Let’s talk. First things first – are you still up for a writers group? I thought it would be important to move forward with something that let’s us focus on good things again.
Next, how do you want to approach this? Do you want to use it as a place to share journeys, ideas and ask questions of each other? Would you like me to bring in some people to offer their experiences in the post and possibly hang out in the comments to chat? I have a couple of people who are willing – one is Hillary Rettig – and I think she can provide some good insights.
Do you want to share works to get opinions from your fellow writers? If so, we’d need to discuss how best to do that. I’m thinking a dropbox-type link – as long as you realized there is no way to secure it – it would be available to anyone who clicks on the link (although with dropbox you can put an expiration on it – I don’t know about the other services). If anyone knows a better way, let me know.
Now, let’s talk about the rules here. I taught for years – many of my classes were for adults who needed a safe, accepting place to explore their creativity in a way their careers didn’t allow. That’s how I’m approaching this. I’m going to monitor the comments closely – this is not the place to be snarky, criticize your fellow writers or decide to unload personal cynicism.
While in all my other posts, including my recipe threads, I let you say whatever, here I will delete your comment. If you feel that’s unfair, you can email me and protest. Or, hey, John loves getting your complaints (in all CAPS if you really want his attention) and he can let me know I’m out of line. But this will be a place where people feel safe exploring their creativity. Period.
Okay, lets’ get started. Let me know how you want this to take shape.
ETA: Next Writers Chat is set for Dec 4th at 12est/10mst/9pst
ETA2: Okay, I’m going to read through this thread tonight and come up with a good plan for our next post. So keep posting comments…..
debbie
As a writer who hasn’t shared any writing (prose or poetry) with anyone, I look forward to the insights of the more practiced among us.
Also, beautiful photo!
jacy
I’m in. I’m interested to hear what other people would like to do.
As for sharing things — you can have closed groups in Dropbox. I work with Kensington Books, and we exchange things through Dropbox, you just give permissions to folders to only the people you want to see those folders.
Edward Pell
The Dropbox sounds good. I have always found feedback from peers most helpful.
Hillary Rettig
Thanks TaMara!
>this is not the place to be snarky, criticize your fellow writers or decide to unload personal cynicism.
totally support this.
Also, to add to the mix: when I help people speed their process I almost never read or comment on their content – I consider that a conflict of interest when I’m trying to help *them* become less judge-y. (And, yeah, OK, I tried it a couple of times and it backfired. :-/ )
So if people want both to discuss the process *and* do workshopping of actual pieces, I do think that’s two separate conversations.
Mark B
I’d love to be in on this. I’m actually doing some sportswriting now, and it’s been good for unblocking, because having to produce readable work on a deadline is a good exercise, but I want to get into more idea-driven writing.
WereBear
I like Dropbox, too.
Mr WereBear has been working on his fantasy trilogy and learned a lot from the Red Sneaker series. They are Kindle/audio on Amazon, might be available elsewhere, too. They specifically focus on important areas for fiction, like Setting, Dialog, Characters, Plot. What I have heard I love!
Hillary Rettig
@Hillary Rettig: clarity! not to say you can’t support each other in the process of workshopping. but if people want to have conversations just about process and overcoming blocks and barriers (without workshopping) I’d be interested in participating in that.
Miss Bianca
I’m down with whatever. I’m working on a NaNoWriMo piece right now, that wouldn’t be for public consumption.
Mostly a place to hang out and chat about process, contacts etc.
I agree about constructive criticism only. It’s been a tenet of mine since my first story telling class. As far as Im concerned, negative criticism only serves to aggrandize the critiquer, and does nothing to help – and often does much to traumatize/discourage – the critiquee. (and I say this as a salty-tongued bitch. I am great enough to contain many contradictions. Don’t judge. ; ) )
I rode thru’ a grove of aspens like that on my birthday weekend. When all other sources of “count-yer-blessings” fail, it’s nice to be reminded of how awesome it is to live in CO!
Hillary Rettig
I have to leave the thread but will check in later – H
Iowa Old Lady
I belong to an online writers group that’s locked and thus is useful for talking about things like agents, editors, and our own insecurities in private. I have asked some of them in to beta read for me partly because of how I’ve come to know them online, and that would most likely happen here too. But in a public place, discussions of process are probably most helpful.
Miss Bianca
@Hillary Rettig: Oh, and I would love to hear your insights on speeding the process. I am trying to just power thru’ a draft and not care about stuff that is going to need to be fixed/addressed in a second draft, and it is pure torture for me! ; )
Baud
If you are looking for a private discussion board, I believe anyone can create a subreddit at reddit for free and limit it to invitation only.
MomDoc
I am in too. I agree with DropBox as well. There are ways to secure things when using DropBox so I think that is good option.
I just finished my first draft of my first novel and haven’t shown it to anyone yet.
I am supposed to be working on the sequel for NaNoWriMo but the election kind of destroyed this week of writing for me.
hedgehog mobile
I’m still in. Need some positivity and focus. I have used Dropbox and it’s a ggod tool.
WereBear
As far as software goes, I am a total Scrivener fan. They even have an app which works on the iPad, so there’s another reason I never put down my iPad :)
For short pieces, Word is fine, but trying to write a novel with it made me practically cry with frustration. Where’s that scene I need to reference? I am tired of opening thirty chapters to do a search-and-replace for the character’s better name. Will it stop annoying me with things I don’t need right now and just let me write?!?!?
Explore the world beyond Word and you might be surprised how much the right tool can help.
Marina
I want all 3 options: share ideas, hear from people who’ve been through the querying/publishing /self-publishing process, and get and give feedback.
Thank you so much, TaMara, for doing this!
TaMara (HFG)
Let’s start with sharing ideas and talking about process. If we want to begin to share work, I can explore some options down the road. As far a a private group – if you guys decide that would work better for you, that might be a better track for you to go. We can decide which of you can start the group and invite others. Then these posts would come to an end.
Arclite
It was a dark and stormy night.
No?
TaMara (HFG)
Why don’t you guys give me some ideas for questions to start the ball rolling for next time.
I have to go out an do some gardening but I’ll check back in a bit. – T
Batten Down the Hatches
I am perpetually struggling to finish rewrites on my novel, so I will happily read/lurk/participate/whatever in the hopes that it will help me, and i’ll do my best to potentially help others as well.
As a side note, I am trying out a “writing help” coachng service that a friend of mine works for called OneRoom. In a month I’ll be able to report back and tell y’all here what I think of it.
jacy
I think it would be a good idea for everyone who wants to participate to make a list of a couple of questions — we have a lot of different people who are at different points in the process, and a lot of different people who have varying levels of expertise or experience. It probably wouldn’t hurt for everyone to make an introduction post: who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re interested in, what experience you have, what you’d like to achieve.
maurinsky
Hi! I am in for whatever the group decides. I’m working on my NaNoWriMo right now, some of it is entertaining as hell, some of it is complete shit, but this is actually a project I am very excited about and would like to edit, rewrite and possibly publish. I absolutely would love to have a safe group to share this with, whether that is Dropbox or some other program. I would like to discuss things like Scrivener, because I’ve only tried it once, but it was during Nano so I didn’t have time to learn how to use it.
