Behind the SCENES: Collaboration

Keri and I began our writing partnership 14 years ago. I clearly remember fellow authors warning us of the hazards: you'll ruin your friendship, you'll never be able to agree on rewrites, you will clash over the propriety of your intellectual property. Sure, those things can happen and perhaps they often do, but luckily for us, we've never spent a single moment regretting our decision.

To the contrary, it seems that with each new project we gain more enjoyment in our ability to hone the style we've created together. She leans toward horror and fantasy while my bent is more mainstream and quirky humor, but in concert, and with a similar eye to description and ear to voice, we've found that the variations can mesh beautifully, even artfully.

I believe we have taught each other many things about writing, about process, and I know that our collaboration has improved us both, vastly. Put simply, it's great to have that sense of your own accomplishments and it's even better when you have someone with whom to share your excitement.

I look forward to watching our "family" of books step out onto the stage of publication. They're good kids, and we've shepherded them along with every ounce of care and talent at our disposal. It's time to let go--they are ready.

If we are fortunate enough to have your readership, I hope you'll get a sense, as you read along, of the egoless teamwork that we employed then enjoyed as we worked. Back in those first couple of years, people actually came up to us in the cafe where we chose to do our writing to tell us how much we had entertained them as they sat and ate their lunch. We didn't intend that and for a while weren't even aware of it, but as time wore on we came to embrace not only the work, but the comedy relief we were accidentally providing.

When I was a kid, I remember watching the old Dick Van Dyke Show and thinking, "That's it! I want to be a TV comedy writer like Sally and Mort." I wanted to know what it was like to sit around that table and come up with the gags that would crack people up week after week. It was my most earnest wish to be a part of that kind of team.

Now that I look back on how we started, what we're about to launch into, and where we envision going, I think I got that wish.

Bonus Content: Lagniappe Marketing

Down here in New Orleans, "lagniappe" means "a little something extra." I've been following a lot of interesting conversations recently on blogs, email groups, and forums about adding bonus content to your self-published books and stories.

For me, if I have a choice between a box of cereal and a box of cereal with a premium inside, I'll always pick the premium. I'll send in boxtops to get the decoder ring. People love getting something extra, they love being engaged.

Self-publishing gives you myriad ways to engage the reader through bonus content. There are so many possibilities: previews of other books, interviews, anecdotes, background about characters or setting, links to resources. Say you're writing a historical mystery. What better way to give the reader a little something extra than linking to resources about the era or the subject matter, a Flickr stream of photos, a list of other books they might enjoy?  How about an interview with your protagonist? How about an anecdote about your first flash of inspiration for the plot or the character? A scene that you cut, not because it was bad, but because it didn't quite fit with your pacing?

If you want to get really wild, you can go interactive: an Internet scavenger hunt, a treasure map, a contest. If you're clever and involved, the sky is really the limit.

How many times have you enjoyed a book and at the end wished it wasn't over or wanted to know what happened to a character or wanted to just keep that little bit of magic going?  How many times did you want to tell somebody else about the great book you just read or leave a note to the author?  You can provide that opportunity to your readers with every book or story you put out.

Bonus content serves three purposes: it engages your reader, it gives your reader a sense of greater value, and it gives you a chance to further market your work. At the very least, every one of your books should have an "About" or "Follow Me" section, where you can list your websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites. Make it easy for the reader to engage with you, to seek you out, to find your other work.

Practical Example: What am I doing? This week I'm publishing four short stories via Smashwords and Kindle. These aren't just thrown together to get them out, they're my four best short stories. Initially I'm going to give two away for free and price two at 99 cents, just to get a feel for how free stories affects pay stories. I have three goals: I want people to be able to get a feel for my writing for free, and I want to generate a buzz for the novels that will be coming out -- four full-length (over 325-page) novels over the next three months -- and I want people to follow me on Twitter and on my blogs.

So for each short story the package will include: The short story, a little "About the Story" lagniappe, a preview package of the next two novels (a cover, blurb, first chapter of each), and a page with all my personal "Follow Me" information.

Example: "Sticks Like Bones"  will include this lagniappe:

About the Story: Sticks Like Bones

This was written on spec for an anthology that folded before publication. I mention that because it’s the only story I’ve ever written where I wrote TO a concept instead of having an idea show up at the top of the cellar stairs demanding to be let out.

I find the French Quarter a fascinating place, almost like a slice of elsewhere that fell through a rip in the fabric of here. There is such a feeling of weight to it, but it’s always shedding itself, in brick dust and loose nails, bits of crumbling slate from roofs and flakes of paint. It’s a reminder that time exacts a price, that decay keeps running through everything even as we live our lives without paying it heed.

