This is long overdue, and I apologize. But it will be a while yet. There are two reasons you haven’t seen this post yet:
First, because I’ve discovered great new free tool for writers, however I haven’t figured it out completely yet. And I’m not sure it’s stable. I’ve installed it in four websites. In two it works perfectly, in the other two, it doesn’t work at all, and I can’t figure out why.
Second, I’m feeling a little pissed. After I quickly launched my first two parts, a ‘friend’ cannibalized my content and posted it on social media, a little each day, gaining a whole bunch of exposure, new followers, and grateful friends in the writing community, without acknowledging that I was the source. When I contacted her about this, she deleted the posts, then blocked me.
So I’m feeling a little salty about posting things I’ve learned that could help the community.
I do intend to post it eventually, but for now, I’m waiting.
The first focuses on software and websites that offer Software as a Service. The second is focused on people, the third on building a WordPress site.
People and Groups The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, (SFWA) runs a semi-annual mentoring program. I was fortunate to have a mentor for the first 3 months of 2023. It’s not just for members (I’m an Associate Member, the lowest level), and anyone can apply, not just science fiction or fantasy writers. (There’s a large romance community within SFWA).
I used to be a member of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA), but it didn’t compare to the SFWA, so I’ve let that lapse. I know next to nothing about the Society of Authors, perhaps someone here knows about them? I understand that they’re a good ally.
Brandon Sanderson is one of the best-known active fantasy authors. He was also a lecturer at Brigham Young University. All of his lectures are on YouTube. It’s a lot, but if you have time, they can be very informative.
Writing Excuses is a podcast I mentioned elsewhere. It was created by the aforementioned Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal (current President of the SFWA) among others and is in season 18. Each episode is about 15 minutes long. it’s fun and informative, and develops a real sense of community as you listen to it. If you wish, there’s writing prompts at the end of each lesson. I found seasons 6-13 to be very beneficial.
Janice Hardy runs a website called Fiction University. They dissect craft, focussing on what does and doesn’t work. They also occasionally post writing prompts where you can post your effort for feedback. Need some motivation to write, or at least an external goal?
Jane Friedman‘s newsletter is considered a must-read in the publishing world, and it’s free.
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a free challenge to join, every November. You’ll be assigned a team, based on geography, and you’ll each be challenged to complete 50,000 words in one month (Making the goal isn’t as important as attempting). Of note, participants often get real discounts on software like Scrivener, Plottr, Atticus, etc. If you’re looking to form a writing group that’s all local to you, this can be a great way to find writers.
They’ve also added Camp NaNoWriMo, a July run of the same program.
As you get further in your writing career, you might want to pay attention to the following sites.
Victoria Strauss’ Writers Beware (sponsored by the SFWA) helps writers avoid scammers trying to separate you from your money.
The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) is a very helpful organisation (I’m a member) that vets service suppliers (like editors) and will also give you advice on any publishing contract you’re offered. When Disney started underpaying writers, and withholding royalties, ALLi and SFWA were on the front line raising awareness in the media and hiring lawyers to pressure Disney into honouring its contractual obligations.
At some point, you’re probably going to want to build a newsletter so you have some form of direct link to your fans (they subscribe to it). There are many newsletter delivery services that offer a free option if your newsletter is below a certain number of subscribers (usually 1,000).. Mailerlite, Convertkit, and Mailchimp are the ones usually recommended. If you have money to burn, Constant Contact is great (I used it for a client). A friend swears by Email Octopus, but I’d never heard of it.
BookFunnel will help you find readers for your newsletter, and help give them a digital gift. BookFunnel works well with most if not all of the newsletter services mentioned above.
Draft2Digital and its subsidiary, Books2Read are very helpful in distributing and selling books, if you self-publish.
Additions from friends in the writing community:
As well as Email Octopus, my friend recommends “a great book on newsletters, Newsletter Ninja by Tammi LaBrecque.”
David Gaughran has an email list, a series of classes on advertising and many books on creating a fan base, and how to work with Amazon, Bookbub, etc, and overall thoughts on marketing.
The annual Inkers Conference ( both virtual and in person). This is a writing conference that provides tons of topics like craft, marketing, etc. You can then watch all the sessions at your leisure for three years post event as they are all filmed and posted. This is also a very active community on facebook. You will also get invited to some free one-off sessions.
The first focuses on software and websites that offer Software as a Service. The second is focused on people, the third on building a WordPress site.
Software and Websites For note-taking almost any app will do. Don’t overlook your email app. I often write or dictate notes on the go directly into my iPhone email app and send them to myself. I use the story title as subject to make it easier to search them later on my laptop.
