And here’s Part 2 of my talk to the Annapolis Chapter of the Maryland Writer’s Association, in which I get into more of the practical details of self-publishing and marketing one’s books.
November 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
June 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
Self-Publishing: What I’ve Learned in the First Two Years, Part 2
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Are you thinking about self-publishing your work? Or are you already self-publishing? Is your work fiction or non-fiction? Whatever your answers to these questions, there’s something in this podcast for you as I reveal what I’ve learned in my first two years as a self-publishing author: the 5 brilliant things that I did, and the 5 things that fell “just a little short” of brilliancy. Enjoy!
Self-Publishing: What I’veLearned the First Two Years, Part 2
June 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
Self-Publishing: What I’ve Learned in the First Two Years
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Are you thinking about self-publishing your work? Or are you already self-publishing? Is your work fiction or non-fiction? Whatever your answers to these questions, there’s something in this podcast for you as I reveal what I’ve learned in my first two years as a self-publishing author: the 5 brilliant things that I did, and the 5 things that fell “just a little short” of brilliancy. Enjoy!
June 6, 2013 Leave a Comment
I Picked Myself
Back in March of 2011 when Seth Godin wrote this blog post about one of his favorite themes, “pick yourself,” I had never heard of him. But at that very same point in time I was just getting ready to live his advice. I was just about to embark, along with my tremendously supportive wife and kids, on a big, risky transition out of a seventeen-year career in academia and into my own business as a freelance writer. Since then I’ve done a few things I’m proud of. Among them:
I started Trojan Tub Entertainment, a children’s entertainment company featuring my humorous Kingdom of Patria series for middle grade readers. I’ve self-published two books in the Patria series so far in both digital and print formats (the first book also exists as a audiobook), and I’m currently serializing the third book in the series on the Kingdom of Patria website, the publication of which I’m gearing up to crowd fund.
I also self-published my blackly comic thriller, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare. Ever wonder what would happen if a young, out-of-work, formidably obtuse philosophy professor, in the hope of an easy payday that would help him finish his book and get back into academia, took a meeting in Hollywood posing as a writer of slasher film scripts? That’s funny, so did I.
In all of these efforts I learned a lot about self-publishing and even more about myself. I made a lot of mistakes along the way and no doubt I’ll make many more. But I’ve also been energized by all the pro-activity: working with my web site designers, my illustrator, my interior book design person; learning the art of selling things online, content marketing, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.
More recently I’ve taken my love of storytelling into this arena of brand storytelling, trying to help others, like you, learn how to spread their stories in our connection economy.
In many ways I picked myself and I’m very happy that I did.
Back on March 21, 2011 Seth wrote:
“It’s a cultural instinct to wait to get picked. To seek out the permission and authority that comes from a publisher or talk show host or even a blogger saying, “I pick you.” Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you–that Prince Charming has chosen another house–then you can actually get to work.”
How do you react to this? Do you agree with it?
It’s a hard saying, one that I, admittedly, haven’t grown 100% accustomed to. But Seth would counter that whether you or I agree with him or not, the “pick yourself” economy is coming anyway.
So I’m going to continue to pick myself and tell stories, and help others tell stories, that are as remarkable as I can imagine.
Yesterday, June 5th, Seth Godin published his 5,000th blog post. Congratulations, Seth! Let’s have 5,000 more.
April 22, 2013 Leave a Comment
Chasing the Whispering Pinker
On 1 June 1905, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, having completed his first out-and-out comic novel, Love Among the Chickens, prepared to submit the work to a literary agent. But as we read in Robert McCrum’s magnificent Wodehouse: A Life, the role of literary agent was in 1905 “a new profession in the world of books, and its pioneer was whispering J.B. Pinker, a rubicund, round-faced, grey-haired sphinx of a man with a protrusive under-lip.”
This sentence leapt out at me when I read it, and not only because I was curious as to why Pinker was described as “whispering” and why the protrusiveness of his under-lip was relevant. I was struck by the fact that the office of literary agent is barely over a hundred years old. And I was reminded of how fluid are the conventions of the “world of books.”
Here in 2013, as we learn from Joanna Penn’s report from the London Book Fair, indie writers are finding ways to sell their books without the aid of literary agents–and to increasing success. In trying to break into an industry, we tend to take its conventions for granted. When those conventions are questioned, those whose livelihood depends on them can be tenacious in their defense. Today the New York Times published two letters responding to its recent piece on David Mamet’s decision to go indie with his next project. Both letters exhibit a woeful misunderstanding of how indie writers are marketing their books–as if all such writers are doing is trying to get their print volumes on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to get an agent. Wodehouse himself ultimately secured the services of the whispering Pinker. But it is fatal to take the conventions of an industry as though they were as immutable as Platonic ideas. Wise literary agents would agree that their role has changed since the advent of self-publishing. Wise authors with conventional book deals would say the same.