NobodySpecial
Who I is: A guy who was always interested in writing but not enough for either formal education in such or anything more than lurking.
What I’m doing: Failing at my first NaNoWriMo. Three reasons why – 1) Election took a bit of wind out of my sails. 2) Entered in this on a whim, so no plan. 3) Lose ambition easily.
Basically, all I’d do is lurk and pick stuff up. I bring nothing to the table but idle curiosity.
jacy
Me: I write crime/mystery/horror/fantasy. I’ve published three novels and a book of short stories, and had short stories in a few anthologies. I’ve been a journalist, worked for an ad agency, and was a line editor on hire for Random House for a couple of years. Independently, I’ve been a developmental and line editor for works of fiction, but switched over to graphic design because it was less stress and more money. I currently exclusively design book covers and marketing materials for authors. I had hoped it would allow me more time to write, but it hasn’t so far. What I really want to do is get back to writing. I’m working on two novels and another book of short stories. My eventual goal is to have a small press. What I would like out of this group is to belong again to a community of writers, because I think that’s a great help. I don’t necessarily have questions. I do have connections with a lot of authors and publishers, and some level of expertise in the business, so if anyone has questions that I’m able to help with, I’d be glad to.
cosima
I’d love to point my daughter in your direction. She has an agent, and is in the process of editing it, and driving me a bit nuts with that process. When she was here visiting for a month it was all day/every day ‘want to do some editing?’ which of course I did NOT want to do 24/7. She’s finding it all very frustrating, but as a youngster is still a bit of an instant-gratification mindset, and I keep telling her that the editing process can take a loooong time. She can use all of the support that she can get, and I’ve got my own editing job (magazine) that keeps me busy, and have no idea where her agent is trying to go with the manuscript, so am really not as helpful as she needs.
Joyce H
I’m in. Not sure if we (this writing group) are staying here on BJ threads or moving somewhere else, but I’d like to participate.
Who I am: Joyce Harmon
What I do: I’m retired Navy, and I write and self-publish ebook novels. See the link above.
What I want to do: I think I just want to chat about the process. I frankly don’t like to beta-read or put my stuff out for beta readers. I don’t know about finding publishers and agents because I’ve gone the self-publishing route. But writer gab and encouragement, that I can get behind and I can talk about the self-publishing aspect.
Where I am now: To be honest, I’ve hardly written a thing in the past year. I have half a Regency written and have been stalled out, though I think and hope I’m getting my mojo back. (I gained a fairly significant amount of weight about a year ago, and maybe this is nonsense and superstition, but I sincerely believe that there is a weight above which I cannot write. I’m losing the weight and have at least started thinking thoughts again, so there’s that.)
I want to finish and publish my Regency, and move on to other projects in new genres. Before I started writing novels, I was a hopeful screenwriter, so I have a lot of stories that could potentially be novelized.
WereBear
I wrote three novels in the 1980’s, which got me a top-line agent, who got me read in many large publishing companies, and the first feedback was always full of praise and high interest. As was the second.
Each time though, it would hit a brick wall in Marketing, who would pull their thumbs out of wherever long enough to say they wouldn’t know how to market this (hello? Isn’t that your job?) and that. Would. Be. That.
After a few years of this, my agent retired, I gave up, and it was only recently, after writing for nine years in non-fiction (my cat blog) that I am ready for fiction again. Because now, I can just self-publish.
Iowa Old Lady
I’m a former tech writing professor who’s published a lot of scholarly crap and edited a scholarly journal. I’m currently writing YA and MG fantasy novels. I had an agent, but she was unable to sell my books to the big presses. We parted ways and I sold two novels to different small presses.
I like to talk and think about writing. Some of the most helpful discussions I’ve had have been when a group of writers picked apart something we’d read. I learned a lot from that.
jacy
@WereBear:
Have you considered self-publishing the novels from the ’80s?
Karen S.
I think discussing process would be useful. I write and self publish ebooks, predominantly LGBT romance, with my wife, although we’re branching out into sci-fi, action/adventure and paranormal. Sales are modest, but we’re at a point now where we pay the majority of our bills and sometimes our mortgage with proceeds from ebook sales, so we consider our venture a success.
I’m working on a project in NaNoWriMo right now. It’s very messy and a good exercise in turning off my internal editor. It’s all about getting the words out now. I work mostly in Scrivener. Like a few others have already mentioned, I think I’d just like to belong to a community of writers.
Joyce H
@WereBear:
Yes, yes! Very much so! And the great thing about self-publishing is that your story can be whatever length it needs to be, whereas in ‘traditional’ publishing, you have to meet a particular word count so all their mysteries or romances or whatever look uniform. AND you can write in genres that the trad pubs have declared ‘dead’. I’ve seen self-published gothics that have the old-fashioned lady in flowing white fleeing the brooding castle covers!
Not to mention the difference in royalties! The world is our oyster!
Joyce H
@jacy:
Good call – WereBear, go back and reread those novels, see if they’re still publishable.
That’s how I got started. Back in the mid 90s, I wrote a cozy mystery set in a winery. But when I’d finished it, the word count was too low. I put it aside to work on it, and one of the big problems with it was that I’d made it ‘high-tech’ for the time, and of course tech was changing almost by the minute then. So it kept getting more and more out of date, and finally reached the point where if I brought it completely up to date, that would make my characters with the Vietnam backstory too old. So the book just got shelved.
But then in the early teens, I was reading about self-publishing and suddenly remembered that I had a novel somewhere. I pulled it out and reread it, and the tech that was becoming out of date now seemed simply quaint. So I wrote a prologue and epilogue and published it and then wrote a sequel. (The sequel was harder because it was set in the late 90s and written in 2012, and that made keeping out the anachronisms surprisingly difficult. So I switched to Regency, where I just had to be able to tell the difference between a curricle and a phaeton.)
Applejinx
Yes, absolutely. I’ve written upwards of 1.2 million words since 2012 (eight novels, all genre internet fiction), and am preparing to launch a ninth in the same series. That’s on top of four earlier novels and a webcomic, so I know how to ‘turn on the creative on switch’. And since I settled on some pretty black-sheep genres, I shan’t be intimidating anybody, so I’m safe to have around :)
I have several hours of video on youtube dedicated to encouraging writers and have repeatedly done writing panels at fandom conventions, and those things have taught me that the highest goal of doing this sort of thing is to encourage writers and help them find their own voice. Nothing else is as important.