When it comes to writing, long form, I love Scrivener. I was about 80,000 words into a novel when I found that Word just couldn’t give me what I needed – the ability to re-arrange scenes, find specific points in the story, try different flows for pacing. Scrivener makes all of that easy (and so much I don’t use, like research, timelines, plotting tools). It has a 30-day free trial. I bought it on day 6. I can use it to write the scene that is the set up and the scene that is the pay-off at the same time, then move them to their respective places in the story. Within 6 months, I had a 135,000 word draft of a complete story. (It still needs revision, but that’s on me, not the software)
If you’re a more linear writer, then Word may work fine for you. I know other writers who swear by Google Docs, but I’ve not used it.
Plottr is a relatively recent piece of software that helps writer who are plotters, well, plot out their novels. Again, I’ve not used it, but I’m told it works for many types of plotting, like linear and snowflake plotting.
Grammarly advertises everywhere, and it can be very useful for discovering your mistakes, but it can also over-power your voice. That’s also true for these next two recommendations. I don’t use Grammarly, I use the free levels of both Hemingway App and ProWritingAid. And I use them both, in that order, as they do slightly different things, and catch slightly different mistakes. Hemingway will tell you how readable your text is, and at what grade level, as well as flagging complex sentences. It also catches passive voice.
ProWritingAid will catch many more grammatical and spelling errors. You don’t need the paid versions, in my experience, as long as you’re not offline when you need them. None of these supplant the need for a human editor.
If you’re a self-pubber, you’re going to want to format ebooks at some point. Scrivener does this quite nicely, but there are some specialized tools that may be better. Vellum and Atticus are the two that come to mind. I’ve not used either, as I know Scrivener well enough for my needs, but they both have a high profile in the self-pubbing community.
Canva lets you make decent covers without needing to know Photoshop, but if you’re serious, you’ll end up using (or hiring someone who is using) Photoshop .
I do my print layouts in InDesign, but Vellum or Atticus should be able to do those also. Technically, you can do those layouts in Word, but I wouldn’t expect to get good results without a lot of pain.
I want to mention BookBrush. this is for creating ads for self-published works. Again, there are many paid tiers, but the free tier offers a lot of good stuff. You upload your book cover, select from a generous listing of free mock-ups and download the image of your cover embedded in the mock-up. A much more limited version of this, but also free, is DIY Book Covers.
Two months ago, I started selling my own clothes online as “Skrap Apparel on Etsy.” I don’t have a marketing budget per se, so I’m trying to find organic reach through Twitter and Instagram. I set up new accounts on each (Insta. Twitter.) and I have about the same amount of followers (less than 20).
Recent ad on Twitter
Whenever I have a new article of clothing to promote, I make a post and put it on both Twitter and Instagram. As my accounts are new, and I’m not paying to promote, I only get a dozen or so views on each platform.
BUT…
My results so far have been surprising and not at all equal.
According to Etsy, my store has gotten 84 visits from people “visiting directly”, which means they’ve had to type out or copy/paste the URL. And only 4 from clicks from Twitter, which Etsy can identify because they are clickable links. Now those 84 ‘direct visits’, where someone has had to copy-paste the URL, are, I believe, from the only place I’m posting my URL in an clickable format: Instagram posts.
So, with the same minimal exposure, I’m getting 21 visits to my shop from Instagram users for every 1 visit from a Twitter user, even though it’s easier to click and visit from Twitter.
Same ad on isntagram
Now one obvious advantage of Instagram is the character limit. With a message geared towards Twitter, I have a lot of room for hashtags on Instagram, and I keep lists of ones that work.
So maybe I’m finding my audience there, whereas I’m not on finding them on Twitter. That’s possible, but that’s also because Twitter chooses to constrain my ability to reach out, forcing me to do more work there to hopefully find a similar result. It’s not worth my time right now to do that.
So, how dos this all convert to sales? It hasn’t much yet, not enough to make any conclusions. I’ve had some problems with Etsy and pricing, you can read about it all here.
Look, we’re all struggling to make money, authors as much as anyone else.
“Buy My Book! But My Book!” Ad Nauseum
As a writer, you can focus all your energy on getting people to read your books, but there’s a number of drawbacks. You pimp and pimp your books on social media, watching as you lose more followers than you get.
First, you need to have enough material out there that when people read one, they will have more to consume. If you’re new, or a slow writer like me, this isn’t easy to achieve.
So many writers look to alternative strategies to make money.
