Ugh.
I may know how to *do* research, but I don't enjoy it. I've spent much of today - though possibly not as much as I should have - trawling through Amazon's sci-fi bestseller lists and the Kindleboards for sci-fi, searching for authors who are self-publishing, per the research strategy I described on Tuesday. While there are many self-publishing authors, what I've mostly learned is that lots of them have never learned how to write marketing copy, and some haven't even learned how to SPAG-check (spelling, punctuation and grammar) their forum posts.
That much, at least, leaves me feeling fairly confident; I'm a pretty accurate typist and grammarian (I recognise the irony in using a word like 'grammarian' here - is it a real word or not?), and I'm pretty sure I can write better marketing copy than much of what I saw on the Kindleboards today. If nothing else, I can write shorter marketing copy - some people post up 1000-word plot summaries, and even anecdotes about how they came to write the book (tip, guys: the anecdotes go on your personal website).
Actually, one thing which has really surprised me is how few of the authors plugging their books on the Kindleboards had easily-Googleable personal sites or blogs. Something I've heard constantly from the blogs I read about how to succeed at self-publishing is that maintaining a good, active online presence is one of the best ways to draw readers. If all that turns up when I Google you is a list of Amazon links, you probably aren't casting your net wide enough.
The drawback from my perspective of it being hard to find people's blogs, particularly, is that that's where I was hoping to get most of the information I'm after - people's descriptions of what they're doing by way of self-promotion and what their results are like. Joe Konrath's blog is great for this, but he's a thriller writer, and 'thriller' is a rather different genre from sci-fi.
I've found a couple of success stories I'll be studying with interest; Christian Cantrell is running well on the sci-fi bestseller list with 'Containment', and Stephen J. Sweeney is doing pretty well on Apple's iBook store and has generated several hundred Amazon sales of a book he's giving away free everywhere else. So this is doable.
What I'm struggling to do is build a systematic body of evidence, rather than a collection of anecdotes and case studies. I'll try to do some more of this tomorrow, as well as dipping into some of the free books I've found today and checking my writing style against what's on show.
To finish with (and to see if my high opinion of my own promotional writing is in any way justified), here's a blurb I'm working on - note, still working on - for 'The Death of John Collins':
"Some believe John Collins destroyed time. Now, in the last human city, Collins has returned, and three students must make up their own minds about his motives. One worships him; one has sworn to kill him; billions of lives may hang on the decision of the third.
And Collins brings a warning: time is collapsing again."
What this needs at the moment, is a better first sentence, or possibly an all-caps leader along the lines of 'THE DESTROYER OF TIME RETURNS...' at the top. Does it grab you?
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
The promised Screnzy post
Okay, large parts of tomorrow are set aside for research, so I don't need to feel too bad about having spent today on Script Frenzy and new toys. With that in mind, here's an off-topic post about Script Frenzy; what I'm doing, how it's going, and what, if anything, I'm learning.
What I'm doing for Script Frenzy is writing the next volume of my webcomic Prismatic Vodka. PV spent the second half of last year steadily going down the tubes as a combination of stresses and a lack of clarity about where it was going caused me to lose the ability to be funny. The actual story suffered as a result, and in mid-November, I put it on hold until I could recharge my creative juices. I realised that part of the problem was that I'd lost sight of where the characters were going and how I wanted them to end up.
It's now been four months plus since the hiatus began, and I've spent the interim (among other things) figuring out how to fix the comic's character problem so that I can start driving the characters towards the climax at the end of the volume after the one I'm currently writing.
It's actually going pretty well. I've given up trying to come up with a joke every page - I'm not a good enough humour writer to manage that, and given that the plot of this volume (volume 6) has already involved the immolation of probably 100,000,000 innocent human beings, in some places humour would be far more tasteless than I'm prepared to go. The result of this freedom from the punchline structure has been the confidence to polish dialogue and exposition, and to be a bit bolder with my action sequences - one sequence involves helicopter-mounted mages fighting demons in the skies above Berlin.
I'm a little past half-way through the 100-page target of the challenge, though I can probably expect to write more than 100 pages overall. Given that it's only April 5th, this can probably be taken as a good sign (though by 5 days into November, I was substantially closer to the completion of my NaNo target, and that involved a hell of a lot more words actually written). I'm hoping to finish by the end of the weekend, but it's starting to look unlikely - I'm a little too easily-distracted at the moment, particularly with the buying of new toys I can't really afford.
Overall, though, it's great to be writing again, and to be bringing back old fave characters from earlier in the comic's story (I celebrated the half-way point of the challenge by bringing back my favourite ever character, the benign-yet-irritable poet demon Ferdandt, who only previously featured in two scenes back in volume 3). It's also felt good to find that I can still come out with jokes - they may not be very 'good' jokes, but Prismatic Vodka has always been about finding humour in self-consciously bad jokes, so the quality of the joke itself doesn't matter.
It's also been a nice break between much more serious, dark writing projects. 'The Death of John Collins' can hardly be described as light-hearted, and 'The Earth Trembles', because it has to get to grips with Ayn Rand's bleak vision of mankind, is in some ways extremely dark.