I am concerned about one thing: bear in mind, we will not be making money off any of this. That’s easiest for me to say because of my choices, but please understand that the whole amazon/ebook/etc thing should be seen more as a distribution concept than as a means for writers achieving self-support through their work. In practical terms, that can’t ever happen, and to conflate it with ‘success’ would be an unpleasant fate for the group.
Read John Gardner’s ‘On Becoming A Novelist’ for exactly the same message written back when physical books sold and there was a marketplace for them. This isn’t some new terrible news, it’s always been like that. Of the books that have changed my life, some of them were obscurities written by people who never once got even close to quitting their day jobs, for all that they managed to get on Tor or Del Rey back in the day.
And yet they changed my life: ponder that. Let’s not tie this group to money matters.
Applejinx
@Joyce H: That’s interesting! I’m fascinated by screenwriting and expect to be giving a panel on it at a fandom convention (some people got together a really cheerful-charley-amateur panel on their own despite having even LESS experience than I, and it turned out they’d wanted me on the panel and had never asked). Especially in this modern world, I think screenwriting is an incredibly interesting topic.
Mnemosyne
I am currently trying to get over my weird insecurity about the fact that, while I am a very good writer, the genre that keeps my interest and that I’m best at is romance. I have a voice in the back of my head that hisses Bad Feminist! at me even though the romances I prefer are all pretty darn feminist. I’m working on a Regency historical (i.e. it has sex in it) and I, too, stalled out during this election brouhaha. I’m hoping to get back to it today.
ETA: I have an MFA in Screenwriting, which I don’t regret exactly, but I’m not using it right now. It turns out that I am one of those people who can write fiction OR screenplays, but I can’t do both formats at once.
Applejinx
@Miss Bianca: When you’re trying to help someone find themselves and their art, the perspective of ‘this is how you failed my expectations’ is literally the silliest and least helpful thing you could possibly do :)
It takes a writer to be able to help a writer, because it’s like trying to find a character: you look at what you can see, and you go, ‘now what gives you the idea to say that, hmmm? What makes you tick, and where can I find consistency in you and nurture it so that you can resonate better with all that you are?’
Mnemosyne
@Applejinx:
Since I am an older woman than you are ;-) — I will say, when has any writer made serious money off writing? The Stephen Kings and Danielle Steels of the world are very much the exception. Even my favorite romance novelists — ones who were winning awards — were not able to quit their day jobs until they had a back catalog of 10 or 12 published books.
So, yeah, for 99 percent of writers, it will be a nice side income if you’re lucky, not your primary living.
Applejinx
@Mnemosyne: As long as I am around you shan’t be the most black-sheep genre. I _started_ as a furry novelist XD and there is absolutely no reason your fiction should be didactic: remember the heart’s stories can be most affecting when they are foolish and not really justifiable by the head. Courage, you’re fine <3
Joyce H
@Applejinx:
Why do you say that? I know of more than a handful of writers who’ve been able to quit their day jobs and become full-time writers through publishing ebooks. A few of them are in fact wildly successful, though they might not be household names, but self-supporting isn’t an unreasonable goal.
Iowa Old Lady
@Mnemosyne: You could take a feminist perspective on it and say that genres are disrespected to the extent that their most common audience is. Romance and women’s fic are scorned partly because they deal with concerns that fascinate women. YA and MG suffer similar fates. People sometimes ask me why I’d want to write YA rather than a real book. (I have an answer for that if you want to hear it, but it’s irrelevant to my point here)
jacy
I think you make a good point that this group is not about making money — it’s about a writing community. But the publishing landscape is changing very rapidly. Self-publishing is actually a viable way right now to make a career. It’s not get-rich-quick or quit-your-day-job scheme — there is a ton of marketing and promotion and hard work that go into having a successful career in writing, regardless of if you’re trad pub, self-pub, or hybrid. But make no mistake, I have scores of clients who self-publish full time and make a decent living off it. It’s hard work. I work exclusively in the publishing niche — it’s how I make my living and support my family. Yes I do have trad pub clients, but the majority of my work environment is in small press, independent press, and self-publishing. It’s very vibrant, and it’s growing and evolving, and it will continue to grow and evolve.
Again — I understand what you’re saying, but I’m pretty sure there are people who will be in this group who do make a living as self-published writers, as there will be those who write part-time, and those who don’t even necessarily want to write as a way of making of living. Hopefully this group will be able to offer something to everyone, no matter where they are or what they want to accomplish.
Applejinx
@Joyce H: And I am easily in the top 10% on patreon for my software programming work and can probably count on several hundred dollars a month from that, possibly growing possibly not. BUT, I’ve been doing that for well over ten years in the public eye, and can also count on hundreds of visitors a day to my software website.
Please be cautious and ask yourself: how many years or decades have I been doing this work in the public eye, possibly with commercial publication support, to establish my base for my self-publishing? I know a few people too, but I don’t know anybody in pretty much any field anywhere, who are earning a living off any internet e-thing, where they were not already earning a living for a decade or more already.
That’s very much the case for my software Patreon. I began that in 2007, and that doesn’t count at least another decade of practice and learning. It’s not fair for us to suggest any prospect for earning anything, to anyone who hasn’t been already earning from their writing for a decade or more.
Radiohead could put out an album of free mp3s and do well on voluntary contributions because they’re Radiohead. You may be too big of a star for the likes of humble little us :)
NMgal
I’m an aspiring screenwriter and novelist. I’m in for whatever folks want to do, whether it’s exclusively process and kvetching or adding a Dropbox closed group to share drafts for feedback. I also had the thought that the group might at some point consider an AbsoluteWrite forum, which has a lot of great participants and info. We could establish our own thread there and even password-protect it – the key is in plain sight but it would certainly be more private than here.
Miss Bianca
It sounds like we have a number of previously-published writers here. good to know!
My published writing has always been nonfiction – newspaper/journal articles or theater and arts criticism – and while I wouldn’t be averse to continuing in that vein, I’d really like to get a piece of fiction published.
My questions would be: Where do published writers see the market for fiction heading? Are established publishers going to become irrelevant, or are they still players/gatekeepers for the foreseeable future? Is it worth bothering with them, or is focusing on self-publishing the way to go? And if so, what are the best ways/means of doing so?
Here in Colorado, Jamie LaRue, a really brilliant and visionary librarian, with a strong interest in public access to e-books, was advocating a state-wide coalition of writers to e-publish. I don’t know what’s become of that.
Miss Bianca
@Applejinx: Music criticism was originally intended, at least in the 19th century, to be by musicians, for musicians. How it turned into “this is how I *feel* about your music” would be a fascinating (and probably depressing) read.
