"Make a Living with Fiction" Panel at Radcon

I've been to panels with similar titles before, and they all focused on writing query letters, getting an agent, how to meet publishers at cons, and so on.  This year was quite different.  Three published and even best-selling authors (Patricia Briggs, Mike Moscoe aka Mike Shephard, and S. Andrew Swann) spent the hour discussing the uncertain publishing market, whether you should self-publish ebooks, and how to self-promote whether indie or traditionally published. 

According to Mike Moscoe, if anyone tells you they know where the industry is going to be in 2 years, don't believe them.  No one knows.  I noticed this general theme at the Villains panel, where noted and famed authors like CJ Cherryh discussed their recent move to self-publish print on demand and ebooks.

For now, it's best to just guess.  Place your bets folks, because it's going to be an interesting ride.

For the most part, this panel was, for me, a validation that I have a good head on my shoulders and have been making decent decisions so far.  Being successful in this business, in the end, comes down to luck, but luck will do you no good (or even harm you) if you're not covering a few bases.

The biggest message was: Write well.  Now that the market is the slush pile, the stakes are even higher when it's time to market.  While it's always been true that even the best writers will benefit by writing more, now new writers may not have the benefit of an editor to guide them through this early phase.  Your goal is to get through this phase without damaging your reputation too badly.  You might be able to get someone to read your 1st or 2nd book with lots of promotional efforts, but if that book sucks, then it will be impossible to get them to read your 5th or 15th book, which will inevitably be much better.

Most of all, if your work actually does suck (and isn't at least pretty good), you really shouldn't publish it.  I put that in bold because I don't think anyone wants the indie market to be a giant slush pile.  Wait until you've written out all of your sub-par words, file them away, and only publish the good stuff.

Since I've already stored all my crappy writing in a cool, dark place, I concluded that I should market appropriately to the quality of my work.  I happen to think my work right now is "pretty good", and is getting better, and eventually will be excellent.  If I market When Prey Hunts and Make Willing the Prey as if they were excellent, then no one will buy my actually excellent work 5 years from now.

People get a general feeling for just how excellent your work is by the quality of the marketing materials, how often your ads or fliers pop up, how often they see you interviewed in blogs, and so on... Anyone who took my laser-printed bookmark with the hand-threaded ribbon at Radcon probably knows that the free ebook "Four Fae" and Kindle novella "Make Willing the Prey" are probably "pretty good", so they can't be disappointed.  Later, when I'm Super Awesome, then I can ramp up the full color printing and fancy artwork and blog tours and so on.

At least, I think that's what they were saying. :)

Speaking of bookmarks at Radcon, yeah.  I probably distributed about 100-125 free bookmarks at Radcon.  And according to Mike Moscoe, that's the best thing I could have done.

He's spent years trying every possibly marketing gimmick.  He confided that he over-marketed given the quality of his early work.  Which is one reason he publishes his newest work under a pseudonym.  He learned the three most effective techniques for promotion of fiction:

1. Go to cons.
2. Give away bookmarks.
3. Print a good bio and an email address on the books you sell.

That's it.  Which made me feel very pleased that I was already doing the first two. :)

Another piece of advice, which I am already trying to do, is to market yourself over your books.  Sell a brand, not a title.  This is why I spent so much prep before Radcon coming up with a "brand" for the universe of my fae stories and books.  It took two days of concentrated effort, plus the help of friends and family, to settle on "Dreams by Streetlight".  Now when ever I promote any story in that world, I am promoting every other story in that world.  And myself as an author.  So that 10 years from now, when I'm actually writing excellent books, my name is what people will remember, not the title of my first two or three books which will (relatively) suck.

Thanks to Patricia Briggs, Mike Moscoe, and S. Andrew Swann who spoke on this panel, for their openness in sharing their wisdom to those of us just beginning.

What I Leaned from Radcon 5c

What a great Radcon this year! I think cons are often what you make of them, and this year I was assisted at the task of "having a good time" by my wonderful fiance.  I also think my experience of cons is enhanced when I'm attending with my writer's goggles on.  Not literally.

Not only that, but the Friday batch of Toxic Waste® at the Official Radcon Room Party® tasted mighty fine.  I heard they found a new source for depleted U-238, so I'm sure that had something to do with it.*

In addition to the parties, admiring the costumes, meeting new people, saying hi to old friends, and absorbing the general vibe, I attended a few panels.  I tend to forget how interesting they can be.