How have the tectonic changes in the “world of books” affected your approach to marketing your fiction?
March 19, 2013 2 Comments
Seeing Things
“Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” –Josef Pieper, “Learning How to See Again,” in Only the Lover Sings
How well do you really see the world around you?
When after a lost half hour of email and Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest you finally tear your glance away from your computer screen–your eyes buzzing from all the electronic stimulation–and look out the window–what do you see? Do you really see what’s out there, or is the reality outside simply a screen upon which you throw the thoughts and feelings going on inside of you?
To see, as Pieper says, is more than simply accounting for the sensible details of what’s outside the window. Authentic seeing is an intellectual process by which we grasp the essential structure of reality. It is a process, too, by which we realize the special kind of intellectual being we are.
Which is why Flannery O’Connor recommended to writers, among other strategies, the practice of the visual arts. “I know a good many fiction writers who paint,” she wrote in her essay, “Writing Short Stories,” “not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things.”
How else, asks Pieper, but by building up a habit of seeing could Tolstoy ever have written such a gorgeous simile as “The girl’s eyes were gleaming like wet currants.”
Even when we take a moment to look, our vision rarely reaches deeper than the visible surface. But the more we cultivate the habit of seeing, slowly will our vision begin to see not only the visible contours of things, but all that is there.
* Those interested in O’Connor’s own impressive drawing ability will want to check out Kelly Gerald’s book, Flannery O’Connor–The Cartoons. An excerpt of Gerald’s book published in The Paris Review, showing further samples of O’Connor’s early cartoons, can be found here.
March 14, 2013 Leave a Comment
The Great American Production Line
The other day I mentioned the distinction between technological thinking and philosophical thinking, and how our culture in general, and electronic media in particular, are dominated by technological thinking. Now we are seeing that technological thinking is seeping into the creative act of writing books.
In a piece today on Page-Turner, the book blog of The New Yorker, Betsy Morais surveys several companies who are trying to streamline the process of writing a book by breaking it down into a set of component parts and then finding the best way to make those parts work together at maximum efficiency. As on a production line.
So a writer will farm out his book to an editor even while the first draft is in progress, because the immediate feedback at the gestation stage will help the writer create a product that will better satisfy his target audience. Guy Kawasaki created his recent book on self-publishing, APE, in just this way–and apparently to great success.
But Kawasaki’s book was a “how-to” book. It strikes me that this kind of test-marketing during the gestation stage of a book would work best with a product that is itself technological in nature. But what if you’re writing The Great American Novel?
The first draft (at least) of a work of fiction or creative non-fiction is not a group project. At this stage the writer has to work out for himself how to make the most of his material (language) with the tools at his disposal (the principles of his craft and the habits he has gained so far in applying them). This act of creativity is, in large part, an exercise in philosophical thinking, and no one can do philosophical thinking for you.
Even if they could, why would you want them to? Isn’t this supposed to be your vision?
Bring in the A-Team (mentors, editors, beta-readers, writing groups, spell-checkers, marketers) either before or after the gestation period. But achieve the discipline necessary to leave the gestation period itself alone.
March 13, 2013 Leave a Comment
Book Publishing Comes Home
Three acres and a cow.
That’s how G.K. Chesterton summed up his understanding of distributism, an economic theory he championed with Hilaire Belloc and others in the early 20th century. It’s a theory still worth thinking about today.
Distributism emphasizes private property, and private property as widely distributed (not necessarily re-distributed) as possible. Distributism puts the oikos (the household) back into economics. For when someone becomes an owner of the means of livelihood, then he doesn’t have to commute into the city every morning. He can stay home and milk his cow.
Electronic media and especially the new distribution channels have made the distributist ideal more approachable than ever. Self-publishing, or what Guy Kawasaki has nicely called “artisanal publishing,” is one example of how the ownership of property and the means of production can be brought back into the home.
And the technological innovation is becoming more congenial to private ownership by the day. No longer, as Seth Godin implores, do we have to wait around to get picked by the gatekeepers of the established distribution channels. We can pick ourselves and write our book, publish it, distribute it, market it, and write another.
Have you heard about Pressbooks? It’s an amazing new concept in indie publishing, one that’s going to allow writers to take even more control over their work.
Such innovation, of course, puts the onus of responsibility on us. But isn’t that precisely where it should be?