I like to refer to Frank Zappa as The Word on music appreciation for me: “If you like it, then it’s BITCHIN’. If you don’t, then it SUCKS.”
I got my clock cleaned pretty decisively by an acting teacher of mine for writing theater criticism that compared the production in my head to the production that was actually happening on stage. And while I would continue to argue that it’s legitimate to criticize a theater production based on actual analysis of the text, I was also forced to concede that he had a point. I got out of the business shortly thereafter.
@Mnemosyne: And I love romance, too. Feminists Who Love Romance, Unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
WereBear
@jacy: Yes, I have. And yes, I will :)
jacy
@Miss Bianca:
I can give you some preliminary thoughts on that to start a conversation, and hope some other people chime in with their experiences.
The market for fiction is expanding. One reason for this is access and choice. There are genres now that had no exposure, and now are well-established. Length has no meaning anymore. There is no such thing as too short or too long. New forms are arising. Serialization is making a comeback. Short fiction is making a comeback. And things will continue to change.
Established publishers will need to adapt, and are adapting. Once upon a time, self-publishing meant you’d probably never trad pub. No more. The stigma, if not dead, is very seriously ill. If you want to trad pub, you can get yourself out there and self-publishing will increase your chance at being either seen, or showing that your work has viability. I have clients who are trad pub and self pub, but also many who are hybrid. They have a line of books with the Big Six, and a line of books they self-publish (for whatever reason, and there are many.) I have a client who was offered a six-figure advance from one of the Big Six, but turned it down to maintain control over her empire. See, she could make more money self-publishing than trad pubbing. And she does. So the answer is to do what makes sense for you, and what plays to your strengths as both a writer and a business person.
As for the means of doing so — well, there’s a ton of things to talk about there!
Iowa Old Lady
@Miss Bianca: I have no particular insight into where the fiction market is going. I think what you do depends more on what you want from publishing or writing. What will make you happy?
Big publishing gives you a much wider distribution and readers are able to find your books by browsing in bookstores. My small press books will never be in my local B&N, but it’s a good choice for me because someone else does a lot of the work I don’t want to do.
Self publishing gives you more control over what happens, and you don’t have to deal with soul crushing rejection.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: Some of the writers I know about were established names… and are thrilled about the self-publishing angle, because before that happened, publishers were already discarding what used to be called the mid-list.
They weren’t Steven King and Danielle Steele, so the big publishing houses just dropped them. Now, they can take their own backlist (ALWAYS KEEP RIGHTS) and publish it themselves, and make a living again.
Eljai
Really enjoying all the comments here. I’d like to keep a daily writing practice, but I’ve been pretty undisciplined about it in the past. I’d be interested in hearing how others go about this.
Joyce H
@Applejinx:
OK, to be specific, there’s me for one. I’ve never written for sale in any venue other than ebooks. For a few months after I published “Katherine, When She Smiled”, I was earning several thousand dollars a month. I’m not alone. That’s really fairly common for romance authors. At the time of publication, I’d put out three publications in a year, and that’s how ebook authors do it. If I’d continued that publication history, I have no doubt that I would be making significantly more than several thousand a month; I know of romance writers who publish multiple times a year who are making tens of thousands a month, and a few who are making over a million a year. All on ebooks. Even in my case, with no publications over the past year, no promotions and a small backlist, I’m still earning several hundred a month in royalties. It can be done. Plenty of people, PLENTY of people, are doing it.
I’m most familiar with romance writers, but it’s not just romance. I was there on KBoards the day Wayne Stinnett announced that he’d quit his truck driving job and was going full time with his thriller writing. I don’t think Hugh Howey was every traditionally published and the guy’s a freakin’ millionaire now.
Look, I’m not saying that every self-publisher is going to get rich or even self-supporting. The writing has to be good and you have to keep bringing out more. But to say uncategorically that supporting yourself with your writing is simply not possible – that’s just not true. Not anymore.
Genine
I like the Dropbox idea for sharing working and feedback. I would also like a group on process. I agree that they should be two totally different groups for reasons stated above,. I’m doing a writing round robin right now. It’s been very helpful with getting me to write every day no matter what.
PaulWartenberg2016
I’m tempted but I’m busy with NaNo at the moment. lemme see how things are by the end of the month.
WereBear
@Miss Bianca: I would say small presses, writer’s coalitions, and maybe group websites are the future. I tried for months to get an agent or publisher to so much as look at my cat book, and they ignored me. This is what drove me to my own blog, and as soon as I get my health back, a serious of nonfiction books on cat management.
Because now I have my own audience, who I know likes my work, and I don’t have to give those short-sighted fools a penny. (Bitter? No. Exasperated? So much.)
TaMara (HFG)
@Genine: I’m thinking this will be easy to accomplish…just need to suss out a plan in my head.
WereBear
@Eljai: The only way to do it is to do it :)
But here’s some of my helps:
First thing in the AM while the brain is fresh. Or late at night when you will be left alone. Or lunchtime (Elmore Leonard wrote on the paper bag his lunch came in, during his lunch breaks, for years.) Pick a time and place and stick with it to train the brain.
Set goals: number of pages, one cartridge in my fountain pen, number of words, before you are allowed to stop. It doesn’t matter if half of it is “dear lord I cannot think of anything to write” or “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
Editing is after the whole book is drafted.
Honest, I get the most complaints about that last one. But it is really vital for me. Because it uses two different parts of the brain that are not easy to switch on and off, much less in-between.
jacy
@Applejinx:
I have clients who make more than a million a year self-publishing. I have clients who make $100,000 a year self-publishing. I have clients who make $10,000 self-publishing. I have clients who just want to publish their work, and it’s not about money. I can probably name you, right now, 75 people in my close circle who make a nice living solely on self-publishing, who have quit their day jobs. I’m not saying it’s easy, but neither is going to med school and becoming a doctor. It’s a lot of hard work, time, effort, and talent. There’s a load of marketing and research and lots of other things. It takes time, and one thing you have to do is continually improve and produce to get to that level. But it’s certainly common enough to make a living self-publishing online in eformat. Most people I know also publish in paperback also, because it costs nothing to do so once you have an ebook, but their main income comes from electronic media.
Applejinx
@Joyce H: I’ve earned upwards of five thousand dollars a month with the software, but it was incredibly inconsistent (something that seems not to be so much of a problem with Patreon, for all that it’s decimated my income). Those who haven’t experienced it might not be quite ready for that sort of life, where one month the slot machine pays off, and then the next three things you do flop, and you MUST be able to do a fourth and fifth regardless.
Not surprised that you can claim to have written three books a year, though! That’s the final answer on ‘how you do it’, and how I did my software thing, and how I got the largely non-commercial benefits I’ve got for my genre writing. I’m not sure I’ve quite managed three books a year, but the trick is to do that and then to have got lucky with the first or second so that you can get a bandwagon effect. Indeed you are on to something, and you’re accurately describing ‘how to make thousands of dollars a month writing ebooks’.
