Our featured writer today is Richard Roberts.
Let’s give him a warm welcome!
If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series or Authors in Our Midst series, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.
Fun, With Bullshit
by Richard Roberts
Good chronal aberration, jackals, and thank you for coming to my Balloon Juice post. Today I will be lecturing you about Fun, With Bullshit.
Bless you, oxford comma.
Watergirl has given me this chance to lecture you because I have a book coming out on January 4th, called Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead, about a 15 year old girl whose super power is necromancy. It’s hard juggling a super power you’re not good at, creepy ghost ancestors, evil skeletal conquistadors, mean girls at school, your new boyfriend, and your new girlfriend all at once. Now with any luck Watergirl will add the book cover image I will give her below, and link it to the Amazon page to buy that book and we can get on to the pearls of wisdom.
As much as I look at how my ex-publisher blowing up affected my sales and feel like a failure, I am one of the incredibly lucky few who was making enough money as an author to live off it independently, and the trend in my royalties suggests I might reach that again in a couple of years. So, presumably, I am hot shit and have the moral authority to tell you all how to succeed. That’s how this works, right?
(See end of post for caveat) The first of two lessons I will preach is: Go big or go home. In fact, forget going home, just go big. Crank that sucker up to 11. It does not matter what you are writing, go all-in. The last thing you ever want to do is blend, be just another book on the shelf. One in a million writers will hit the fantastic big time with their mediocre novel that was in the right place at the right time, and those odds suck. So, make people go “You like X? You need to read Obvious Pen Name. Wow. So much X. Excuse me, I have to go read that book again.”
Crank it up. End that fight scene with one punch so brutal it ends the fight that fast, or stretch it out with snowballing chaos that destroys the city. Are you writing tragedy? Cut your reader’s heart out. Have the hero kill his mother who you have built up as the most lovable character in the book. “That’s too cruel!” No, it’s not. There is no prize for moderation. Are you writing fantasy? Yeet your castles up into the air, keep them up there by perching them on sleeping wind dragons, cover them with runes, throw in a freaky rose oracle. Is your schtick fantasy with a layer of normality? Put a jaded grandmother on that throne who yells at adventurers for making a mess when she can’t get cleaning staff because it’s a flying castle. I may not be into tech military style scifi, but if you do it, by the sun pony you research your calibers and building materials and assault your readers with whatever detail makes the weapon the heroine is pointing awesome – or garbage.
Plus, and this is important, going big is fun. You’re not writing tragedy unless you enjoy twisting the knife, so cackle with sadistic glee as you look for ways to make it hurt a little more. There is joy going “Bats. I like bats. I will add bats to my flying castle. Magic bats. Magic bats that are in the heroine’s bedroom and won’t go away!” You will enjoy the writing, you will write more, your passion will bleed into the text and suck in the reader, and your odds of success go up another notch. Hoo boy, do you need every notch you can get in this game.
Which leads to Bullshit. “But Sublime Richard!” I get to claim I hear you cry because I’m writing this, “I can’t do that. It wouldn’t make sense!” Your job as a writer is to make it make sense. To make it fit into your story, to make it fit into your world, to jam the square peg into the round hole and make your readers think that’s where it always belonged. It is a skill, not a magical talent. It can be studied, practiced, and learned. And that skill is called Bullshit.
Seriously. Bullshitting is one of a writer’s most essential skills, and for once, that is not bullshit. You don’t have to have the real answer to anything. You have to have a plausible explanation, and since as the writer you are God, you have a big advantage. You say your hero would never murder his mother? Oh, yeah? When he was so jittery he panicked and set the bomb off before seeing who walked in the door? Sure that would require incredible amounts of being jittery, but as God you can go back and drop in the foreshadowing comments about how little sleep he’s getting and how much coffee he’s drinking. You can make him complain about his own jitteriness in the bomb analysis process. You can establish how this couldn’t be avoided, or worse, it could have been avoided but didn’t seem important until suddenly your readers know something awful is about to happen, but not what. Now something insane seems inevitable and plausible.
Remember, you don’t have to be right. You have to sound plausible. That’s all.
And it’s a skill. It can be easily practiced. Pick some whackadoodle idea and try to come up with a justification. Time travelers from the sun? Where else were you going to find the physics-mauling conditions required for time travel? Come on, people, it’s not rocket science. They’re from the sun, they never needed rockets. They can spit and a solar flare will launch them where they want to go. Plus, ‘plausible’ varies according to setting. If you’re writing comedy, ‘plausible’ means you can make a joke about it. Bonus points, for most styles of writing, you want to minimize explanations to avoid the dreaded “In this modern age, our cars work on-” effect. An occasional hint at a scientific justification that is really just bullshit is enough.