That's all for today. Once again, I can't recommend Script Frenzy enough as a writing exercise, and indeed as a fun thing to do if you enjoy writing (particularly with a little pressure and friendly competition to carry you along).
What I'm doing for Script Frenzy is writing the next volume of my webcomic Prismatic Vodka. PV spent the second half of last year steadily going down the tubes as a combination of stresses and a lack of clarity about where it was going caused me to lose the ability to be funny. The actual story suffered as a result, and in mid-November, I put it on hold until I could recharge my creative juices. I realised that part of the problem was that I'd lost sight of where the characters were going and how I wanted them to end up.
It's now been four months plus since the hiatus began, and I've spent the interim (among other things) figuring out how to fix the comic's character problem so that I can start driving the characters towards the climax at the end of the volume after the one I'm currently writing.
It's actually going pretty well. I've given up trying to come up with a joke every page - I'm not a good enough humour writer to manage that, and given that the plot of this volume (volume 6) has already involved the immolation of probably 100,000,000 innocent human beings, in some places humour would be far more tasteless than I'm prepared to go. The result of this freedom from the punchline structure has been the confidence to polish dialogue and exposition, and to be a bit bolder with my action sequences - one sequence involves helicopter-mounted mages fighting demons in the skies above Berlin.
I'm a little past half-way through the 100-page target of the challenge, though I can probably expect to write more than 100 pages overall. Given that it's only April 5th, this can probably be taken as a good sign (though by 5 days into November, I was substantially closer to the completion of my NaNo target, and that involved a hell of a lot more words actually written). I'm hoping to finish by the end of the weekend, but it's starting to look unlikely - I'm a little too easily-distracted at the moment, particularly with the buying of new toys I can't really afford.
Overall, though, it's great to be writing again, and to be bringing back old fave characters from earlier in the comic's story (I celebrated the half-way point of the challenge by bringing back my favourite ever character, the benign-yet-irritable poet demon Ferdandt, who only previously featured in two scenes back in volume 3). It's also felt good to find that I can still come out with jokes - they may not be very 'good' jokes, but Prismatic Vodka has always been about finding humour in self-consciously bad jokes, so the quality of the joke itself doesn't matter.
It's also been a nice break between much more serious, dark writing projects. 'The Death of John Collins' can hardly be described as light-hearted, and 'The Earth Trembles', because it has to get to grips with Ayn Rand's bleak vision of mankind, is in some ways extremely dark.
That's all for today. Once again, I can't recommend Script Frenzy enough as a writing exercise, and indeed as a fun thing to do if you enjoy writing (particularly with a little pressure and friendly competition to carry you along).
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
It's OK to start your research with Wikipedia...
...provided you don't end it there.
This is a post about research methodology (with respect to my preparations for the Common Sense Test next week), and in particular the above important lesson which took me a long time to learn after being told several times as an undergraduate that it's not true.
Bah, that's a horrible sentence. The story goes like this: in Britain at least, most undergraduates are told at an early stage (possibly even before they finish school/college) that Wikipedia is 'not a credible source' and thus they shouldn't use it in their research. They then go on to try to do research without Wiki and other similar sources, and find it almost impossible to make any headway. The lucky ones eventually figure out that it's OK to use Wiki, just not to say you used it.
I was well into my PhD before I got to that point. Before then, I worked up huge quantities of stress trying to find introductory material on obscure philosophical topics like Meinong's ontology (don't ask) without using Wikipedia.
The problem is one of finding starting points. It's easy to look at something like the field of e-self-publishing, even limited to a genre such as speculative fiction, and think 'wow, how the hell do I find anything out at all?' The scale of activity in indie publishing these days is staggering, and set to continue growing. So, here, based on my experience as a research student in the similarly overwhelming field of abstract metaphysics, is a research strategy. You'll be able to judge the strategy, I hope, by the results it produces for me over the coming week or so.
Step 1: Refine your question.
You can't find answers to a question you don't know. What I have to figure out is what I need to know information about. In my case, I'm trying to prove that self-publishing is a viable option for a new author. I'm trying to prove that self-publishing can be used to supplement an income to an extent that justifies time and effort spent.
So, I'm looking for authors doing just that. Specifically, I'm looking for authors who are writing the same kind of stuff I'm writing, who are self-publishing online. I'm looking at a comparison of number of authors making money against total number of authors trying to make money, and at how much money is being made. I need to be able identify the authors whose work is selling well, and detailed information on their sales and (hopefully) their income from same. I also need some general statistics about the size of this slice of the industry.
Step 2: Go where the answers are.
It's impossible for a new author to be everywhere and to get their name everywhere. The chances of running into any kind of promotional material for a new speculative fiction writer just by clicking through the websites I normally visit (mainly webcomics and Web 2.0 stuff linked on Twitter) are pretty small. On the other hand, every new author knows that the Kindle boards are a great place to promote your work - because the shop selling it is two mouse-clicks away. There are (or at least I hope there are) still large online communities where people discuss science fiction and speculative fiction which are an obvious home for sci-fi novelists to try to accumulate sales.