Who, alongside you, also wrote three ebooks but wasn’t lucky or wasn’t quite as good? There isn’t room for everybody. I’m wary of trying to direct people towards trying to replicate your experience when there’s a huge gambling aspect to it. We can’t go by averages if J. K. Rowling is part of the data set: it’s misleading. You may be our pet celebrity but as an entrepreneur-indie-DIY-selfpublishing type person, I consider it much safer to tell people outright that they will not make money by this.
Miss Bianca
@Iowa Old Lady:
Truly, the thing to keep in mind. What will make me happiest right now is getting a first draft finished.//
More seriously…I like the content of what I’m working on. But I’ve always been one of those people who, when it came to writing term papers and articles, had a happy knack for banging out something that was always at least competent, and sometimes even brilliant, as a first and only draft. Consequently, I never got used to the notion of writing in drafts.
Then came time to write my dissertation. And I crashed and burned. Because that “brilliant improviser” part of me would not, could not, accept the fact that the “first draft” wasn’t going to be good enough – or allow me to accept the process of successive drafting for what it was. Likewise with fiction. I’m always going back and editing and re-editing, rather than just getting on with the bloody writing.
There’s another topic for discussion, right there! ; )
ETA: Oh, yeah – the articles and term papers? Always had a deadline. The dissertation and the fiction, not so much. Hmm.
Applejinx
@jacy:
Plural, literally? Then it sounds like we ought to be putting our literary pennies in YOUR slot machine. Also, I’m quite curious to hear a breakdown of genres and distribution networks. I presume Kindle is a linchpin in this strategy on the strength of their market dominance?
wonkie
I belong to a writer’s group and what I found is that, while everyone wants their work to be read, no one is really interested in reading anyone else’s.
I am very interested in finding out more about marketing a book. I have a collection of short stories published by a smal new publishing business, available as an ebook or paperback, and I am working on a non-fiction account of the only large scale animal rescue in the US ever carried out without support of law enforcement.
I am also editing a fantasy novel I wrote several years ago. My publisher will publish the non-fiction book and will likely publish the fantasy novel,
But just because something gets published, does not mean anyone will notice it or buy it. My short story collection is listed on Kirkus Review as one of the best books of 2015 and I think I have sold maybe thirty copies.
Applejinx
@wonkie: This is what I mean, and why I feel we’d better be extremely cautious about taking a ‘let’s all become working writers with the magic of e-book commerce!’ angle here.
I’ve seen a group of writers in my genre (bunch of millenials mostly) get drawn into a sort of club by a fellow who swore he had a way for us all to make money as writers. He’d found a sort of ‘Mechanical Turk’ place that was a marketplace for nonfiction piecework (corporate, advertising, etc) and his idea was this: because he’d made some headway and lucked out, giving him a foothold from which he was able to build and get himself still more gigs, he proposed that we all join as well and then recommend each other. Straight-up manipulation of that market: we’d coach each other into having the right sorts of promo material, would conspire to build each other up, and be a sort of cabal since we all without exception had enough writing skill to get by on this website.
Only the first guy got anywhere with it. I saw everyone else flounder and not really get traction, and the whole cabal thing failed. I’d quietly backed away, because I was finishing up a novel at the time and trying to plan for original work afterward, and I wasn’t about to put that amount of effort into writing corporate blurbs to compete with writers in Jakarta and New Delhi and Moscow…
I can only caution against trying to make the group be a ‘e-commerce ahoy’ thing. Better to focus on the actual writing and nurture that, and accept that for most people there will never be any recompense whatsoever, not even attention.
msdc
I’m interested in the writers group, whether for feedback or process talk or both.
I’ve written a ton of short stories and serial fiction, submitted a few, published one, and I’m working on a novel draft that’s in need of re-evaluation and revision, but it’s been hard finding a community to discuss this stuff with since grad school (and, well, Usenet). So I’m in.
Iowa Old Lady
@wonkie: A discussion of marketing would be very useful, though it’s a late stage task.
Applejinx
@Miss Bianca: When I’m underway on one of my genre books, it’s on a website with many other authors and readers, and it’s commonly known that I WILL release a chapter on Monday. Period.
There are people watching and waiting: if I’ve been cliffhanger-happy, they’re watching and waiting and gnawing their fingernails to the bone :) I’ll expect hundreds of reads that day, though once you’ve done a million words or so, the same people who’ve praised you over and over before, have themselves run out of words and you’re ‘seeking validation through Google Analytics’: the page hit statistics tell you there are loads of people who’re just passively reading your story and feel you’re continuing to deliver what they’ve come to expect.
This is a thing that can happen in electronic media: if you have a context where you can write and have readers who’re reading your stuff chapter by chapter as it comes out, a deadline is completely appropriate. It helps them stay engaged when they know ‘Christmas Morning’ is coming, and it helps you get into a groove. And yes, you can still go back and revise, but my little secret is that doing it this way prevents you from throwing out stuff and going back to constantly retrace your steps. Turns out, continually throwing away your work is bad for it, and tending a growing fern of literary expression is good. :)
jacy
@Applejinx:
Yes, plural, literally. I’m not privy to every clients exact numbers, but I am part of their marketing and privy to some numbers. The genres that I have experience with personally with uber-successful clients are romance, women’s fiction, science fiction, mystery (especially cozy mystery), YA, and urban fantasy. Most successful clients do not put all their eggs in one basket: there’s both Kindle and Barnes and Noble, but also Smashwords (although it’s less important now), and a number of other eformat platforms. As I said, almost everyone also does paperbacks, and the method of distribution of paperbacks is expanding rapidly. It is no longer true that self-published books do not appear on bookstore shelves.
Specific example: I have a client who writes a successful cozy mystery series. She started this as an older lady, about four years ago. She has produced six novels in the series, along with boxed sets of those novels. She publishes in Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and paperback. Earlier this year, B&N announced that self-publishers who had sold a certain number of copies in a year would be carried in their stores. https://www.bookworks.com/2016/07/barnes-and-noble-opens-its-shelves-to-indies/
She was thrilled, because she was selling over 1,000 copies A MONTH in ebook alone. Now, without doing any additional marketing herself, she’s just reached a whole new level of distribution. As I said, it’s changing rapidly.
jacy
@Applejinx:
My feeling is that this group will not be at all focused on the money aspect of things — although it will be helpful for people to be able to ask about and discuss all aspects of writing, from being motivated to eventually marketing. So you’re putting the cart before the horse, in a way. My reason for participating is to be in a writing community, because that’s where I need help: motivation and improving my craft. But it’s just not true to say that self-publishing is not a way to make a living. Over the past 10 years, it’s increasingly become a very viable career path, and will continue to expand. And as it does expand, I imagine that more opportunities will become available for self-published or hybrid authors, and it will become even more viable. It’s already changed in ways that people would have found unimaginable 20 years ago.
