave? A girl who’ll do anything to find her own identity – even if it means lying through her teeth?

I don’t have any answers to the way the real world works. Some things, like hatred of other human beings simply because they’re different in some way, confound me terribly. I guess that’s why I enjoy writing so much. Because in my stories, my worlds and characters make sense.

I was at a writer’s conference this past weekend called A Weekend With Your Novel. These are the same folks who put together Write By The Lake and other, similar programs. I had taken a class from Christine DeSmet way back in the day, when I was in college, and was familiar with the depth and breadth of her experience, so I gave it a shot. I received several techniques for the areas I need to focus on — many of which popped up in some of the trunk novels I wrote and Redwing’s Gambit during the revision process. The instructors know their craft. For that reason, I’d go again. The other authors I talked to, however, well… That was a different story. I did not feel that this was a good place to network on that front.

I do work-for-hire and I also understand marketing. So when the stat popped up that 90% of queries to agents get rejected because they aren’t saleable concepts, I nodded my head. Many authors (myself included) start out writing a story for their own vanity. This is often very personal and rationalized in the category of “very important to share.”

Yes, absolutely, that may be true. However? That does not necessarily mean that your story to teach the world about X is a saleable concept. Read other books in your preferred genre. Understand what people are reading. Then, tailor your novel to be a story people will want to read — not your personal soap box because you, out of nigh seven billion people on the planet, will change the world with your one story that someone else has probably already written.

I’m sorry to be so harsh, but honest-to-God I did this to myself when I was 19 because this was broached as one of the big no-no’s in my writing program. I wanted to understand why. So? I wrote an awful story about some stupid date and used Metaphor; I thought it was brilliant and witty and insightful and important. Everyone in my crit group laughed at me. It was embarrassing as hell, but it taught me something: what *I* think is crucial to my world view doesn’t necessarily make a good story other people will want to devour in one sitting. It was obvious I was writing about myself, which turned the story into a stain of insecurity, rather than something with a plot people want to spend money on.

When the subject of popular books or mass market came up in my talks, most people were confused. I mentioned Dan Brown, zombies, Twilight, Harry Potter. Some people laughed at popular books throughout the day and showed obvious disapproval when I mentioned I did work-for-hire. Man, I felt like I was back in college where writing is Art and only Real authors write their OWN STUFF and are BROKE until IT happens. (Again, I want to stress that this was not from the organizers…)

Then the speaker, Karen Doornebos who wrote Definitely Not Mr. Darcy, reinforcing many of the things about having a saleable concept, sacrificing, revising, how you never stop learning, etc. I listened, I nodded, and I understood. She’s successful (Go Karen!) and she had some great advice. I hope it did not fall on deaf ears. Hell, I have a lot to learn about writing a damn, good novel.

So let’s get back to that whole laughing at work-for-hire authors or trashing popular books or not understanding what a saleable novel is.

Fact #1: I don’t care how much you hate Twilight. Stephenie Meyer sold millions of books. She *had* to be doing something right. If you don’t agree, then you don’t understand why her popularity is important.

Fact #2: Turn your nose up at Dan Brown all you want. Besides selling a zillion copies, the man’s storytelling was so believable, other authors wrote NON-FICTION to DISPROVE his MADE UP STORY.

Fact #3: *coughs* There is nothing wrong with making money as an author. Let me repeat that: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH WRITERS MAKING MONEY.

Fact #4: While every author’s path is different, there are some conventions to storytelling and the publishing business. <-- Key word: business

Fact #5: I care about what books are popular because I want to write stories that people will want to read. Seriously. It’s not the dollars, because you can’t predict how many copies will sell. I know that I’m in this for the long haul. I’m looking at many novels as opposed to just the one.

And last but not least?

Fact #6: I’m not a hack because I write-for-hire, I’m a business woman. I learn all the time from whatever project I do (big or small) and apply that for the next one *and* get paid for the work I do. The work I’ve done professionally has helped me understand what sells, what doesn’t, what works, what won’t. Everything that I’m doing is to support my path and (not kidding) beyond my retirement. Writing will always be there for me, whether I have a job or not regardless of my age, and I love it to pieces. I am an artist, but one who wants to get paid for my efforts.

Fact #7: If you don’t have a saleable concept, then maybe getting an agent isn’t right for you. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH NOT GETTING AN AGENT OR WRITING LITERARY FICTION. There are thousands of small press publishers you don’t need an agent for. The reason why I’m saying this? Is because there’s the craft of writing and the business of writing. You can know one but not the other. The trick is being humble enough to know where your strengths and weaknesses are.

So, apologies for the rant, but this has been weighing on me like a ton of bricks. (To use the proverbial metaphor.) The good news, is that I feel I do have a saleable concept and know the business enough to explore my options. Right now, all I care about is writing a damn good story that people will want to read. I’m working on my versatility, in the mean time, by penning trunk stories and flash fiction. My path is my own, your path may be your own, but seriously…

Making money as a writer is not a bad thing. This is a business, like any other, even though writing is Art. Like any other form of creative expression, there’s commercial art and indie art and everything in between art. Doesn’t mean one’s better or worse than the other. All it means, is that one is more commercial and, ergo, will be more popular as a result.