Just keep practicing and it will become easy and automatic, and the practice is fun.
Caveat time. Random chance is an overwhelming factor in book sales, and makes it hard as hickory to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless, good writing and good techniques are important. You can’t change life’s die roll, but you can ensure that a bigger set of results means you win, that ‘just missed it’ becomes ‘just got it’.
Thank you, and may Celestia bless your apple orchards. Also buy my book.
Afternoon Open Thread: Puppy Update
WaterGirl
Richard, please let us know when you get here.
Frankensteinbeck
I am here, in the treasured Second position!
WaterGirl
@Frankensteinbeck: Notice how nicely I set you up for that
edit: the artists and authors posts sometimes get off to a slow start, so keep checking back.
Frankensteinbeck
@WaterGirl:
You deliver a cue beautifully. It helps that my post was so long that everyone got lost on the way to the comments.
Old School
Your books sound fun. My daughter, Middle School, just got overloaded with books for Christmas, but I’ll have to have her give yours a shot and see what she thinks.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
How is your book selling? What do you think of Crossroad Press? Did they give you any help along the way? Also, do you have an agent? I’m still looking for an agent, so any tips on finding one would be most helpful. Gracias.
Frankensteinbeck
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
I hear the preorders are going well, but it’s been a month since I had an update. Crossroad Press only contacts me when I need to do something, which is not a bad thing.
I like Crossroad Press. They give a simple, straightforward service with a very high royalty rate. They’re an odd little company that specializes in side books of established authors, and getting authors who have been cheated (like me) back on their feet.
They mostly perform basic services. Editing, a cover made out of photomanipulated stock images. They have an advertising package for a book release, but I can never remember what it is. They make you pay for your own bookbub, but there’s nothing skeevy about that. They suit my needs as well as a small press can.
I do not have an agent. I have never had an agent. I tried to get an agent when I got my rights back from Curiosity Quills. No one is interested in me. This fact boggles everyone I know, since I have a fan base and that makes me guaranteed money. I cannot give you advice on getting an agent, alas.
SiubhanDuinne
@Frankensteinbeck:
Do you advise reading the books in the “PDTMP…” series in order, or are they standalones?
Roger Moore
@SiubhanDuinne:
The “PDTMP” books need to be read in order. They’re a series that refers to events in previous books.
Frankensteinbeck
@SiubhanDuinne:
Every book starting with ‘Please Don’t Tell’ is in chronological order. The first five Please Don’t Tell books are one overarching story, and while you can get away with reading just the first book, the other four really don’t work independently or out of order.
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For A Supervillain and Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead assume you know some characters and the world, but they are independent stories and origins for new characters, so they’re pretty easy to read independently.
I Did Not Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence is set in the same world in 1980, and probably makes no sense to non-adults. Irene is a manic enough main character that she can be hard to understand if you DO get the cultural references. It would help a reader to have experience with the world, but it’s a prequel, so theoretically it’s fine to read alone.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
Great, thank you! That is what I shall do.
And saving your #10 comment as a reference.
ETA again! Woops, sorry, thank you Roger but I thought it was Frankensteinbeck who had responded. As he, in fact, did after I replied to you ?
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
@Frankensteinbeck:, how do you get in with Crossroads? I don’t guess you can just call them out of the blue. Do you have to be established?
Frankensteinbeck
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
I don’t think you can call them out of the blue. I was referred to them and vice versa by one of their authors. I am pleased with them. They have delivered exactly what they promised so far, and it’s a good deal for someone in my position who supposedly can bring in my own audience.
Miss Bianca
@Frankensteinbeck:
I really hope “Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a Supervillain” is the first in the series, cuz that’s the one I ordered for the tween in my life (my great-niece).
Omnes Omnibus
What if I don’t really care for bats? I mean, I am not an antibatist by any means. They eat insects and all that. I just don’t really care for them. Can I substitute wolves? I like wolves.
Citizen_X
Great advice in your post, Richard!
Just a general question: publishing, the traditional way, or self-publishing? Pros and cons of each? Again, I mean broadly/generally; I don’t mean to monopolize your time with this question.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I will take your bats. I like bats.
(I am a Southern Battist.)
Frankensteinbeck
@Miss Bianca:
The order:
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Have Henchmen
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis
Please Don’t Tell My Parents You Believe Her
Above are the Penny Akk storyline. The next two books follow new characters in the same continuity and sharing supporting characters from Penny’s books.
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For A Supervillain
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead
And I am currently writing
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
This seems like the kind of thing they’d be able to figure out on their own…
(Yes, I know that it’s entirely possible within the world for someone to be a giant monster part time.)
Miss Bianca
@Frankensteinbeck:
Sweeet, thanks!
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks.
