I’m planning some big changes to my web presence this Autumn, not least of which is putting together a simple but proper author website with custom URL. This Blogger account has served me well, but as I plan on launching my first indie pub project later this year I think its limits have been reached. Stay tuned for further announcements!

So I was pleased this morning to find some advice from Mike Shatzkin on what exactly a proper author website should include in this day and age. His entire post (on author web presence and SEO, author branding, and marketing) is well worth the read, but here’s a checklist that I plan on testing my new site against:

* List of all your books, listed chronologically and by series
* A landing page for each book, including the cover, a description, reviews, excerpts, links to retail sites and other important metadata that would help readers discover the title and decide to buy
* Contact page so readers can easily send an email and get a response
* Sign-up for an email list for future updates and marketing initiatives
* Social media buttons, so readers can easily connect and share your content via social media
* Calendar with upcoming publication dates and scheduled public appearances
* Page with links to articles and reviews by the author, as well as references to the author on blogs and in the press

In addition to these things on an author website, Shatzkin recommends that authors all should have:

* Up-to-date Amazon author page
* Google Plus page (which is crucial for effective search engine optimization strategy)
* Twitter and Facebook

Shatzkin’s full article (and blog full of useful stuff generally) is here.

– S.

I’m a super-slow writer.

At least I’m pretty sure I am.

Oh, there have been times where I’ve cranked out the words; those times when I’ve been on a roll, writing some part of the story that I’m especially excited about, or rushing with excitement toward the end of a story, or just tapped into the Main Source and channeling it all onto the page like a fire hose of words. And of course there have been times when pressure and circumstances have forced me to write more and faster than I ever have before (Writers of the Future was a good example of this, when I wrote an 8000-word story in the space of 24 straight hours).

But mostly I’m slow. How do I know this?

Last month, the Stop-Watch Gang held our annual writer’s retreat weekend and it was a very productive weekend for all involved. But ‘productive’ is a relative description. Just how productive are we talking? Let’s put that in perspective: your average SF paperback tends to be in the 80,000-100,000 word range, so let’s use that as our metric. Fully THREE of us wrote 1/10th of a novel over the course of the sixteen writing hours we had that weekend, and two others we not far off that pace at 6000-7000 words.

Was I one of those five? I was not. Where did I rank? Yeah, that’s me second from the bottom (and Richard probably would have beat me if he didn’t stop after hour 6 because his carpal tunnel was acting up).

Don’t get me wrong: it was still super-productive for me. 3100 words is a lot of word for me, especially over the course of 16 hours. But its not 1/10th of a novel, by any means. (You’ll note that we took a two-hour dinner/Star Wars pinball tournament break on Saturday night, and people STILL kicked my ass…)

Kevin J. Anderson‘s advice to us at Writers of the Future was “be prolific.” Suffice to say it’s advice I’ve tried but failed to take to heart. Or at least to keyboard. But no more!

You see, Kevin records his chapters into a handheld recorder as he hikes and then has someone transcribe them for him, whereupon he edits them and sends them off to various publishers. Seems to work wonders as the guy publishes a dozen or more books each year. Why not give it a shot myself.

Recently, when I upgraded to a new laptop I decided to finally pick up Dragon Dictate for Mac (on sale!) I can’t afford to pay someone to transcribe my babbling, but I sure can talk faster than I can type! So if I can force my computer to do the transcription…Hell, I talk to myself all the time anyway–I might as well harness that to some useful end!

This morning, basically out of the box with almost no training of the program to recognize how I speak, I was able to very accurately (like 98% accurately) dictate 1400 words of story in under an hour using Dragon Dictate. That’s about 2.5x more than I would normally get written in an hour (yes, I’m otherwise THAT slow) and easily three-days work the way things have been going for me lately, and for ages, really. 1400 words in a single day would be a banner day for me–but to do it in a single hour? I may actually now finish my novel by the end of the year…and at this pace write another one, too!