This is where the point about Wikipedia comes in. It's easy to think that these sources will be unfiltered and unpoliced - which is the (snobbish and misguided) motivation behind the complaints teachers are always making about Wiki. To a certain extent, it's true that the actual text that will appear on your screen is unpoliced, but that's what God (or Darwin, your choice) gave you a brain for. In a quick skim down a single thread on the Kindle boards just now, I was quickly able to discard half the posts by the quality of the promotional writing - whether the actual book being promoted is any good or not, no-one's going to sell books with marketing copy that looks like a poorly-punctuated amateur plot synopsis.
Step 3: Follow the answers where they lead.
If I had been doing something other than a quick skim, my next step (the 'provided you don't end at Wiki' step) would have been to click the links the remaining posters were helpful enough to provide - to look at the reviews they wanted me to read, and probably to find links to the ones they didn't want me to read. I'd also look up the author on Wiki, to see if they were successful enough to rate a mention (if nothing else, Wiki is a great barometer of significance-to-someone-somewhere). Lastly, I'd look at the author's own blog and Twitter feed, and do a simple Google on their name - possibly with the book title if it's a fairly common name.
The overall point, then, is that you have to start from the unfiltered, aggregator-type sources with research, because these are the only places where the information you want all gets indexed in one place. The aggregator then gives you links to more information on the particular entry you've just looked up (an index or phone directory isn't a bad analogy for this way of using Wiki or the Kindle boards), which in turn gives you a path or set of paths to follow. Provided you take decent notes along the way - and yes, note-taking is ESSENTIAL - you end up with exactly the information you're after.
I hope I'll have time to start arriving at some results tomorrow, though it may have to wait until Thursday before I have anything more than a list of names and titles. This strategy has proven sound not just for my PhD, though, but also for my Distinction-earning MA thesis, so I'm fairly confident, and I highly recommend going about your market research this way if you're struggling.
This is a post about research methodology (with respect to my preparations for the Common Sense Test next week), and in particular the above important lesson which took me a long time to learn after being told several times as an undergraduate that it's not true.
Bah, that's a horrible sentence. The story goes like this: in Britain at least, most undergraduates are told at an early stage (possibly even before they finish school/college) that Wikipedia is 'not a credible source' and thus they shouldn't use it in their research. They then go on to try to do research without Wiki and other similar sources, and find it almost impossible to make any headway. The lucky ones eventually figure out that it's OK to use Wiki, just not to say you used it.
I was well into my PhD before I got to that point. Before then, I worked up huge quantities of stress trying to find introductory material on obscure philosophical topics like Meinong's ontology (don't ask) without using Wikipedia.
The problem is one of finding starting points. It's easy to look at something like the field of e-self-publishing, even limited to a genre such as speculative fiction, and think 'wow, how the hell do I find anything out at all?' The scale of activity in indie publishing these days is staggering, and set to continue growing. So, here, based on my experience as a research student in the similarly overwhelming field of abstract metaphysics, is a research strategy. You'll be able to judge the strategy, I hope, by the results it produces for me over the coming week or so.
Step 1: Refine your question.
You can't find answers to a question you don't know. What I have to figure out is what I need to know information about. In my case, I'm trying to prove that self-publishing is a viable option for a new author. I'm trying to prove that self-publishing can be used to supplement an income to an extent that justifies time and effort spent.
So, I'm looking for authors doing just that. Specifically, I'm looking for authors who are writing the same kind of stuff I'm writing, who are self-publishing online. I'm looking at a comparison of number of authors making money against total number of authors trying to make money, and at how much money is being made. I need to be able identify the authors whose work is selling well, and detailed information on their sales and (hopefully) their income from same. I also need some general statistics about the size of this slice of the industry.
Step 2: Go where the answers are.
It's impossible for a new author to be everywhere and to get their name everywhere. The chances of running into any kind of promotional material for a new speculative fiction writer just by clicking through the websites I normally visit (mainly webcomics and Web 2.0 stuff linked on Twitter) are pretty small. On the other hand, every new author knows that the Kindle boards are a great place to promote your work - because the shop selling it is two mouse-clicks away. There are (or at least I hope there are) still large online communities where people discuss science fiction and speculative fiction which are an obvious home for sci-fi novelists to try to accumulate sales.
This is where the point about Wikipedia comes in. It's easy to think that these sources will be unfiltered and unpoliced - which is the (snobbish and misguided) motivation behind the complaints teachers are always making about Wiki. To a certain extent, it's true that the actual text that will appear on your screen is unpoliced, but that's what God (or Darwin, your choice) gave you a brain for. In a quick skim down a single thread on the Kindle boards just now, I was quickly able to discard half the posts by the quality of the promotional writing - whether the actual book being promoted is any good or not, no-one's going to sell books with marketing copy that looks like a poorly-punctuated amateur plot synopsis.
Step 3: Follow the answers where they lead.
If I had been doing something other than a quick skim, my next step (the 'provided you don't end at Wiki' step) would have been to click the links the remaining posters were helpful enough to provide - to look at the reviews they wanted me to read, and probably to find links to the ones they didn't want me to read. I'd also look up the author on Wiki, to see if they were successful enough to rate a mention (if nothing else, Wiki is a great barometer of significance-to-someone-somewhere). Lastly, I'd look at the author's own blog and Twitter feed, and do a simple Google on their name - possibly with the book title if it's a fairly common name.