The places described in the story are a mix of the real and imagined. The oddest thing for me is that even though the French Quarter is a cleanly laid-out rectangle, I always get lost if I’m walking alone, almost as if the layout changes around me, like some multi-dimensional funhouse. Suffice to say, I no longer walk without a companion.

Following that, I'll give the cover for Running Red and this blurb:

Jesse Stone has been running the night roads for 150 years, preying on humanity for survival, but he still feels an ache from the empty place where his soul was torn away. Other vampires – an ex-SS soldier, a fanatical tent preacher, an Aztec biker – have been gathering an army for an assault on humanity. Now Jesse must lead a rag-tag band of humans against the others, in a last-ditch attempt to find redemption…


Look for Running Red, coming soon.

I'll follow that with the first chapter of Running Red and the preview package for Darker By Degree.
Then I'll finish it up with a "Follow Me" page that lists every place I can be found.

Easy-peasy. With a hour or so of extra work, hopefully I've given the reader that little something extra, I've piqued their interest, and I've given them further reason to seek me out.


What lagniappe can you give your readers?

Let Me Tell You a Story

I met Susan when she signed up for a creative writing class I was teaching. She tells me that first class I literally bonked her on the head and asked why she wasn't turning out novels left and right. I vaguely remember smacking her with her writing sample, but mostly I remember what an astonishingly good writer she was.

Fast forward -- eventually we became BFFs because us crazy writer types have to stick together. On kind of a whim, we came up with a mystery series (a halfway meeting point, as I was horror and she was mainstream). The first book was good, good enough to get us an agent -- a New York agent, to boot. I used to love saying "New York agent," because it made me feel "special." Our agent encouraged to get to work on the next in the series and we did.

Fast forward further -- a publishing house shows interest in the series. The editorial board has the manuscript! We fill out their author paperwork, they're coming up with a marketing plan, and then....  No dice. Wasn't quite thematically right for them. But, hey, maybe we'd be willing to retool the second book in the series to make it a first book in the series? Sure, we say, anything you need. We cannibalize Darker by Degree to move all the wonderful prose we can to Director's Cut. We invent a new backstory. A whirlwind of activity follows. After all is said and done? Crickets.We begin work on book three, but our hearts aren't in it.

Fast forward to the now. Since we've decided to go the self-publishing route, we've resurrected the series in its original format. We always loved Maddie Pryce (and she received high praise from publishers), so we're going to let her be who's she supposed to be. Today, we finished restoring Director's Cut to its original glory -- and it's a great book: funny, fast-paced, suspenseful, just really fun. Wow, we are stoked.

But in returning to Darker by Degree, while it's a good book, we realize it's not on the level of Director's Cut. The plot is still great, Maddie is still great,  but it needs retooling in the character development and motivation department. (I also suggest zombies, because zombies are cool, but really not necessary for our purposes. Damn.)

In other words, self-publishing is no excuse to not give your best. We could quickly publish Darker by Degree -- as I said, it's a good book, good enough to be a hair's breadth away from being published by a major mystery publisher -- but it's not as good as we want it. We want to leave readers with a, "Wow!"  And then we want them to promptly buy Director's Cut because they can't wait to see what happens next. So we are hard at work on the revision of Darker by Degree -- and it's going to be great.

Moral of the story: never go with "good enough." Whatever you write, polish that thing until it glows. ( Kind of like a radioactive meteorite, the kind that causes the dead to rise..... Oh, never mind.)

The List

Been busy, busy, combing blogs and websites, arming myself with information, immersing myself in ideas, and playing around with concepts. Dean Wesley Smith, on his excellent blog, has a very informative section called Think Like A Publisher, in which he provides numerous sections about the various aspects of publishing yourself. It's a great starting place to give you an idea about what you need to think about, especially if you're more of the DIY mindset.

Under Production &Scheduling, he suggest making a List, just like big publishers make a List, outlining your now and future "inventory." He says, "This total number of your inventory may surprise you, disappoint you, or scare you to death (as it did with me and Kris). But at least you have a list of inventory now."

I dutifully opened all my electronic folders, improv notes, notebooks, bundles of amassed scrap paper, and after digging myself out from under it, tried to be honest with myself about what I had.