I don’t use it to do all the punctuation–I could, but speaking your punctuation feels pretty unnatural, at least at this point–and I figure that’s easy enough to clean up when I do revisions. That’s where the fun is for me, anyway. I don’t like writing; I like having written.

The key in using Dragon Dictate, for me, is speed. To get those words down as fast as I can; to get what Tim Powers called our “first approximation draft” down before my inner editor kicks in, and I hem and haw endlessly about the sentence I have in my head before writing down essentially the sentence I started with. Speaking is so much better for this than typing: I think it and say it almost at the same time, and there it is on the screen second later! Typing is truthfully an added step: I have to think something, tell my fingers to fine the right keys, type it, and then verify I wrote the right thing. This is just disintermediation! People call the first pass the “vomit draft”, so here it comes!–just through this little headset mic, instead of a keyboard.

Do I want to write glorious, evocative prose? Of course! Is that going to happen in the first draft, whether I type it with my fingers or speak it into a transcription program? Hell no!

Writing is rewriting, and that’s where most of the pretty will come in anyway. For that I’ll use the keyboard; for that I’ll agonize over word choice, phrasing, placement, etc. For now, I just need it DONE.

Because before I can revise, I need a complete first draft. And if I can speak-write 1400 words of prose fiction in under an hour that complete first draft just got a whole lot closer. Like “done in a couple of months” close, instead of well into 2014.

And imagine if I have TWO HOURS each day! And what if I can get better at dictating and can do 2000 or 2500 words an hour? And when I’m done the novel, think of how many short stories I can crank out…

– S.

I’ve always heard (and never doubted) that the best, most certain way to sell books is word of mouth: if your friend liked it and recommends it to you, odds are you’ll buy the book they recommended rather than the one next to it on the shelf about which you’ve heard nothing.

And though this principle always made sense to me–you tend to trust the opinions of your friends, and groups of friends tend to be fairly like-minded in their tastes and interests (my friends’ love of the Ottawa Senators notwithstanding)–it really struck home last night when I was reading Pat Rothfuss blog. 

It was because this “word of mouth” principle was put into a striking visual form. See, some fan’s of Pat Rothfuss’ book The Name of the Wind showed up en masse at a book signing and presented Pat Rothfuss with a genealogy of how it came to be that the whole group had read his book.

Yeah, that’s right–a family tree of discovering an author. How cool is that? And how cool are Pat Rothfuss fans!?!? Check out the visual here.

It started with one person. She saw or read something on the internet, picked up the book as a result, and after loving the book (and it’s a good one!) she started spreading the word amongst her friends. From her recommendation to two friends, it looks like at least 26 people read (and looks like most loved, because they kept spreading the word) The Name of the Wind.

What blows my mind is seeing how this meme propagated through this group of friends, and presumably out into other circles that each of these people in the tree are part of. This is the kind of chart an epidemiologist would make up to track an outbreak of ebola or something–tracking back links of contact to a single cause, the Patient Zero. This just blows my mind.

Did all these people buy a copy of Pat Rothfuss’ book? Probably not. They might have borrowed one from the friend who recommended it (I can’t count how many times I’ve thrust a book into my buddy Andre’s arms and said: “You need to read THIS”), or borrowed one from a library. But I bet more than a few of them bought the book in one form or another.

Did they all recommend the book to someone else? Based on this chart, no. But nearly half of them did (and, who knows, this chart could be incomplete).

But what I would be willing to bet money on is that, having loved the first book in the series, ALL of these folks were rabidly waiting for the follow-up volume, The Wise Man’s Fear. I bet most of them bought the book as soon at they could. I also bet they then continued to spread the word about this series of books they loved.