The overall point, then, is that you have to start from the unfiltered, aggregator-type sources with research, because these are the only places where the information you want all gets indexed in one place. The aggregator then gives you links to more information on the particular entry you've just looked up (an index or phone directory isn't a bad analogy for this way of using Wiki or the Kindle boards), which in turn gives you a path or set of paths to follow. Provided you take decent notes along the way - and yes, note-taking is ESSENTIAL - you end up with exactly the information you're after.
I hope I'll have time to start arriving at some results tomorrow, though it may have to wait until Thursday before I have anything more than a list of names and titles. This strategy has proven sound not just for my PhD, though, but also for my Distinction-earning MA thesis, so I'm fairly confident, and I highly recommend going about your market research this way if you're struggling.
Monday, 4 April 2011
Speculations on Genre (ha ha)
As I said yesterday, I'm spending this week doing research for a 'common sense test' of my self-publishing plans. Of course, I don't have much more than the current half-hour free today to do anything on this front, which rather prevents me coming up with anything substantial.
So, I thought I'd cover one area I need to sort out in order to do effective research which I haven't really confronted yet, which is figuring out what genre I'm writing in - how am I going to position my books, and what will they therefore be competing with. I have a few different labels to play around with. I like the idea of branding my work as 'conceptual fiction' (that is, fiction whose main interest is investigating some particular concept or other), but I don't think that's a label in widespread use, so there's no guaranteeing anyone would understand what it means.
'Philosophical fiction', another label which is entirely semantically appropriate, is wrong for different reasons; primarily because I'd imagine that when most people think of 'philosophical fiction', they think specifically of Sartre's 'Nausea', or possibly something by Camus. That's a far cry from the sort of novels I'm writing, though my intention in writing it is, I think, similar to the intention by which Sartre wrote 'Nausea'.
Initially, I was considering branding myself a 'hard sci-fi' author, and stressing that the 'hard' part was more philosophical/metaphysical than laboratory-scientific. I'd be aligning myself with the likes of Isaac Asimov (particularly the Robot stories) as against someone like Greg Egan. However, I think 'hard sci-fi' is more closely associated with the Greg Egan end of the spectrum these days; much more novels which you have to understand a lot of physics to get to grips with the story.
Of course, that means it would now be a little bit misleading to call 'I, Robot' hard sci-fi. A more common label, I'd guess, would be 'speculative fiction', which I think is the best label I'm going to be able to come up with. The compass of speculative fiction includes Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Ursula LeGuin (I'm reading 'The Left Hand of Darkness' at the moment, with growing fascination), and while I don't quite have the arrogance to put myself on their level, I think I'm doing, or trying to do, the same sorts of things.
I'll expand a bit what I mean. 'The Death of John Collins', as I've said, grew out of a piece of MA coursework on the nature of time. I started with physicist Itzhak Bars' theory of two-dimensional time and looked at how the linearity (one-dimensionality) of time as we experience it could arise in that context. Then I came up with a story which explored that vision of the world. In the novel, the story comes first, but I tried to systematically realise the logical consequences, from a human as well as a metaphysical standpoint, of this theory of time.
'Bad Romance' is also in a sense speculative - what it speculates on is just how far you can go with pretending to be someone you aren't in public (particularly in the media and online) without actually creating a person. It pushes the classic speculative fiction question of identity and draws much of what is distinctive about its story out of these two areas. Most importantly, while the story (which, again, is king) is a romance, I tried to write a book of speculative fiction whose story is a romance, rather than a romance which speculates on public life; I tried to write in a style which reflects the history of speculative fiction and my history as a reader of it (I've certainly never been an avid reader of romances). I don't think 'Bad Romance' would sit any more easily on a 'romance' bookshelf than on a 'speculative fiction' one.
I've always quite liked the old label sometimes applied to Ayn Rand's novels, the 'novel of ideas'. In a sense, it's a much broader label than those I've considered here, but it's also possibly the most appropriate, partly because it's so broad. Equally, it's clumsy to use in marketing language and a little bit anachronistic, so I think I'll stick with 'speculative fiction' for now.
So, I thought I'd cover one area I need to sort out in order to do effective research which I haven't really confronted yet, which is figuring out what genre I'm writing in - how am I going to position my books, and what will they therefore be competing with. I have a few different labels to play around with. I like the idea of branding my work as 'conceptual fiction' (that is, fiction whose main interest is investigating some particular concept or other), but I don't think that's a label in widespread use, so there's no guaranteeing anyone would understand what it means.
'Philosophical fiction', another label which is entirely semantically appropriate, is wrong for different reasons; primarily because I'd imagine that when most people think of 'philosophical fiction', they think specifically of Sartre's 'Nausea', or possibly something by Camus. That's a far cry from the sort of novels I'm writing, though my intention in writing it is, I think, similar to the intention by which Sartre wrote 'Nausea'.
Initially, I was considering branding myself a 'hard sci-fi' author, and stressing that the 'hard' part was more philosophical/metaphysical than laboratory-scientific. I'd be aligning myself with the likes of Isaac Asimov (particularly the Robot stories) as against someone like Greg Egan. However, I think 'hard sci-fi' is more closely associated with the Greg Egan end of the spectrum these days; much more novels which you have to understand a lot of physics to get to grips with the story.