Monster Hunting kept devolving into Zombie Apocalypse Escape Planning, but I learned a few great tips for hunting monsters.  For starters, I they discussed some of the things I've already considered for my faerie hunters in When Prey Hunts.  Like how does your hunter make a living?  Those weapons cost a lot of money, after all.  And what do you do with the bodies?  How do you dodge modern-day law enforcement, when they're not likely to believe you've imprisoned, injured, robbed, or killed this guy because he's a vampire, werewolf, zombie, or faerie.

They also discussed the use of dogs or other animals to help counter-balance the monster's supernatural senses.  If you're hunting through the woods, horses make great pack animals and can sense an approaching monster, especially if trained.  You should plan to bring a lot of people -- one to pursue and track, one to ambush, and a reserve group to deploy as needed.  They also pointed out that when fighting groups, deplete your enemies resources by shooting to wound, not kill.

There was a lot of interesting discussion on the Build a Better Villain panel.  But not much I haven't already heard or thought about myself, so I didn't take notes.

The Neuroscience panel was education and interesting.  The physics student in me loved hearing about how an fMRI works.  A magnetic field lines up the spin of the atoms in your brain, and then turns off.  When the atoms snap back to their previous random positions, they release energy.  Doing this, they can tell how much oxygen is in your blood in various places.  Based on the assumption that active areas of the brain are using oxygen, they can take a moving image of those active areas while asking you questions or having you perform various activities.

I'm a big fan of fMRI studies in the news, and always find the results fascinating.  So I loved seeing the union between two of my favorite fields, physics and psychology.

Contrary to popular belief, the processing areas of the brain for specific tasks are not limited to one location.  For example, a simple version of the task may be in one spot, when when the same type of task becomes more complex, that area will call upon various backup areas to process sub-tasks.

Less efficient readers process in their frontal brain, while efficient readers process words in the back. 

By far the best panel I attended was "Make a Living by Writing".  I learned enough there that it deserves its own post.

As always, Radcon proved to be the best con in its class (general sci-fi fantasy with slight focus on tabletop games and fiction).  If you live in the Pacific Northwest, consider driving a couple of hours to the middle of nowhere next February to attend Radcon 6!

* Just kidding about the Uranium! It's bad for you, kids!

Links of the Week

Every week I post a lot of fun and interesting links in Twitter.  Last week was no exception.  Here is an aggregate of some of my favorites.

Writing & Fiction

I'm pretty excited about a new book called "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One".  Here's an except.  In the spirit of this, the author has listed a few of his favorite sentences here: Stanley Fish's Favorite Sentences (and Mine, too)

I posted a few of my own favorite sentences, from a series I'm currently reading, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.

And while we're on that, Strunk and White vs. Stanley Fish at the Boston Globe.

I learned a new way of spelling "teh internet", "t'internet" from this blog post, Why Being an Indie Author is More Difficult Than It Sounds.

There's a documentary on H.P. Lovecraft, called Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown.  I love biographies of the old-school sci-fi and horror writers.  So inspiring and nostalgic.

I listened to an awesome short story called Schrodinger's Cat Lady on the Escape Pod podcast.  What a fun story!

Here's a blog post about publishing and piracy called, Writing on the High Seas.

Science

Carl Sagan's old Cosmos series is up on Google Video for free viewing.  I watched all of these last year, and they are very worth it.  He cannot disguise his passion for science.  The retro charm of this show only lends enjoyment, and most of the science is still accurate.  Here is Episode 1.

Speaking of Carl Sagan, here is the much-shorter excerpt, A Pale Blue Dot.  If you don't have time for 13 episodes of Cosmos, this one is less than four minutes.

The Kármán vortex street caught my interest.  What beautiful fractals in the clouds. 

I also discovered the beautiful Faroe Islands up north of Ireland and west of Norway.  The tradition of growing grass on their roofs came from the Vikings, who would build houses by tipping their ships upside down and growing turf on top.

And I found a huge source of free documentaries at Top Documentary Films.

There's a short TED Talk called How to Start a Movement, about the science of leadership.

Entertainment

Best superb owl commercial of the week?  Watch this Volkswagen Commercial featuring Darth Vader.

Leavenworth, WA has started a new marketing campaign, featuring Woody the Nutcracker in a new rap video.

News

An Iowa Eagle Scout testifies to the Iowa House of Representatives in favor of gay marriage.  You see, he was reared by two mothers.  His story is touching.

Speaking of touching, here's a video about the protests in Egypt.

In a story from Russia fit for a cyberpunk novel, a suicide bomber blew up prematurely when she received a spam text.