Yarrow
I got your first two books for a young family member who was around 12-14 years old at the time (can’t remember exactly). They were huge hits. She finished the first one on the four hour drive home and devoured the second one the next day. Her mom told me she reported they were her new favorite books.
Frankensteinbeck
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, and with enough bullshitting, you can make the wolves hang from the ceiling and fly around the room. That’s the point.
@Citizen_X:
This is basically the toughest question there is, one that has no clear answer. I will throw out some Pros/Cons I know.
Traditional publishers provide you advertising, and vastly increase your odds of success.
Traditional publishers are no guarantee of success. Lots of traditionally published books fail.
Traditional publishers almost completely monopolize bookstore access, and thus the physical copy industry. Small press and independents rely on ebook sales. Seeing your book in bookstores feels gigantically validating.
The system for getting traditionally published is broken. Utterly broken. It is a mess, hugely random, requires an agent, and even getting an agent follows no system anyone honestly understands. Like Hollywood, everyone is chasing their superstitions and guesses about trends.
All the bamillionaire authors are traditionally published.
Traditional publishers sell your book for a brief period of time and then hold onto the rights for a long time after.
Independent or small press publishing keeps your books on sale always, permanently, cross-selling each other.
Cross-sales are incredibly important for success and building up an audience.
Traditional publishing is very, very boom-and-bust. There is no guarantee you can sell them your next book, or how they’ll treat it.
Independent or small press publishing is still very boom-and-bust, but it is much steadier. In particular, it builds as you write more books.
Formatting, editing, and obtaining cover art are surprisingly difficult. Small presses do this stuff for you, for free.
If your publisher of any kind charges you for anything, run for the hills. Ditto an agent. Honest publishers/agents get a cut of profits. There is a whole industry of scammers that prey on new authors.
Small presses offer very little if any advertising support. It varies, but nothing even close to what a traditional publisher does.
Small presses offer much, much better royalty rates than traditional publishers.
Traditional publisher contracts are as or more likely to be skeevy and booby-trapped than small press contracts.
patrick Il
Afternoon open puppy thread followed by have your hero cut his lovely mother’s heart out.
nice dynamic tension
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Frankensteinbeck: That’s a really good summation.
Yay for having your series back out there.
lowtechcyclist
Best use of “it’s not rocket science” ever.
Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff)
I remember when the first one came out…started my son on them…lost track for a bit but just got him Please Don’t Tell My Parents You Believe Her
Frankensteinbeck
@Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff):
Ouch, he left off at the cliffhanger ending between Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis and Please Don’t Tell My Parents You Believe Her? That is awful. It is also believable and common, because that’s when I found out my publisher was stealing from me and we went through the fun of getting free of them. There was a huge delay between 4 and 5, then 5 got taken down quickly anyway.
JeanneT
Oh man, if reading your books is half as fun as reading this essay, I have got to try them out.
schrodingers_cat
Any advice for non-fiction writing?
Frankensteinbeck
@JeanneT:
The tone of a book depends on its purpose. All the books in the Please Don’t Tell My Parents universe are meant to be fun, so the writing style is playful. I Did Not Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence is certainly the funniest, because Irene is so manic she packs a joke into every line. The others are more relaxed. Mostly.
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodingers_cat:
Not really, beyond ‘the tone of a book depends on its purpose.’ That should apply even for non-fiction. Figure out who your audience is, and what they want to read. They may want their facts presented in a silly way with anecdotes, or in page after page of graphs. Narrative fiction is what I do and what I have trained myself to.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks! What about something like creative writing, say a memoir. Or historical fiction that straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction like the Hillary Mantel’s series.
Also, how much exposition is too much?
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodingers_cat:
Historical fiction is narrative fiction, and I think all narrative fiction rules apply… except possibly this one. Hmmm, interesting. I would suggest the twist there would be that if you are writing about an actual event or historical person, and you want to claim this is as-close-to-truth-as-possible, you pick the most extreme episodes you can. Those will be most interesting to read. If you are merely writing about someone in historical circumstances, I see no problem with cranking that sucker up. It would be fun to read the story of the (not existing in real life) woman who Henry the VIII made a pass at, she slammed a chamber pot over his head and escaped, and that’s why he was so pissed off he decided to start decapitating wives.
As for exposition, EXPOSITION BAD. I must admit a personal bias that I prefer to explain nothing, and often don’t explain enough. You cannot go ‘no exposition’. Never, ever start with it, and split up what absolutely needs to be explained amidst action and dialog, trying to find moments that it is relevant to slip the fact in. Someplace where someone would actually care about this fact and be thinking about it.
zhena gogolia
Congratulations on the book launch!
Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff)
@Frankensteinbeck: Yeah…Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Have a Nemesis was part of Christmas 2018…lost track of keeping track, I mean…so, 3 years on that cliffhanger.