I would say surprise is maybe not as descriptive as "shock." If I'm being honest (counting the four books that are for all intents and purposes close to publication) I have 25 book-length projects that are totally viable. (And by that I mean the concepts are complete, some have multiple chapters already written, they're ready to work on without much further thought.) Beyond that, there's a maybe another 15 good ideas, and at least as many short stories. Like some zombie squirrel, apparently I've been stashing these things away for years and years and forgetting where I put them. The sub-cellar in my head must be very, very full.

Even when I can quite the day job and write full time, I've got enough to keep me busy for the next 15 years. This is both gratifying and utterly terrifying, because what was always at a safe distance is suddenly on the doorstep, possibly like something wished upon a monkey's paw. Now every one of those stories is knocking on the door and demanding to be let in.

You see, for years and years I did the minimum to keep this going. I queried, I got an agent, I went back and forth with publishers, but there was always a safe space, a buffer. I went back and forth for an entire freaking year with a publishing house (which shall remain nameless) over rewrites that they requested only to have the book dropped at the 11th hour.

So over time, while I never stopped writing, it became the act of just jotting down something I fancied on the back of an envelope, whipping out three chapters and then letting a book lie fallow, creating a world full of characters and then consigning them to a closet that I forgot to open again. I stopped producing, because something inside my head told me I could better spend my time doing something that had immediate results, that paid me enough to feed the kids, that got the damned floors swept and the dogs walked.

Sadly, because I let it, my talent and time became expendable. It became something that was not as valued as other people's time. If the kids needed something, that always came first. If the significant other needed something, that always came first. Hell, if the dogs needed something, that came first too. And over the years that default has just grown, because I've got to make a living right now, not next year, and nobody else is doing the laundry or the shopping or the cooking, or most of all the planning and double-checking and coaching that makes everybody else's lives run smoothly enough that they forget what it's like without the woman behind the curtain.

So now I have worlds upon worlds waiting to be set spinning. And I've got to answer the door, because something there is knocking.

Soft-core Processer

So what's a Susan in this dichotomous duo of ours? If Keri is persistent, driven, and tech-savvy, does that make me a lazy, distracted dinosaur? Oh sure, I'll cop to the first two (on occasion), but dinosaur? Let's dig a little deeper.

The dinosaurs did not die off because they were slow to change; the Cretaceous creatures were among the most bizarre in appearance, after all. This was no case of extinction by lack of evolution.

Meteorites happen and then what's a lizard to do? You cannot outrun destiny, especially when it blots out the sun for days on end and kills the food supply.

I've never had a problem finding sustenance and at nearly two miles high, the sun and I are intimately acquainted. The relationship I'm working on is the technological one and Keri is my psychologist: She has been navigating the electronic realm forever and tolerates my quaint tales of magazine subscriptions and catalogue orders. She kindly pets my pointed little head.

Yes, I want my kids to be able to click on any element of the toolbar and perform any task on the pull-down menus. I also want them to know their way around a toolbox and comfortably manage a dinner plan. I hope they examine their email threads when they aren't stitching together quilt squares, and I know they will effortlessly process their words electronically. I just prefer that they write to me in cursive.

Dinosaur? No, not yet. I do still carve in stone, but as I stand on the precipice of e-publishing, the valley seems verdant and the future looks bright. No meteorites in sight.

In excavating the wonders of my garage, I can still find the notebooks, diaries, and journals of my Triassic. During my Jurassic, I moved from a simple word processing machine through PCs, laptops, and now on to my IMAC and IPAD.

Let's see what weird horns, humps, and spots I sprout as I lumber over to this new watering hole. Terrabytes, anyone?

A Brief Note About What to Expect

Why should you put us in your RSS feed? After all, there a ton of blogs out there about self publishing and marketing your writing, many of them so-so, but some of them brilliant. We're not here to duplicate information that's been covered ad nauseum, although we will be recognizing the best of this information and pointing you toward it. We're not going to evangelize any particular approach or platform or get into a shouting match about the relative merits of Lulu over CreateSpace.

What we will do is walk you through what we're doing, from the moment we decided to publish ourselves going forward. What did we consider, why did we make the choices we made? What worked and what didn't? What hurdles did we run into, what did we forget to do? And maybe most practically, how much time and money did it take?

Marketing your writing is a business. Writing is not so much a business as an avocation. Meshing those two things into a cohesive whole is troublesome and difficult and takes a lot of effort. It's not something that comes easy to most writers, especially those of us with houses full of kids and full-time jobs. We aim to show that it can be done.

The other thing we offer is passion. We love writing. We still get giddy and call each other up after writing a particularly gorgeous passage, saying, "Hey, listen to this..." We sweat over our character motivation, or the clarity of our prose, or agonize over a plot point that just doesn't ring quite true. We are writers first, but realize we have to be more or we'll just keep writing for ourselves and no one else.