Just think about this for a second: the POWER that word-of-mouth has in book buying decisions. When I finish my novel, if I could get everyone who loved the book to tell just two friend who they think might like it, how many copies do you think that could sell? And if those two friends told two more friends, and they told two more, etc. etc., and if even just half of all these people told two friends, how many copies do you think that would sell? One person’s recommendation here set off nearly 30 people reading and/or buying the book, and probably close to all 30 buying the second volume of the trilogy. Think about that–think about the sales! It’s no wonder that Pat Rothfuss (besides being a great writer) made it to the New York Times bestseller list. This is the way The DaVinci Code, or Twilight, or Fifty Shades of Grey take off. Any meme that can propagate that fast is bound to make a mark.

So if you’ve ever doubted that the best way to sell books is word of mouth stop doubting…and start figuring out a way to generate that kind of word-of-mouth buzz for your book!

– S.

I read a wonderful–and true to life–piece in The New York Times the other day, called “Stupid Writer Tricks.” The author, novelist Ben Dolnick, laments his time spent investigating the writing techniques of famous writers (as in how they wrote, like, where they sat when they wrote, or whether they used a No. 2 pencil or a typewriter, etc. rather than their actual writing).

As he puts it in the article:

I had, for a long time, a profound vulnerability to hearing about these sorts of routines. Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work, and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch. But I persisted in believing that I might one day come upon some technique, some set of tricks, that would vault me irreversibly onto the professional plane. I didn’t have a working printer, but I agreed wholeheartedly with Joan Didion that I needed to be sleeping in the same room as my manuscript, so as never to lose touch with it. It would be years before I’d written so much as a single chapter of a novel, but I knew that when I finished a book, I would, like Anthony Trollope, begin my next one on the very same day.

I confess to seeing a lot of truth, and a lot of myself, in this piece.

The “imaginary author interviews I occasionally conduct with myself while brushing my teeth” that Dolnick mentions bear more than a passing resemblance to my own inner fantasy life (though usually I’m on Letterman or Craig Ferguson, not in the pages of The Paris Review). And I would be lying if I said I haven’t been occasionally browsing the prices of stand-up desks since learning that’s how Hemingway preferred to work. (I’ve also taken to drinking mojitos on the same principle).

So I resolved to take Mr. Dolnick’s advice: he points out that

the important thing is not the techniques, but the spirit in which you take them up. If you reach out, as I spent all those years doing, like a drowning man for a scrap of wood, then you’ll most likely flail until you and your technique sink together in an unhappy mass. If, though, you can reach out from a position of calm, as a swimmer reaches out for a kickboard before turning to begin his next lap, then you might find yourself feeling what all the tricks and tips are finally pointing toward: freedom.

Naturally, what was the first thing I did after vowing to be more free of concerns about writing, about not worrying so much about how I write and just write more, and not spending so much time investigating how others have done the same work in the past?

I read this article by Austin Grossman about how working on video games taught him how to write.

Naturally.

– S.

PS: I really wish Dolnick hadn’t pointed out that all those Paris Review interviews are available online…

#

Okay, so I stole the title of this post from this article in Forbes–sounds like a Forbes title when you think about it, doesn’t it?

There’s been a lot of buzz about Jennifer L. Armentrout lately and the success she’s had with her self-published best-seller Wait for You. The Forbes article lays out the details and strategy of how Armentrout and her agent built her career and then positioned her for best-seller success with her self-published e-book (or is it “indie published” now? It’s like the trekkie/trekker debate…). Their very successful strategy has resulted in HarperCollins acquiring the project for a “high six-figure” advance.

All of this is well and good and the article is an interesting and informative read. But what I really want to highlight from it was the Five Tips on How to Make a Million Dollars Writing that are included at the end of the article.

I love reading these success stories: let’s face it, I hope to replicate them someday soon. But it always seems to me that these stories are in more than one way just stories about lightning striking, and we all know what they say about lightning striking in the same place twice.

