So the latest Facebook meme is the #bookbucketchallenge (a take-off of the Ice Bucket Challenge). You may have seen it. Perhaps one (or more) of your friends have posted the challenge on their wall:

“List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. They do not have to be the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.”

I’m pleased to report that based on the results of the survey that researchers Lada Adamic and Pinkesh Patel have compiled (and that you can find some helpful infographics of here) we can officially declare the ascendancy of geek culture.

That’s right: the war is over. We won.

How can I say this? Well, of the Top 10 books that “stayed” with people, six of them are sci-fi or fantasy:

01 21.08* Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
02 14.48 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
03 13.86 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
04 7.48 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
05 7.28 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
06 7.21 The Holy Bible
07 5.97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
08 5.82 The Hunger Games Trilogy – Suzanne Collins
09 5.70 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
10 5.63 The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis

If we look at the Top 20 that number grows to eleven. Out of the 100 books listed, thirty-five or thirty-six of them would be considered SF & F–nearly a quarter of them

You’re welcome, world. You’re welcome.

The Full List

01 21.08* Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
02 14.48 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
03 13.86 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
04 7.48 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
05 7.28 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
06 7.21 The Holy Bible
07 5.97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
08 5.82 The Hunger Games Trilogy – Suzanne Collins
09 5.70 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
10 5.63 The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
11 5.61 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12 5.37 1984 – George Orwell
13 5.26 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
14 5.23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
15 5.11 The Stand – Stephen King
16 4.95 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
17 4.38 A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
18 4.27 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
19 4.05 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
20 4.01 The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
21 3.95 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
22 3.88 The Giver – Lois Lowry
23 3.67 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
24 3.53 Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
25 3.39 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
26 3.38 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
27 3.38 The Eye of the World – Robert Jordan
28 3.32 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
29 3.26 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
30 3.22 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
31 3.21 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
32 3.15 Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
33 3.15 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
34 3.12 Animal Farm – George Orwell
35 3.08 The Book of Mormon
36 3.05 The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
37 3.02 Dune – Frank Herbert
38 2.98 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
39 2.83 The Autobiography of Malcolm X
40 2.78 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
41 2.72 The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein
42 2.68 The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
43 2.68 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
44 2.58 Lamb – Christopher Moore
45 2.54 Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
46 2.53 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
47 2.52 Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
48 2.45 The Help – Kathryn Stockett
49 2.44 The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton
50 2.42 American Gods – Neil Gaiman
51 2.41 Where the Red Fern Grows – Wilson Rawls
52 2.39 Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
53 2.38 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
54 2.35 Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
55 2.31 The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
56 2.31 Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
57 2.29 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
58 2.24 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 2.21 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
60 2.21 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
61 2.16 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
62 2.12 Night – Elie Wiesel
63 2.12 The Dark Tower Series – Stephen King
64 2.07 Outlander – Diana Gabaldon
65 1.92 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
66 1.89 A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
67 1.88 The Art of War – Sun Tzu
68 1.85 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
69 1.85 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
70 1.83 The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
71 1.78 The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
72 1.76 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
73 1.75 Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
74 1.73 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
75 1.72 Watership Down – Richard Adams
76 1.72 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
77 1.68 Where the Sidewalk Ends – Shel Silverstein
78 1.65 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
79 1.65 A Song of Ice and Fire – George R. R. Martin
80 1.65 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
81 1.64 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
82 1.63 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
83 1.62 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
84 1.62 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
85 1.61 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
86 1.58 The Shack – William P. Young
87 1.56 Watchmen – Alan Moore
88 1.55 Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
89 1.54 The Odyssey – Homer
90 1.54 The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
91 1.53 The Stranger – Albert Camus
92 1.52 Call of the Wild – Jack London
93 1.51 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
94 1.51 Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
95 1.50 East of Eden – John Steinbeck
96 1.50 Matilda – Roald Dahl
97 1.49 The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
98 1.47 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
99 1.45 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
100 1.45 Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak

– S.

* The numerals between the book’s ranking and the title indicate the percentage of people who mentioned the books in their lists

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.