WereBear
@jacy: I wanted you to know that sharing your expertise about the potential in self-publishing has cheered me up at a time I thought nothing could. Thanks.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I’m late to the thread, but am eager to participate/lurk… (Lurkticipate?)
I was a lit/comp instructor for 14 years at the community college level, an online tutor, and contributing co-editor to a couple science-based newsletters.
I have two YA novels in the can ready to self-publish, some essays, a screenplay, and two children’s books ready to send out to traditional publishing.
I’ve never belonged to a writing group, but am eager to see where it goes!
jacy
@WereBear:
Yay! If you ever need to be pointed at some resources, or just want to ask some questions I might be able to answer, just let me know. I have to stay on top of a lot of trends, because clients ask me crazy things. To stay in business, I’ve got to know the answers. :)
Applejinx
@jacy: All that fits with what I know about the business (though now I know you’re no indie: you’re working for something major. Amazon itself? You’re part of the distribution networks, not an outsider agent placing clients and finding them success, otherwise I think you’d be privy to their numbers)
Is your older lady in the vanguard of the cozy mystery boom? That’d explain a lot. Also note that she’s written more than one book a year, in a series, and may have been retired and able to devote her full attention and effort to her writing (at more than a book a year I suspect that’s the case). And good! That’s how you do it. However, if I’m right, she would have been OK had her first book not sold.
jacy
One other thing I did want to mention as a trend: audio books. Tons of independent authors are doing audio books of their works, even short works. I’m seeing that increase month upon month. So that’s another aspect that people might not have considered in marketing and distribution.
Applejinx
@jacy: All that fits with what I know about the business (though now I know you’re no indie: you’re working for something major. Amazon itself? You’re part of the distribution networks, not an outsider agent placing clients and finding them success, otherwise I think you’d be privy to their numbers)
Is your older lady in the vanguard of the cozy mystery boom? That’d explain a lot. Also note that she’s written more than one book a year, in a series, and may have been retired and able to devote her full attention and effort to her writing (at more than a book a year I suspect that’s the case). And good! That’s how you do it. However, if I’m right, she would have been OK had her first book not sold.
And I’d bet you cash money that she has a successful series BECAUSE the first book sold. You can expect a certain amount of attrition on each successive book, but each successive book helps sell more of the first one. People are into series and ‘to be continued’, when done right.
I also suspect the lucky ones didn’t pick their genres because they were trending genres. They stepped into those positions because that’s what they loved, and it happened to come up on the roulette wheel. Your cozy older lady could well have written her six novels regardless, even if the first didn’t sell ten copies, and that may be part of the secret.
…I confess this gets me thinking: do you mean you’re seeing a workflow for connecting already-productive genre authors WITH their markets? Because I will freely admit, I just don’t have the overall perspective to scan the market and find where people are consuming various things. You’re saying it’s now possible to isolate that stuff and feed it to its audiences, and that’s plausible. Are you finding it easy to connect distinct bodies of work with demographics that’ll consume ’em? Obviously to me it looks like sheer gambling, yet what you say checks out. Doesn’t mean it’s not still gambling, but I think part of the hope for ebooks is that you can direct marketing more specifically.
I still feel that every successful client you’ve got has been able to dedicate extensive time to writing without any hope of recompense. That’s sort of the nature of the beast: also helps if you’ve got decades of practice, though I daresay there are wacky outliers like the fellow writing dinosaur porn.
THAT is a whole marketing story on its own. Strange world we’re in when part of this market is driven by outrageousness. Get a story placed about the million-selling author writing romance porn about the love between burly men and Renaissance end tables, watch it go viral, and get as much as you can before the next viral story eclipses the last…
Applejinx
@jacy: I’m your resource on recording audiobooks. Sound engineering has been my day job for over ten years, plus I’m releasing sound-processing software free as part of the Patreon and familiar with pretty much everything involved. So if people here want to have professional audiobook recording quality, I’ll happily tell all. Heck, these days I don’t even need to sell copies of the software :)
Basic performance and acoustic treatment concepts will get you past 90% of the pack, I think, without even getting into the software/post…
jacy
@Applejinx:
Cool! That’s one of the areas I’m not as up on — I only design the covers.
WereBear
When my health was up for it, I did podcasts. Hope to get back to that again.
In a Purrfect World
Now my husband, the musician, leaped at the chance to get me a nice microphone and mixing board, but it’s fairly inexpensive to do it with a laptop and a decent mike these days. So I can offer a bit of insight on the artist end that way.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
Here’s what I’ve gleaned from being in my local Romance Writers of America group: if you’re going to self-publish, you really need to look at your finished work and see what niches you can market it to. With e-publishing and Amazon/B&N, there are way more niches you can reach than you could in the days when your book had to be physically printed and shipped to a store. One of the books I have on my shelf is a cozy supernatural knitting shop mystery romance — with cats! Whatever you write, there will almost certainly be a niche for it.
ETA Lurkers please note that I am NOT saying find a market and write your book to it. I’m saying that if what you write is something you love that calls to you, the current ebook market means you will probably find readers if you do a little research AFTER the book is complete and figure out which niches will want to read it.
jacy
@Applejinx:
I’m just a graphic designer. I run my own company, freelance. I have clients who are publishing companies and clients who are individuals. Whatever numbers I know, it’s because my clients share them with me. But I’m totally an indie.
My mystery writer did not see success take off until her fourth book. She works in healthcare — still full-time, even though she could quit. She loves her job and will stay on until she retires, I imagine. But this is what I’m saying — if you plan on making a living as a writer, it’s a long slog. But it is the same in any industry. Writers write because they must. They love it. Being good does not ensure success, but it never did. Being bad does not ensure failure, but it never did. Any writer should try to find their passion, and decide what their goals are. For some it might be expression — to speak and be heard. For some, it might be just publishing so that they can hold their creation in their hands and share it with others. For another, it might be a career that supports their family. All are equally valid goals, all are are attainable. For many, sharing the journey to whichever goal is a good thing. :)
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: Yes, great thoughts.
We don’t have to figure out how to stuff our work in an existing niche. The Web gives us potential access to the supernatural mystery romance knitters with cats demographic — and they will love to know there is someone writing for them!