Of course, that means it would now be a little bit misleading to call 'I, Robot' hard sci-fi. A more common label, I'd guess, would be 'speculative fiction', which I think is the best label I'm going to be able to come up with. The compass of speculative fiction includes Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Ursula LeGuin (I'm reading 'The Left Hand of Darkness' at the moment, with growing fascination), and while I don't quite have the arrogance to put myself on their level, I think I'm doing, or trying to do, the same sorts of things.
I'll expand a bit what I mean. 'The Death of John Collins', as I've said, grew out of a piece of MA coursework on the nature of time. I started with physicist Itzhak Bars' theory of two-dimensional time and looked at how the linearity (one-dimensionality) of time as we experience it could arise in that context. Then I came up with a story which explored that vision of the world. In the novel, the story comes first, but I tried to systematically realise the logical consequences, from a human as well as a metaphysical standpoint, of this theory of time.
'Bad Romance' is also in a sense speculative - what it speculates on is just how far you can go with pretending to be someone you aren't in public (particularly in the media and online) without actually creating a person. It pushes the classic speculative fiction question of identity and draws much of what is distinctive about its story out of these two areas. Most importantly, while the story (which, again, is king) is a romance, I tried to write a book of speculative fiction whose story is a romance, rather than a romance which speculates on public life; I tried to write in a style which reflects the history of speculative fiction and my history as a reader of it (I've certainly never been an avid reader of romances). I don't think 'Bad Romance' would sit any more easily on a 'romance' bookshelf than on a 'speculative fiction' one.
I've always quite liked the old label sometimes applied to Ayn Rand's novels, the 'novel of ideas'. In a sense, it's a much broader label than those I've considered here, but it's also possibly the most appropriate, partly because it's so broad. Equally, it's clumsy to use in marketing language and a little bit anachronistic, so I think I'll stick with 'speculative fiction' for now.
Sunday, 3 April 2011
The common sense test
A week tomorrow, I'm going home to visit my parents for a few days. I haven't quite told them yet of my plans to self-publish. Being avid dead-tree-lovers, I suspect they'll be slightly hostile to the idea. I think they'd be horrified if they realised how much work I was intending putting into it.
However, my father is the best purveyor of common sense I know, so I'm going to sit down with him for an hour or two while I'm at home, discuss my plans with him in detail and see if he thinks they make sense. If the plans pass this test, I'll feel comfortable putting in the time, effort and, particularly, money to make my books sell.
Of course, that means I need detailed plans. I need a detailed, evidence-based case for self-publishing, based on sales figures for authors in my bracket and genre, and I need to know what the ones who have succeeded have done to generate that success. And I have just a week to find out.
So, obviously, if you know any relatively new speculative fiction writers successfully self-publishing online, please let me know. Also, if you know any good resources for aggregated statistics on ebook sales (particularly if you can get a breakdown by genre), I'd appreciate it.
What other sorts of things will I be looking at? Well, among other things, I need to do some costing. I've got a total budget, if the plans get the go-ahead, of about £800. I need to get two novels ready for sale, which means I need a(t least one) full edit on both, plus market research - which I should be able to do almost for free, because it's the future, stupid - and cover design and artwork. I've seen some places advertising cover art as low as around $250 (about £155), but I think I've got some shopping-around to do.
I also need to learn my way around formatting for ebook release, though with such short books, plus a fair deal of coding and HTML experience, I'm expecting to be able to do this myself, provided I leave myself enough time to get it done.
The last thing that I need to be able to outline a plan for is networking, and I'll happily admit I'm bad at this. I'm bad enough at being sociable, face-to-face, with people I know and like, never mind people I don't like who might be in another country.
Anyway, I'll be dedicating the coming week to some basic research on these points, and I'll share my findings as and when I have any. I don't know what I'll be able to manage tomorrow, as I'm not sure I'll have a single moment to myself - work all morning, then a philosophy colloquium in the afternoon, and I'm going straight from that to a gig my band are playing at. I'll probably get home around midnight. A long lunch-break is my only chance to get anything done. Wish me luck!
However, my father is the best purveyor of common sense I know, so I'm going to sit down with him for an hour or two while I'm at home, discuss my plans with him in detail and see if he thinks they make sense. If the plans pass this test, I'll feel comfortable putting in the time, effort and, particularly, money to make my books sell.
Of course, that means I need detailed plans. I need a detailed, evidence-based case for self-publishing, based on sales figures for authors in my bracket and genre, and I need to know what the ones who have succeeded have done to generate that success. And I have just a week to find out.
So, obviously, if you know any relatively new speculative fiction writers successfully self-publishing online, please let me know. Also, if you know any good resources for aggregated statistics on ebook sales (particularly if you can get a breakdown by genre), I'd appreciate it.
What other sorts of things will I be looking at? Well, among other things, I need to do some costing. I've got a total budget, if the plans get the go-ahead, of about £800. I need to get two novels ready for sale, which means I need a(t least one) full edit on both, plus market research - which I should be able to do almost for free, because it's the future, stupid - and cover design and artwork. I've seen some places advertising cover art as low as around $250 (about £155), but I think I've got some shopping-around to do.