A simple one is to get more revenue from your existing work. This can mean submitting your shorter works to foreign markets for translations – which is time-consuming and doesn’t earn much, but might build an audience for later material. Or, it can mean making a Patreon-type program, where people are encouraged to pay money to get early access to your writing.
Again, this doesn’t work well with slow writers, and can also be difficult for writers who simply don’t have enough material to entice a recurring payment. Also, if you haven’t found your fans on social media, how will you find them on Patreon?
Then there’s the tip jars like Kofi. Without giving anything away, you simply ask people to tip you some money. I don’t know anyone who’s having success with that.
A couple of my designs
A different strategy strategy is to try to create multiple revenue streams from different products completely. That’s what I’m trying to do, by edging into Print-on-Demand t-shirt and all-over-print clothing.
This is your RedBubble, Etsy, Printful type work. Depending upon how you want to structure it, and how much control you want, you can find a solution that lets you design using their tools (great for silly slogan stye t-shirts) or go full-on photoshop CMYK designs on all-over prints.
Again, you have a problem of how to find an audience, but in theory Etsy or RedBubble are also trying to sell your work, so you have a very little bit of support from a very large player.
My first exposure to the use of “trigger warning” came about as a teacher. As part of our training, we were briefed on them, so it wasn’t a complete surprise that our students knew about them too.
I was teaching ESL in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One of my students, about 13 years old, attended an international school where they’d just had an assembly on triggers and trigger warnings. From that point on, whenever I mentioned grammar or homework, she’d shout “Trigger!”
This did not get her out of doing her class work or homework, and eventually she stopped.
There was a discussion on the Alliance of Independent Authors facebook group about trigger warnings. Apparently there’s a serious discussion around embracing the inclusion of trigger warnings on books.
I understand that some things in stories can trigger strong emotional reactions. Story-telling is about evoking emotions, sometimes a writer pushes too far. But the list being discussed, available here, is just absurd.
According to it, you should use a trigger warning if you mention a brand by name, if anyone is pregnant in the story, if there are any references to Harry Potter, spiders, or alcohol…
There are valid things on the list, such as rape, decapitation, torture, but they’re invalidated by the absurdity of the rest of the list.
Simply getting your feelings hurt because a story has “slut shaming” isn’t being triggered, it’s being uncomfortable.
All of this led me to think, how would the books of my childhood stack up to this list?
Let’s find out:
I’ll start with one of the most influential books in science fiction, Dune:
Abusive relationship Assault Attempted murder Attempted rape Child abuse Child death Childbirth Cults Death Drugs Emotional abuse
Finally, a publishing strategy for my short fiction!
Back when I was in university, I wrote some short fiction. I even got some backhand praise for it (“It’s too real, you’re writing a memoir and passing it off as fiction”), if not the best grades.
But I’ve always been drawn to the epic novel, the longest of long forms (think Lord of the Rings, which was written to be one volume with five parts but was published as three volumes).
I don’t know when I stopped writing short fiction, but I do know when I restarted.
There’s a new York literary agent named Janet Reid. For a while, she ran a weekly contest. She’d give you five words and you had to use them in a story of exactly 100 words. You had from late Friday until late Sunday to complete this task.
It was hard. It was fun.
It taught me a lot about brevity (ironically, something this post might lack). Then I started looking through my backlog of stories and found that a lot of them could easily be told in a much shorter form than an epic novel.
I discovered that 2,000 – 3,000 word stories were my jam. I started reading up on short fiction markets and submitted some stories. Then I sold a couple of them. I had my first professional sale, many semi-pro sales and some interesting contracts that I wouldn’t sign (You can read about here).
After six or seven years, I had a backlog of about 30 short stories and another 25 or so drabbles (those 100-word stories).
I gathered the best of the best, 14 short stories and 12 drabbles and made a book. Then I made three more. No, I don’t have enough content for four books.
But I do have a strategy.
I write across a number of genres, so I decided that for Amazon Kindle, I’d release two short “samplers”; one of space opera stories and the other of a speculative fiction variety. Both would have three stories and three drabbles. I’d make a third ebook sampler of just the complete set of drabbles and offer it to anyone who signed up for my newsletter.
The 14 short stories and the 12 drabbles, I’d bind as a paperback. This would allow me to learn about that whole process before I was ready to release one of my ‘epic novels’.
In a surprise to myself, I ended up also making an ebook out of the complete collection, and offering it everywhere except Amazon (It conflicts with the samplers).
So now those short stories have become four titles and five publications (four published and one given away)!