Everyone needs a website, even if you have to start with one of those free blogs on Blogspot or WordPress. Give the future fans ways of finding our work. Amazon gives everyone an Author’s page: go look at them and see how it is done.
jacy
This is every writer, ever. You have to make the time to write, even when you have no time. And you have to do it imagining that it will never make you a dime. And then you have to keep doing it, so that you achieve a level of expertise. (Anybody’s first 10,000 hours at anything is crap, even if it’s good crap.) But at this point in history, a far greater percentage of writers are more able to make a living writing than at any time in the past — so that’s a good thing.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
I have a Gmail account for my pseudonym already. I should probably have at least a rough first draft of my book completed before I start on the website. ;-)
Applejinx
The nice thing is, these threads by definition will have both eager writers seeking encouragement… and writers who’ve put in a hundred thousand hours or more. I concede (cheerfully!) that for those of us maniacs who’ve done it all our lives without reward, this is definitely a leg up, and we’ve got better chances at finding those ‘niches’, though it is still a chance and not a certainty. Gotta protect yourself and also stay true to yourself.
I hope to hear about graphic design tips, jacy! The harrowing reality is that the ebook cover has a LOT to do with whether you’ll succeed in even being looked at for the first time. I’m not sure whether you get to preview audio from audiobooks, but this would be a similar thing: you could get or lose people in an instant, just on the first impression.
And yeah, remember that fussing over that stuff only matters after you’ve got a few books under your belt and know you can do it as an ongoing thing. Be a Terry Pratchett, not a Douglas Adams. Being blocked is no fun :)
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: Oh, just thinking ahead. We’re throwing out topics at this point, no pressure :)
But it is, as jacy says, a lot on the author to do what the publishing houses used to. But they aren’t at all the same; no more copy editors, for instance. One agent had a sheet to fill out, and one whole section had a place to list all your media appearances and celebrity contacts.
Like they only wanted celebrities, before you’d even done anything that made you a celebrity…
Terry chay
Let’s create a slack group and frien each mother on NaNoWriMo .
Those are my two ideas
Applejinx
@WereBear: Yes, that’s normal. You must have celebrity and an existing fanbase to build on. I wouldn’t have a few hundred bucks a month off Patreon if not for a decade of fanbase doing what I do.
These new systems are more like payment processors than ‘book publishers’ or ‘record companies’. It’s not on them to find you readers, you’re on your own. On the other hand, if you know more celebrities than anybody, they can get that word around to absolutely everywhere, and it feeds back on itself.
maurinsky
I am willing to read other people’s works. I can’t guarantee I’m the greatest reviewer, but I will try to be fair and honest.
Hillary Rettig
@Miss Bianca: Hi Bianca,
re tips for writing more speedily – aka overcoming procrastination – I wrote a whole book on that and there is plenty of stuff on my website (www.hillaryrettig.com) that you can read. I have some ideas on how we can discuss this topic every Sunday that I will share with TaMara. In the meantime below is a summary of the approach. I’m happy to answer questions on this passage. Just make sure my name is in your comment b/c that’s what I’ll search on. Best, Hill
Procrastination is not due to laziness, lack of commitment, lack of willpower, etc., but disempowerment – meaning that there are forces separating you from, or blocking you from using, your skills, strengths, talents, energy, etc. (Writer’s BLOCK, get it?) Laziness, etc., are not causes of procrastination, but symptoms. I promise you that once you overcome your disempowering constraints you’ll “magically” reclaim all the energy, commitment, etc., you think you’re missing.
Also remember that your reasons for procrastinating are always valid. Always. Confusion, fear, depression, poverty, lack of support, and personal or family problems are all perfectly valid reasons not to want to do your work: procrastination is just a suboptimal response. Whenever you are underproductive, therefore, skip the shame, blame and guilt, and simply work to identify and resolve the underlying problems, preferably within the context of a competent and supportive community.
There are key behaviors separating productive/prolific people from those who are underproductive: each addresses a major category of disempowering constraint. They are:
1) Overcome Perfectionism. Perfectionists define success narrowly and unrealistically, and failure broadly, and then punish themselves harshly for the perceived (inevitable) failures. They also: overidentify with their work, so that every failure becomes a kind of ego demolition; are grandiose, so that they expect quick and easy success even for difficult endeavors; emphasize product over process; and over-rely on external rewards and measures of success. They also: are shortsighted (the current project is always do-or-die), use a lot of negative labels (e.g., “lazy” or “loser”), relentlessly compare themselves to others (and always lose in those comparisons), and dichotomize (everything is either a “total success” or “total failure”).
In a typical procrastination scenario, you begin your work, and then the perfectionist kicks in with an abusive litany: “That’s horrible! Whoever told you you could write [or do art or activism, etc.]? You’re never going to succeed at this rate. And why don’t you write more, anyway? You’re so lazy!” It’s a desperate attempt to get you to perform “up to spec” and thus avoid the terrifying prospect of failure, but, of course, it only makes you more terrified – so that you are forced to procrastinate simply to escape.
There are three voices in that scenario, those of the fragile creator, bullying perfectionist, and procrastinator – who, by the way, is not your enemy but the valiant defender of the bullied creator: only, because she’s invoked by fear, she’s regressed and therefore limited in her coping options. I picture her as a smart and empowered 15-year-old who, like most teens, reacts to bullying either by opposition (“Screw you and all your rules!”) or learned helplessness (“Why even bother trying?”). That’s the heart of your procrastination or block right there.
The missing voice is that of the wise and compassionate adult who understands the true challenges of creativity, and also that abuse is not only ineffective, but morally unacceptable. That’s the voice you need to grow within yourself, and when you do, you’ll find your fears around your work lessening, and also your need to procrastinate. You grow that voice in three ways: (1) journaling, and especially dialoguing with the perfectionist; (2) timed exercises where you practice doing your work in the absence of judgment; and (3) participating in compassionate and humane (in the broadest sense) communities. (More on strategies 1 and 2 here.)
2) Resource Yourself Abundantly. The underproductive worker is typically the one working on a flaky computer in a dusty basement with the mildew and cobwebs and last season’s wardrobe. The prolific worker, in contrast, claims the best room she can, decorates it to her taste and needs, and invests in top-flight equipment. (While it’s true that some people don’t have a lot of money to invest, it’s also true that many who do choose to spend it anywhere but their work.)
3) Manage Your Time. Productive people live consciously and deliberately. They know their values, needs and priorities, and align their actions as much as possible with them. They budget and schedule their time, and invest as much of their time as possible in high-value activities that: (a) are mission-focused, (b) leverage their strengths, and (c) create impact or change in the real world. They are comfortable saying no to tasks they can’t or don’t want to take on, and they also delegate constantly. They avoid time- and energy-sucking dysfunction and drama, and also live frugally (a win for the environment, too!) because they understand that too many possessions, and too much debt, are a kind of slavery.