I also need to learn my way around formatting for ebook release, though with such short books, plus a fair deal of coding and HTML experience, I'm expecting to be able to do this myself, provided I leave myself enough time to get it done.
The last thing that I need to be able to outline a plan for is networking, and I'll happily admit I'm bad at this. I'm bad enough at being sociable, face-to-face, with people I know and like, never mind people I don't like who might be in another country.
Anyway, I'll be dedicating the coming week to some basic research on these points, and I'll share my findings as and when I have any. I don't know what I'll be able to manage tomorrow, as I'm not sure I'll have a single moment to myself - work all morning, then a philosophy colloquium in the afternoon, and I'm going straight from that to a gig my band are playing at. I'll probably get home around midnight. A long lunch-break is my only chance to get anything done. Wish me luck!
Saturday, 2 April 2011
If you would hit the mark...
...you must aim a little above it. - Longfellow (thanks, Twitter!)
I am tempted to declare the above my motto (yes, I'm still not doing a proper blog about Script Frenzy - I'll get to it, I promise). I'm a very ambitious person. It's the natural combination, I feel, of imagination and optimism, and I have both in spades.
I want to talk a bit about my ambitions. Not so much my career ambitions - I want to make a comfortable living off my writing, and that's about it, really (of course, I'm *aiming* to make millions... ;D). I want to talk about my ambitions to write.
I'm in the bad habit of planning lengthy series of novels. I seldom start a single-story project without having it sprout sequels, spin-offs and other ideas. 'The Death of John Collins' started life as a short story, and I'll be lucky to keep it down to a trilogy. 'Bad Romance' started life as a standalone novel, and ended up getting absorbed - along with a lot of other standalone novels - into a truly epic sequence whose completion has become one of my main goals.
I used to deliberately try to write long sequences, because I thought that a longer story would automatically be more complex and therefore more rewarding. That's very much putting the cart before the horse. Once I got things straightened out, I've found I can't stop coming up with sequels and expanding series.
It isn't - or at least, I hope it isn't - the kind of syndrome which has been plaguing Hollywood for a while now. The film industry is churning out needless, bland sequels all the time these days, because a sequel is safe. I add to sequences and stories, when I do, for one of two reasons; either because I believe a character deserves more time in the sun, or because I believe the books that already exist (in my head) require or mandate a book about something else.
It's the latter case which affects the 'Bad Romance' sequence, more than the former. 'Bad Romance' is book 1 of 'Man and God', a sequence of which I've currently laid out 21 books (with the overall story still basically lacking a third act). Now, I'm expecting most if not all of those books to be in the 60-80,000-word range, so we're still not in 'Wheel of Time' territory by a long chalk, but it's still a long sequence.
Why write a sequence that long? There's only one good reason; I want to write those books. Most of the first part (books 1-10) consists of books which more or less stand alone, but just happen to happen in the same world. They describe distinct, separate key events in the collapse of modern society and the birth of its replacement. By the time I realised they fit together in this fashion, seven of the books were already on my 'I'd like to write a book about that' list (Bad Romance wasn't one of them).
I probably wouldn't be trying to market Man and God as a series if I was attempting to break into conventional publishing. Fortunately, I'm not, so I can talk about the series and its ethos now. Part 1 of Man and God is a collection of books which explore philosophical and sociological areas which fascinate me (tribalism, myth, economics, faith and hope, among others). The demise of modern civilisation happens to make a good backdrop; I wanted to write the books, I discovered that putting them together would help each book, provided I added a few to the mix, which I discovered I also wanted to write.
My ambition, in all these cases, is to write such-and-such a book, not to write a 20- or 30-book sequence which happens to involve writing a few particular books.
I suppose the other point to make is that all I'm talking about is ambition to write the books. I'll put them all on sale, though I'm not necessarily expecting them all to sell equally. And nothing stops me writing them - that's the great thing about writing; I can write whatever I want, and if a certain book doesn't make any money, that's just an excuse to write another book and see if that one does.
Maybe I won't ever finish 'Man and God'. Maybe I won't even finish the Collins trilogy. But that's where my ambitions lie right now, so here goes...
I am tempted to declare the above my motto (yes, I'm still not doing a proper blog about Script Frenzy - I'll get to it, I promise). I'm a very ambitious person. It's the natural combination, I feel, of imagination and optimism, and I have both in spades.
I want to talk a bit about my ambitions. Not so much my career ambitions - I want to make a comfortable living off my writing, and that's about it, really (of course, I'm *aiming* to make millions... ;D). I want to talk about my ambitions to write.
I'm in the bad habit of planning lengthy series of novels. I seldom start a single-story project without having it sprout sequels, spin-offs and other ideas. 'The Death of John Collins' started life as a short story, and I'll be lucky to keep it down to a trilogy. 'Bad Romance' started life as a standalone novel, and ended up getting absorbed - along with a lot of other standalone novels - into a truly epic sequence whose completion has become one of my main goals.
I used to deliberately try to write long sequences, because I thought that a longer story would automatically be more complex and therefore more rewarding. That's very much putting the cart before the horse. Once I got things straightened out, I've found I can't stop coming up with sequels and expanding series.