I’m still new to all this, and I’m finding it hard to keep track of where everything is available and when. Why don’t you take a minute to check out skrapbooks.com (my publishing company) to see if there’s anything you’d be interested in.
There are many ways that a writer can screw up their story. One that I am susceptible to is the “I have a cool concept, now I need a story to fit it.” or worse, “I have a cool solution. I need a problem to fit it.”
Why a ship? It’ll make sense eventually
The “cool concept” one is, I feel, far less risky and can be pulled off well. Here we’re talking about high concept stories like the classic Arthur C Clark stories Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End. In “Rama”, an extraterrestrial foreign body is tumbling through our solar system; let’s go investigate. In “End”, aliens have arrived to shepherd humanity to our next level of evolution. Both are easy to quantify and catchy pitches.
Even then, “Rama” didn’t offer a lot of satisfying conclusions, instead opting for a soft cliffhanger ending (literally, “wait, there’s more!”). I know many people were disappointed with Childhood’s End, but I’m not among them, and in some ways the disappointment seems generational.
But the “Cool Solution looking for a Problem” pitfall is one I’ve seen a few writers fall into, and it is a deadly trap. Here’s the problem with this approach. Your solution has to be either the only viable solution or the simplest. Otherwise when your readers come up with a better solution than your protagonists do, they will hurl your book against the wall.
I … speak from experience.
I’ll be vague here…
I read a book about a decade ago. It made me scream in frustration. I threw it against a wall, and later burned it in a fire pit. I’m serious.
Let’s take a non-book example, then get back to this book.
Someone has a cool idea for a movie and needs to brainstorm it:
Let’s put rough and rowdy oil field workers in space and have fun.
OK, how do we do that?
Maybe an asteroid is coming and NASA needs to blow it up? They need these guys to drill a hole for the bomb?
Couldn’t we just train astronauts?
No, no, no “it’s easier to train drillers to be astronauts than to train astronauts to be drillers” Really?
That doesn’t sound right.
Come on, it’s a movie. They’ll love it. How many viewers are going to be both experts in drilling and space? No one! We’re safe!
For the “Cool Solution looking for a Problem” to work, the experts in your story need to be smarter than your target audience, which means you need to be also.
Back to that infernal book…
Its cool solution was a huge space station orbiting Earth, with the elite of the elite surviving a disaster. The problem it wanted was all the political intrigue that would go into making it.
The problem that the author settled on was that biblical-level flooding was going to wipe out the Earth, covering it with water.
So, if you had a story where a known flood was going to happen (everywhere, so evacuation isn’t really feasible) what would be your first solution?
I’m sorry, Couldn’t hear you mumbling at the back of the class. Did you say, “boats?”
I know I did.
In fact I started imagining converting a PanaMax cargo vessel into a floating farm, with people living below decks, wind or solar as a source of power. Hell, a few thousand of these and you could save a decent sized city. (In this book, only a few hundred people would be allowed to survive on the space station).
Then think of all the smaller ships that exist and could be converted, like the tramp steamer pictured at the top of this page. With no land to go to, their engines don’t even need to be that great. You just need hulls with integrity to convert to little oasis of tenancies.
You could build a whole economy afloat, with smaller sailboats acting as fishing vessels. Scavenging the flotsam and jetsam of our society might be productive too.
In short, the technology to do this solution was much more feasible, mostly already existed, and would have allowed for an order of magnitude increase in the number of people who survived.
But in the story, NO ONE, not one of the ‘genius’ advisors gathered to ‘save humanity’, mentioned boats or ships as an option.
And that’s why that book got hurled and burned. I won’t buy another book by that author (caveat: I’m not sure I remember who the author was now). As a reader, they’ve lost me not only for that story but for all future outings.
And that’s a huge problem with a poorly executed “Cool Solution looking for a Problem”. You lose readers, not just on this one title, but on all going forward.
I recently participated in an author’s workshop where a very well-established, multiple-title-best-selling indie author offered advice to the rest of us. One point in particular struck a nerve with me, because I’m not sure that it was good advice for me (I know, you ignore advice at your own peril), but it certainly got me thinking.
The advice was to find a very narrow niche and write to it exclusively, to basically re-write the same story again and again (different characters and situations, but the same basic plot). “Your readers will love it. They’ll know what to expect when they buy one of your books.”
And I understand that as a marketing/branding idea: You buy a James Patterson book, you get the typical James Patterson story. There’s a template.
But there are many successful authors for whom this singular expectation isn’t true.
Robert Heinlein’s most successful stories were Starship Troopers (Military Sci-fi), A Stranger in a Strange Land (a very Kurt Vonnegut-esque discourse on religion and sex), and Friday (a cyberpunk story).