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
Okay, I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of that, so I’m engraving it on some nearby tablets and will be referring to it frequently while trying to get my own writing done. Keeping the fun up front and centre is my new mantra.
Also, my kid is always on the look out for new series to devour. Yours is on the list.
oldgold
Movies?
Frankensteinbeck
@oldgold:
I doubt it, ever. I can’t see a path from here to there unless I become so massively popular people come looking for me. Which HAS happened.
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony Jay:
Not an accident. Like I was saying, the tone depends on the purpose. That also means it depends on the audience. The popularity of your commentary demonstrated to me that ‘lengthy, slightly manic, playfully humorous, edged with sarcasm’ is a style that the Balloon Juice audience likes.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Roger Moore: Seriously: if you need an answer to that, do a web search on Ultraman… the absolute best entertainment available that consists of two guys wrestling in rubber suits… you know, unless you’re *into* that kind of thing.
(Oh: I’m not kidding about the “best entertainment/rubber suits” bit. And, all Ultramen I’ve known of turn into giant heroes to fight equally large monsters. Which, if you think about it, sums up the movie Boa vs Python exceptionally well.)
(B v P is where a deadly, killer python escapes, so they release an equally large boa constrictor to kill it. Which – I mean, think about it, there’s some government agency that has appropriately size boas to handle any emergency. And seriously, how many problems won’t be solved by an equally large boa constrictor? Inflation? Equal sized boa constrictor. Unemployment? Well, that might take 2-3 boas, but come on, man, think percentages! ISIS? Equally large boa constrictor. Iran? Iran-sized boa constrictor. Trump? Equally large boa constrictor – bigger than that Iran-sized one, for sure!)
@Frankensteinbeck: You’ve summed up my learning of the (sci fi/fantasy) publishing industry *very* well. From “go big” to “WTF does *anyone* know about publishing that doesn’t come with a 7 figure advance?”
NB: I’ve been told I write a decent story. I agree with that assessment – emphasis on “decent”, vs “extraordinary”. I’m a failure – no sales, ever – as a professional writer. That said, *everyone* (I’ve spoken to, with respect to becoming a published author…) agrees it’s better to go big (hey, one person’s biggest nightmare is bigger than a world-ending apocalypse… to *that person*. So show me how this is the worst of the worst, or bestest ever…) and it’s *hard* to become a writer who can actually quit their day job.
Frankensteinbeck
This has run three hours, folks. I’ll try to check it later, but for now I’m putting it away. Thank you everyone who read and commented, and I hope this Almost Top 10,000 Blog gets me many sales. Oh, and that you enjoyed it or found it useful or whatever.
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
Can’t argue with that. There’s ‘finding your voice’ and ‘reading for the room’ and shooting right down the groove between them like you knew it was there all along is a skill that I’m given to understand only looks effortless.
Personally, I find it damned hard.
EntroPi
Back in the late 90s, maybe early naughts(?), the webcomic I helped start and was the tech guy for, decided to start putting out collections. This was before e-books were a “thing” and when self-publishing was basically viewed as a vanity project so no one would buy it. So we basically created a faux publishing company (based on a HHG2G reference), with our own ISBNs and all that which we published under. We did amazon’s program where we would ship them a few books at a time. Lent a few of those ISBNs to other webcomic friends, but… being a “real” publisher, even small press back then was way too much work for reward.
Curious how (ballpark) eBooks vs (assuredly PoD) paperbacks stack up for you these days, sales, how small publishers deal with percentages for each, etc. Again, w/o personal details, obviously. Also, with your original publisher gone, but the books still being sold, what happens to your cut of those? Was that part of some sort of negotiation to get your rights back?
Ordered the first book in the series. Sometimes YA stuff is a much more fun read than what people a half century old are supposed to be reading.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
Having read my share of historical fiction, this seems right to me. When you read real history, or at least history that gets to the individual level, there’s almost always a moment that must be true because they’d never let a fiction author make up something like that. You need to incorporate those in your historical fiction, ideally changed as little as possible. The ideal work of historical fiction should have the reader wanting to read the history so they can figure out what was real and what was made up.
xephyr
I hate it when well developed characters I’m deeply invested in get offed – unless it serves a justifiable purpose. But sure, turn it up to 11, put the pedal to the metal, go for broke!
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks good advice!
There is an incident in the Maratha history which I think would be a great setting for a historical novel.
It involves a political assassination engineered by a war hero, treachery, messed up extended family dynamics and a coup attempt.
Another Scott
Excellent thread, thanks. Pre-ordered.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Primer Gray (formerly Yet Another Jeff)
BTW, I’m still creeped out by all that red goo…so…good work.