It isn't - or at least, I hope it isn't - the kind of syndrome which has been plaguing Hollywood for a while now. The film industry is churning out needless, bland sequels all the time these days, because a sequel is safe. I add to sequences and stories, when I do, for one of two reasons; either because I believe a character deserves more time in the sun, or because I believe the books that already exist (in my head) require or mandate a book about something else.
It's the latter case which affects the 'Bad Romance' sequence, more than the former. 'Bad Romance' is book 1 of 'Man and God', a sequence of which I've currently laid out 21 books (with the overall story still basically lacking a third act). Now, I'm expecting most if not all of those books to be in the 60-80,000-word range, so we're still not in 'Wheel of Time' territory by a long chalk, but it's still a long sequence.
Why write a sequence that long? There's only one good reason; I want to write those books. Most of the first part (books 1-10) consists of books which more or less stand alone, but just happen to happen in the same world. They describe distinct, separate key events in the collapse of modern society and the birth of its replacement. By the time I realised they fit together in this fashion, seven of the books were already on my 'I'd like to write a book about that' list (Bad Romance wasn't one of them).
I probably wouldn't be trying to market Man and God as a series if I was attempting to break into conventional publishing. Fortunately, I'm not, so I can talk about the series and its ethos now. Part 1 of Man and God is a collection of books which explore philosophical and sociological areas which fascinate me (tribalism, myth, economics, faith and hope, among others). The demise of modern civilisation happens to make a good backdrop; I wanted to write the books, I discovered that putting them together would help each book, provided I added a few to the mix, which I discovered I also wanted to write.
My ambition, in all these cases, is to write such-and-such a book, not to write a 20- or 30-book sequence which happens to involve writing a few particular books.
I suppose the other point to make is that all I'm talking about is ambition to write the books. I'll put them all on sale, though I'm not necessarily expecting them all to sell equally. And nothing stops me writing them - that's the great thing about writing; I can write whatever I want, and if a certain book doesn't make any money, that's just an excuse to write another book and see if that one does.
Maybe I won't ever finish 'Man and God'. Maybe I won't even finish the Collins trilogy. But that's where my ambitions lie right now, so here goes...
Friday, 1 April 2011
Right, Script Frenzy's underway...
So naturally, I'm talking about my writing influences. Wait, what?
Well, I'm spending my Screnzy trying to get the webcomic back on-track with some proper scripting, so it's probably not going to afford much to talk about from the perspective of my novels (though I do highly recommend trying your hand at screenwriting if you want to write novels professionally - and hey, Screnzy is much easier than NaNo).
I'm talking about my influences out of nothing more than indulgence, really. Partly because I want to recommend some great books you may not have heard of, but also as something of a break from all the serious work I know I'll need to do to meet my targets for the next nineteen months. Maybe it will also shed some light on where I'm coming from - and therefore where I'm going.
If we're talking influences, I have to start from 'Hyperion' by Dan Simmons. 'Hyperion' is an amazing book - probably not the best in terms of technical writing, but staggering in its richness and depth. In particular, it's the only space opera I've ever read which has delivered enough diversity of human culture to convince me that it's a vision of *our* future. Most of the sci-fi I've read has limited itself to at most a half-dozen distinct human cultures, with the suggestion that cultural diversity will die off with technological progress, and I don't buy it at all. In Hyperion and its sequels, there are hundreds of cultures - and better yet, you can sort of trace how certain strands of modern culture might develop into the cultures it features. The three sequels improve on the formula in various ways - books 2 and 4 are in constant competition for the title of 'my favourite book'.
Another epic sequence I love is Janny Wurts' 'Wars of Light and Shadow' (actually, I've never read a Janny Wurts book I didn't love). The quality here comes from the construction of brilliant characters, particularly the hero, Arithon. Arithon is defined by compassion and foresight - and Wurts shows with piercing, painful clarity time and time again how these virtues can be crippling. I'm not sure any other book has managed to make me share so much of a character's suffering - and eventual catharsis.
Quite apart from fiction, though, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about my philosophical influences. This isn't just because I am a philosopher and philosophy has been my primary activity for the last five and a half years, but because my philosophy is a way of life, and is a way of life which is reflected in and advocated by my novels; each of those novels explores a little piece of my philosophy, and if you put them all together, the whole picture should become clear.
My biggest philosophical influence remains Sartre, particularly his 'Existentialism and Humanism', the first philosophy book I read. E&H isn't always coherent, possibly suffers in translation, and isn't very long, but it sets out a vision of mankind which has always resonated with me. I'm not going to go into great detail about that vision now - over the next few months, there will plenty of time for that while I explore the philosophy of Ayn Rand (which has eerie parallels to Sartre's system, mad as that may sound) in preparation for writing 'The Earth Trembles' - but I want to bring out some fundamental points.
Firstly, free will. The philosophical debate over whether or not we 'have' free will is one of the most clouded, difficult areas of philosophical discourse. I've come to the conclusion over the years that we have something similar enough to the traditional conception of free will to serve the same moral purpose - that is, making us responsible for our actions. This is an essential (ha ha - philosophical joke) part of Sartre's existentialist philosophy. Whatever you do, and however it works out, you did it and it is a part of you.