So, here we go. Come along.

Re-Vision

I'm Susan, and I've been writing for 45 years. I'm not terribly old, but for lack of another talent, I did start pretty early. I have always romanticized writing, comparing everything I wrote to Hemingway while longing for a seat at Dorothy's Algonquin Round Table and fearing that F. Scott had simply "used all the words". I was raised to love books and to revere their authors, maybe a little too much. "They" were the authors and I was me. The odds were long and the work longer. But still I managed to crank out poems, songs, stories, and essays at a feverish clip throughout my childhood and into adulthood.

Then my fear was that I could never compose a "book-length" work. That one dogged me for years until, at 34, I finally finished my first novel. Then in a five year span I cranked out two more novels and two kids--pretty good production, especially for a highly trained self-doubter. Now to get the three non-breathing offspring published.

Fast-forward ten years and here I am, having played by the "rules" and submitted, oh yes, submitted, for well over a decade. If in those earlier years I questioned my ability to be a "real" writer, what now am I to do with the prospect of being a "real" indie publisher? Oddly enough, when Keri proposed the idea, I was ecstatic...ready. I suppose I had finally come to the age and the point where the fear was gone and the fallacies exorcized. And if I could take control of what has always been mine anyway, then why not get the beauty and the angst out there and let the words fall where they may.

Keri likes the old notion I walked around with for years that if I couldn't manage to be delivered to the reader by the big houses, and in hardcover of course, that I would just type out my stuff and hide it amongst the "real" books on the library shelves. I might have done it, too. Or you know what, maybe that's exactly what I'm finally getting the nerve to do.

My Three Favorite Quotes From The Weekend's Research

"I'll never write another synopsis again!"


"If you're a lousy writer, self-publishing is a terrible idea."

And my favorite, from Susan:

"Whenever I tell somebody I'm a writer, the first thing they ask is where they can get my books. I've never had anyone ask who published me."

The New Paradigm in Publishing

(Cross-posted from The Spectral Obelisk for newcomers)

Used to be, only idiots self-published. I know I was against it. Vehemently against it. The only people who self-published were delusional, furtive little creatures, the kind who show up at writer's conferences with their scrawled and dog-eared manuscripts clutched in their sweaty paws, wanting someone, anyone to tell them, "You're a genius!"

When that unlikely event failed to occur, there was always the vanity presses, waiting like snake-oil salesmen in the backs of their shabby carnival wagons, doling out self-labeled bottles of misplaced self-esteem. It was a step up from hermits cranking out mimeographed pages in their parent's basement and forcing them onto hapless passers-by, but not by much. Every once in a while there was a success story like Robert James Waller, proving that it could be done. Why, one minute he was a failed writer and the next minute Clint Eastwood was speaking his words on the big screen! Ah, but that ignored the thousands of dollars and hours and miles Waller had to put in before he sold his first book. And even then, you have to factor in luck. Luck had a lot to do with it.

Well, the days of investing your life's savings in a crate of books, packing them in the rumble seat of your jalopy and heading out on a whistlestop tour of the byways are over. Way over.

Now, it costs you next to nothing. You don't have to quit your day job or save up sick days. You can do it all from the comfort of your home for pennies. And most importantly, it no longer matters if you self-publish. The leper colonies have shut down and self-published people can walk out among decent society without having to disguise themselves.

Ah, I've made it sound so effortless, so tantalizing! Why, I can just publish my masterpiece and readers will intuitively find me and realize my magnificent work! Er, no.

There are still two unavoidable facts that hold true and will always hold true. One, your work has to be good, and I mean good enough to pass the same muster as a book from a big publisher. I've been looking and north of 80% of self-published fiction is a hot mess. That's a non-scientific number, but it's not far off and bound to only increase as writers realize the possibilities and throw their overripe bait out into the water. Underdeveloped writers are going to stop working to get better, and hopeless writers are going to be able to publish unreadable dreck. You see, the problem with removing the gatekeepers of quality is you've leveled the playing field to a point where it's going to be flooded with people who have no idea what they're doing. On the up side, if you're good and smart and tenacious and work your butt off doing what you need to do, you have a good chance of doing at least as well as you would do with a traditional publisher, perhaps even better.

Fact number two has to do with working your butt off. If you bypass a traditional publisher, you still have to do everything a traditional publisher does. Your private publishing staff must include: beta readers, a copy editor, a proofreader, a cover designer/illustrator, a typesetter, a marketing strategist, a publicist, an IT expert/web designer, and a business manager. If you lack in any of those departments, you're apt to fail.