4) Cultivate Effective Work Processes. Underproductive people tend to approach their projects linearly: they try to finish A before moving on to B, C, etc. This is a precarious way to work because if A, B or C happen to be difficult, you’ll get stuck. Productive people, in contrast, see their works as 2D or even 3D landscapes, and work on whichever part seems easiest or most appealing. (Among other advantages, this lets them work “around” the hard parts till those parts get easier.) When writing, they do lots and lots of drafts, each a tiny improvement over the previous one, instead of limiting themselves to a few excruciatingly honed drafts.
5) Overcome Internalized Oppression and Ambivalence. Internalized oppression is when you buy into negative stereotypes about you or your work. If, while you’re trying to write a novel, do veg activism, or even just live your life according to your own values, a part of you is thinking such endeavors are wrong, stupid, silly, futile, etc., that’s going to create a huge ambivalence that can stop you dead in your tracks. You need to be absolutely clear on who you are, what you value, and why you value it – as well as what you’re willing to invest and sacrifice to attain your goals.
6) Avoid and Overcome Traumatic Rejections. Most underproductivity is catalyzed by traumatic rejections, so if you experience one, cope strenuously via journaling, discussions with friends and mentors, and (in some cases) speaking your truth. Always seek to avoid traumatic rejection in the first place, however, by only dealing with fair and honest people in a context of equality. Avoid oppressors or exploiters no matter what benefit you think you’ll derive from the association, and recognize that rejection comes in many forms, including harshness, callousness, neglect, marginalization and deprecation. Finally, don’t believe anyone who says you need to get a thicker skin: the goal is to have a thin skin so that you can be sensitive and alive and responsive to the world around you – and to surround yourself with people who are the same.
7) Create an Empowered Career. Empowered careers are characterized by equality, nonviolence, collaboration and a sense you’re using your strengths and skills to good purpose. They feel good, create positive impact/change, and surround you with other empowered beings. We all know that there are many disempowering jobs out there – and that many employers are taking advantage of the recession to further disempower employees – but there are also many empowered ones. If you are stuck in a disempowering job it is very important that you leave. See my free ebook It’s Not You, It’s Your Strategy for a good job-search strategy.
So those are the seven key behaviors of the prolific. Please note that it would be perfectionist to expect to embrace them all fully in a short time. :-) The path of empowerment, productivity and joy is one you travel along for life, taking mostly small steps.
Martha
Very late to this thread but I would like to participate as well. I am finishing a historical western right now (!) and could use the collegial interaction and know I need to learn about new ways of getting work into the world. I haven’t been able to find a group since we moved to CO (hi Miss B!)
JanieM
Also late to the thread. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I said before that I’d like to participate, and there are some strands being fleshed out that would be of interest to me. (Maybe going forward there will be separable subthreads…I think someone has already mentioned this idea, so I won’t belabor it.)
I’ve written millions of words in my life, though only a few have ever been published (op-eds over the years, but not recently; also a Ph.D. dissertation long ago). In co-authorship with my daughter, an indie author, I have a cozy mystery 3/4 finished, and plans for sequels. I have written sections of what might be a memoir, and outlines for a novel or two. I have vexing questions about memoir vs fiction using the same basic material, so if anyone wants to talk about that or has experience with it, that would be a strand I’d be interested in.
My biggest need is for a community such that my participation in it helps me keep motivated. I haven’t figured out how to settle down and finish things, and there are many distractions: work that is heavily mental, so my brain gets burned out; too much blog-reading; and etc.
I am also an accidental but I think pretty decent editor (mostly copy editing, but also evolving into something of a line editor, if I understand the distinction correctly). I do a lot of editing for a local non-profit, and I used to do a lot at work, even though I’m primarily an IT person. I also edit for my daughter, who has been an indie fiction writer for five years, an enterprise that has kept evolving along with this new wild west of a publishing world. I do the editing and technical stuff (formatting and uploading), she does the writing and marketing. She has done well if not spectacularly so.
I’m heading for retirement (although maybe not as soon as I thought given the results of the election), and I’d like to have a small income stream to supplement SS and savings. My daughter’s example makes me hopeful that I might be able to earn it by writing.* But I’ve also thought about freelance editing, and I’d be interested in hearing from people who’ve done that…maybe in a subthread at some point.
* And no, I do not need a sermon from Applejinx about this, I’m actually a grown-up with a lot of direct experience of indie publishing. My daughter sold books right out of the gate five years ago, no fan base, no celebrities involved, just good stories, a good cover artist, and some attention to how marketing was evolving in the indie world.
JanieM
I did a memoir workshop recently and John McPhee’s New Yorker essay “Draft Number 4” was mentioned. Maybe people are familiar with it, but if not, have a look. I love the first paragraph:
Colleeniem
@WereBear: Send me your stuff!! I will pay! Send me the donation link!
Miss Bianca
@Martha: Hi, Martha! Funny, I know a Martha who is one of the wisest, funniest women I’ve ever met, who also used to write historical wsterns. Right now I’m listening to coyotes and dogs having a show-down/pow-wow down at the compound on the next road over on this night of the hugest moon. Best of luck with your work – I look forward to reading it someday!
stinger
I’ve done a wide range of business writing throughout my career and am now finishing my first novel (historical fiction/retelling older tales). My daily writing practice is to write one usable sentence. Research notes, outlining, character sketches, self-reminders, etc., are all important, but there has to be one sentence that actually fits into the story. I can skip ahead, or go back to a section that seems unfinished, but One Usable Sentence. It may get revised or excised later; no matter! And one sentence very often turns into two, or a paragraph, or a conversation. A good day is 500 words or more, but that’s not my goal. I work full-time and have other demands on my time, and some days one mundane but usable sentence is all I can muster. The practice has resulted, after two years, in a novel in which I expect to hit the 90,000-word mark tonight or tomorrow. Only 2 or 3 chapters to go!
JanieM
@stinger: I like that one usable sentence idea. For me it’s actually sitting down to write that is the challenge. If I thought all I had to do was one sentence, that might get me going. Like with exercise: if I make my goals too ambitious, I’m daunted before I ever start. If I say: a mile of walking a day and my stretches, then I almost always end up doing more.
stinger
@JanieM: That’s exactly how it works for me (both writing and exercise). And, also for both, I HAVE to do them every day. If I can get them in first thing, I feel happy and energized the rest of the day. If not, then I’m squeezing them before bedtime, when I have little energy and less time. But I write.
John M. Burt
I definitely want to play.
I published my first novel, The Christmas Mutiny*, in 2011, and should have had my second, Frankenstein’s World**, finished by now, but haven’t. I’m aching to get finished so I can get started on American Victory.***
I’m still not making much money at writing, but I am definitely getting better at it. It’s interesting to notice myself noticing myself getting better.
*What if the soldiers decided the Christmas Truce was too good to end?
**What if Victor Frankenstein had started a biotechnical industrial revolution?
***What if the evil empire of the Golden Circle set its sights on a parallel world?