Frank Herbert’s follow-up to Dune was a book called Dragon in the Sea (re-released as Under Pressure), a World War III submarine warfare story. He also wrote books about human/alien interactions (there are no aliens in the Dune universe).
John Scalzi came to prominence with a military sci-fi series, Old Man’s War. His next most famous project was Red Shirts, a spoof of Star Trek. He’s written near-future medical thrillers (Locked In and its sequels) and flat out space opera (The Collapsing Empire). His next book is about kaiju (Godzilla-like monsters).
These very successful science fiction writers didn’t limit themselves to a narrow niche, and they didn’t lose their audiences by jumping around.
So maybe ‘narrow niche’ isn’t the way to build your brand and readership, in this genre at least. Maybe we get more flexibility if you don’t stray too far outside of the rather large SF/F arena.
Or maybe there’s another element to branding – be it voice, theme, or style.
Robert Heinlein’s stories often explored the status quo, the power structure behind society. Religion is an oft-repeated motif throughout the works of Frank Herbert. John Scalzi’s draw is his voice, a tone that is flippant, sometimes sarcastic, always light.
Then there’s Michael Crichton.
His books ranged from The Great Train Robbery (historical fiction) to Rising Sun (a police thriller) and Jurassic Park (sci-fi techno thriller). He also create the TV show ER and co-wrote the film Twister (yes that one, with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt). Other than being entertaining, what’s his brand? He’s certainly not contained by a niche genre. Perhaps his brand is about exploring human interaction with (often new) technology.
Whenever writers on Twitter ask if it’s OK to write in more than one genre, I respond with the fact that Ian Fleming didn’t just create James Bond, he also created Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
That’s all well and good, but how does this help me? I don’t write in a narrow niche. What’s my brand?
I have thoughts.
The stories that I’m developing now or taking notes on to write later, range from a parallel Earth fantasy, a space opera, a military scifi, a time-travel series, a high fantasy and a techno-thriller. It’s a very wide niche, basically covering the whole spectrum of SF/F.
My stories can be situational (plot-driven) but are usually character-driven. So I (try to) write characters that you will care about and empathise with, flaws and all. Then I put them through hell, given them conflicts and conundrums and see how their morals adapt. Sometimes, I kill them.
I’d like to think that my stories reward a second (or third) reading, that elements and conversations that seem inconsequential early in the story pay off near the end, and a reader on their second pass would see the pieces more clearly.
I’ve written perhaps thirty short stories, at least as many dribbles (100-word stories), three full-length novels (in excess of 100,000 words each) and somewhere in excess of half a million words set within my own fictional worlds. Add on top of that my years as either a journalist, a copy-writer, or a fundraiser, and I’ve written a lot.
I want to tell you about three of my short stories and how their existences have been different from what I would have predicted. The stories in question are “Last Breath Day”, “Graceful Degradation”, and “The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir.”
When I wrote “The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir” five years ago, I thought it was the best story I’d ever written, and up to that point it may have been. I’ve submitted it to perhaps fifteen publications since then. (Each submission ties a story up for months).
This was the first story I wrote that got personalised rejections. What this means is that the magazine editors read it and seriously considered it. Then, when they decided not to use it, they still gave free editorial feedback on it. This is rare. But with Novyy Mir, it happens a lot. People like it, just not quite enough to publish it.
Three years ago, I wrote “Graceful Degradation.”
This story is such departure for me. It’s not easily categorised as science fiction. It’s a short story about a man reluctantly breaking the law in an attempt to honour his dead wife while living in a repressive society. I love this story. It’s still my favourite.
Just like Novyy Mir, it gets held for consideration and ends up coming back to me with kind notes from editors. The last time it came back to me, the whole editorial board (5 people) had offered individual feedback because they felt moved enough by that story.
Still, neither of those stories has sold.
In between these two, about four years ago, I wrote “Last Breath Day.” This is a very short story, about 1,300 words long. It’s good, but not my favourite by any stretch. Three years ago, in the autumn of 2017, I submitted it to an open call from a UK publisher.
They bought the story. It became my first professional sale and appeared in the Alien Invasion Short Stories anthology, published in March 2018 by Flame Tree Press.
Shortly after that, it was picked up and record for a podcast, Tall Tale TV. (It’s episode 64).
Just today, it’s been accepted into another anthology, this one supporting literacy during lockdown.
That one short story, the middle child of my greatest hits (to date), has done so much for me:
It’s my first qualifying story for membership in the SFWA (Science fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Association).
It got me listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