Now, if you're lucky and clever, you yourself may be able to fill many of those roles. You may have friends, acquaintances, and family that can fill some of those roles. Chances are, you'll have to hire some independent contractors or barter services to fill some of those roles. The truth is, you're likely at first to spend way more time marketing yourself than you do writing. And, boy, you better be a good writer to start off with, and willing to learn from your mistakes.

So, no, it's not easy, not by a far shot. But the publishing business is changing and I can't think of anything more exciting than that.

(Coming soon:  the myths of self-publishing versus legacy publishing.)

Big Decisions

(Cross-posted from the Spectral Obelisk for newcomers)


So, anyway, last Thursday night I was in the throes of rewriting. What had started out as a lark -- hey, let's dust off that old manuscript and see what it looks like -- had morphed into this life-and-death struggle worthy of a nature-documentary-waterhole-showdown-on-the-savannah. And I was very much the gazelle and not the crocodile.

The actual rewrite was going well in terms of, you know, improving the book. I now had the experience and judgment to see the saggy spots and the repetitive imagery and the telling-versus-showing. As of Thursday night, I had cut something close to 40,000 words and had a nice little roadmap for switching around some action, integrating the remaining parallel storyline, and strengthening some dicey motivation. Problem was, it was never going to hit the magic word number the publisher was adamant about. (The publisher had not seen the whole book, just sample chapters and an outline. And while there are good reasons for books to be shorter, it's also my belief that a story takes as long to tell as it takes to tell.)

So I had a dilemma. Make the book less rich and the story weaker by taking some shortcuts to hit an arbitrary number, or put the manuscript back in a drawer. At about 7:00, I had an epiphany. It was probably a combination of things: words from some truly swell writers I've met, research on a somewhat unrelated matter, and some inexplicable light going on in my head. So for the next several hours I put the book aside and did some research. (I am a whiz a research, a research-savant, if you will.)

It came down to a comparison chart, the kind you see when you're trying to decide between "standard" and "premium" options of whatever you're buying. What comes with what? I was dealing with a small press (a nice, respectable small press -- I wish them no ill will). And what were they offering me? No advance. Publishing in trade paperback and ebook formats. A professional cover. Listings in the catalogues, a press release, and a few copies sent around to reviewers. A standard royalty fee.

I realized quite quickly that whatever they were offering me, I could offer myself. So, just like that, I've decided to become to my own small press. I've been editing professionally for 20 years. I've been advising people on marketing their writing for about that amount of time. I'm surrounded by people who are talented designers and marketers.

I realize better than anyone that this is going to take an immense amount of work, but the only thing I'm risking is my time. (Well, and the time of the people around me who have agreed to launch this experiment with me, but they're doing it of their own free will.) Phase one should be finished by July. For the first time in two years, I'm actually excited about my writing.

(Of course starting, oh, about now, it's back to the rewrite. The sagging middle ain't going to fix itself.)

Ta-da!

Hello, there. Welcome to the new digs. Some people may know me from my "fun" blog, The Spectral Obelisk. The purpose of this new blog is to focus solely on the world of writing, specifically self-publishing, or as I would prefer to call it "publishing yourself" to wash it clean of any old icky associations that might be lingering in people's heads.

After some intense research and soul searching, and after 20 years of counseling people that publishing yourself was akin to being your own lawyer, I've come to believe that not only is publishing yourself a viable option for writers, but it's going to eventually drastically change the landscape of publishing. I'm not by any means predicting the demise of traditional publishing, but in the last 18 months or so the paradigm has shifted, and traditional publishing houses will eventually have to change and morph to accommodate that shift.

There are several excellent blogs about publishing yourself, and I'll be adding them to the blog roll as this site fills out. But I want to do something a little different. You see, I decided a week ago today that I was going to become my own small press. I have four novels -- two solo and two mysteries co-written with my talented friend Susan -- that we're going to publish over the next couple of months.

So what I'm offering here is an adventure that you can follow, if you're so inclined. From the spark of an idea, through the research, step-by-step through the nuts and bolts of all aspects of publishing your own work. I hope to have guest bloggers who can offer their own expertise on all aspects or writing, publishing, and marketing, and provide a clearinghouse of sorts for the bits and bobs of advice and tips and reliable information that's strewn all over the web.

You can watch in real time as we take our work and get it to market. Hopefully learn from our mistakes, and possibly have the inspiration to take control of your own art.