For Sartre, the foremost virtue - in some senses the only virtue - is authenticity, by which is meant never trying to be something, but instead always being yourself. You should not pick a target (for example, 'I will be a writer') and then make your decisions based on what you think a writer would do; you should do the things that you believe it is right for you to do, and if you end up writing, only then call yourself a writer. So, I am a writer, because I have written - not because that is what I have successfully tried to become. It's a subtle point, but the import will become evident when I go into the system in more detail.
The last important concept I want to take from existentialism at this point is the existential idea of universalisability. This says - and I'm not sure it's ever explicit in Sartre's writing, but it's unavoidable if you look closely - that every time you do something, you in effect declare it permissible for anyone else in those circumstances to do the same thing. You don't get to count yourself as a 'special case' of mankind - in every situation you find yourself in, you represent the whole species and must behave accordingly.
Maybe none of this makes any sense. If it doesn't, I'm probably not explaining it very well. I am, after all, 12% of the way through a challenge to write a screenplay in a month (again, DO SCRIPT FRENZY), so I've an excuse to be distracted. Also, it's been a long week. Bear with me, I'll explain in more detail - and with more attempt at persuasion - in the not-too-distant future. Tomorrow, more writerly-type stuff.
Well, I'm spending my Screnzy trying to get the webcomic back on-track with some proper scripting, so it's probably not going to afford much to talk about from the perspective of my novels (though I do highly recommend trying your hand at screenwriting if you want to write novels professionally - and hey, Screnzy is much easier than NaNo).
I'm talking about my influences out of nothing more than indulgence, really. Partly because I want to recommend some great books you may not have heard of, but also as something of a break from all the serious work I know I'll need to do to meet my targets for the next nineteen months. Maybe it will also shed some light on where I'm coming from - and therefore where I'm going.
If we're talking influences, I have to start from 'Hyperion' by Dan Simmons. 'Hyperion' is an amazing book - probably not the best in terms of technical writing, but staggering in its richness and depth. In particular, it's the only space opera I've ever read which has delivered enough diversity of human culture to convince me that it's a vision of *our* future. Most of the sci-fi I've read has limited itself to at most a half-dozen distinct human cultures, with the suggestion that cultural diversity will die off with technological progress, and I don't buy it at all. In Hyperion and its sequels, there are hundreds of cultures - and better yet, you can sort of trace how certain strands of modern culture might develop into the cultures it features. The three sequels improve on the formula in various ways - books 2 and 4 are in constant competition for the title of 'my favourite book'.
Another epic sequence I love is Janny Wurts' 'Wars of Light and Shadow' (actually, I've never read a Janny Wurts book I didn't love). The quality here comes from the construction of brilliant characters, particularly the hero, Arithon. Arithon is defined by compassion and foresight - and Wurts shows with piercing, painful clarity time and time again how these virtues can be crippling. I'm not sure any other book has managed to make me share so much of a character's suffering - and eventual catharsis.
Quite apart from fiction, though, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about my philosophical influences. This isn't just because I am a philosopher and philosophy has been my primary activity for the last five and a half years, but because my philosophy is a way of life, and is a way of life which is reflected in and advocated by my novels; each of those novels explores a little piece of my philosophy, and if you put them all together, the whole picture should become clear.
My biggest philosophical influence remains Sartre, particularly his 'Existentialism and Humanism', the first philosophy book I read. E&H isn't always coherent, possibly suffers in translation, and isn't very long, but it sets out a vision of mankind which has always resonated with me. I'm not going to go into great detail about that vision now - over the next few months, there will plenty of time for that while I explore the philosophy of Ayn Rand (which has eerie parallels to Sartre's system, mad as that may sound) in preparation for writing 'The Earth Trembles' - but I want to bring out some fundamental points.
Firstly, free will. The philosophical debate over whether or not we 'have' free will is one of the most clouded, difficult areas of philosophical discourse. I've come to the conclusion over the years that we have something similar enough to the traditional conception of free will to serve the same moral purpose - that is, making us responsible for our actions. This is an essential (ha ha - philosophical joke) part of Sartre's existentialist philosophy. Whatever you do, and however it works out, you did it and it is a part of you.
For Sartre, the foremost virtue - in some senses the only virtue - is authenticity, by which is meant never trying to be something, but instead always being yourself. You should not pick a target (for example, 'I will be a writer') and then make your decisions based on what you think a writer would do; you should do the things that you believe it is right for you to do, and if you end up writing, only then call yourself a writer. So, I am a writer, because I have written - not because that is what I have successfully tried to become. It's a subtle point, but the import will become evident when I go into the system in more detail.
The last important concept I want to take from existentialism at this point is the existential idea of universalisability. This says - and I'm not sure it's ever explicit in Sartre's writing, but it's unavoidable if you look closely - that every time you do something, you in effect declare it permissible for anyone else in those circumstances to do the same thing. You don't get to count yourself as a 'special case' of mankind - in every situation you find yourself in, you represent the whole species and must behave accordingly.
Maybe none of this makes any sense. If it doesn't, I'm probably not explaining it very well. I am, after all, 12% of the way through a challenge to write a screenplay in a month (again, DO SCRIPT FRENZY), so I've an excuse to be distracted. Also, it's been a long week. Bear with me, I'll explain in more detail - and with more attempt at persuasion - in the not-too-distant future. Tomorrow, more writerly-type stuff.
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