When e-book self-pub/indie-pub first became a thing it seemed like the only barrier to success was having a product. Any product. There was so little competition initially that whatever was on offer was going to get some notice, no matter how bad the cover design was. But with the flood of e-books available now it’s harder and harder to get noticed. So people have to be creative about how they promote and market their books. The days when all you needed was a blog, or a Facebook account, or a Twitter handle to promote your book are well and truly over. Those things are fine, and maybe even necessary these days, but when EVERYONE has them you can’t authentically claim you’re standing out, can you? You’re really just part of the background noise of how-things-are (he says while writing on his blog…)

Like any system, as e-book indie publishing gets more and more complex there are fewer and fewer new and unanticipated ways to do things: the playing field keeps getting leveled (especially in this online realm) by everyone knowing and doing the same things that helped propel someone else before them (Amanda Hocking, say, or John Locke) to fame and fortune (though I personally would settle just for the fortune).

That’s why I especially like the Five Tips on How to Make a Million Dollars Writing that are included at the end of the article. They are solid advice but they also take into account much of how publishing has changed and continues to change in the e-book era, check them out in the article or below with my comments:

Five Tips on How to Make a Million Dollars Writing From Armentrout’s Story

1. Write what you want to write. In Armentrout’s case, she wrote the new adult contemporary novel that she wanted to write even though she knew it would be hard to sell.
[“Write what you want to write” is the first piece of advice that every writer has ever given me–there’s no mistaking the passion that goes into something you want to write rather than trying to chase a trend. Write something you care about, Tim Powers told me, and then find and agent and an editor who you can make care about it, too. – S]

2. Build a platform. If you want to have commercial success as an author, it almost goes without saying these days that you need to build a dedicated following using social media and other Web tools.
[This, I think, is the trickiest one of these tips–as in the trick is how to do this. Like I said, everyone has an author blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter, etc. Generating a fanbase and community is where the real marketing and networking creativity has to happen, I think, and where you need to do something unique to make that lightning strike. I have my own idea–or, rather, my wife who is much smarter than me came up with my idea for me–and I hope to roll that out for you sometime this year. – S]

3. Write a lot. One thing that helped Armentrout build her platform was writing many, many books. She has more than a dozen out already with more on the way — and that’s just two years after her first book came out.
[“Be prolific,” was Kevin J. Anderson’s advice to us at Writers of the Future and it’s more true than ever in the e-book age. If people like one thing you wrote they are likely to click and buy everything else you’ve written if its all right there on Amazon anyway… Prolificness (is that a word?) is what I, and most writers, continue to struggle with. – S]

4. Consider all your options. Armentrout first tried the traditional route. When that didn’t work, she tried other things. When publishers wouldn’t buy her latest book, she self-published. Authors have more options than ever today and they shouldn’t be ignoring any of them.
[Not closing off options is, I think, key in the new publishing world. I want a ‘traditional’ publishing contract with one of the big New York houses–who doesn’t? But if they don’t bite then I plan to explore small press options–I already have a couple of publishers in mind who I think would like my stuff–and if that’s a wash, too, then there’s always indie pub. Or maybe I’ll jump right to indie pub if New York doesn’t want it. Or skip New York and go small press right away. Who knows? There are just so many more options for writers these days, and any (or all!) of them can bring you success. I remember even just four or five years ago how panelists at Ad Astra or World Fantasy poo-pooed the notion of digital self-publishing. This year at World Fantasy there was a whole programming track on digital self/indie pub and the rooms were PACKED. How quickly things change these days! – S]

5. Learn the tricks of the industry. The price drop that Armentrout executed for her book was not easy to do. By knowing what’s happening in the publishing industry and how publishers are finding success, Armentrout was able to leverage that to propel her own sales.
[This seems to have been a key to her success, and it was carefully coordinated with help from her agent. This is something that sometimes only professionals know how to do. I’m hopeful my nearly 10-years working in publishing will help me to have a leg-up on this aspect when it comes time to publish my book, but I’m not above hiring some outside help if I can to help me succeed! – S]

– S.