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…. I don’t necessarily mean me, mind you, unless I actually happen to be your favorite author, in which case bless your little ink-black heart.  But I can guarantee you that no matter who your favorite author is, whether they’re a traditionally-published best-seller or a struggling indie, they’ll greatly appreciate it if you do any of the following things, today or any other day:

• Write a review of their book on Amazon. Can’t ignore the 500-pound gorilla in the room — Amazon almost certainly drives the majority of your favorite author’s sales, and the more reviews and ratings a book receives, the more likely Amazon is to promote and recommend that book.  This is probably the number one thing you can do to help get the books you love in front of people’s eyes and into their hands.  If the thought of writing a “book review” is putting you glumly in mind of your school days, don’t stress over it — you don’t have to write an essay or anything, just a few sentences about why you liked the book.
• “Tag” their book on Amazon.  If you add the appropriate labels for a book (for example, “thriller,” “ghosts,” “serial killers”, etc.), then that also helps improve the book’s visibility, and makes it that much more likely someone will see the book when they do a search for that kind of fiction.
• “Like” their book on Amazon.  Book listings on Amazon now have a little “thumbs-up” button on them, which should be a familiar concept to any of the 250 million or so of you who are on Facebook.  If you’ve got literally five seconds to spare to help an author out today, while this probably doesn’t do nearly as much good as reviewing or tagging — it sure can’t hurt, either.
• Add their books to a “Listmania” list on Amazon.  I’ll be honest — I personally don’t pay a whole lot of attention to Listmania lists, but there are definitely people who do, and this is another way you can help an author’s visibility.  Maybe put together a collection of “Best Horror Books for $2.99 or Less,” for example.
• Boost their  Social Media signal.  Are you following your favorite writers on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Digg, Tweedle, Bloost, or Splinder?  Of course you are, even though I may have made those last three up.  Anyway, if so, when they have something they’re promoting there — a new book, a reading in your hometown, a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new project — help spread the word.  Retweet their tweets, share their posts, let people know.  If you follow their blog and you think a post is particularly interesting, pass the link around.
• Review their books on “social reading” sites.  If you love to read, and you’re not already a member of Goodreads, Shelfari, or LibraryThing, you should check them out.  They’re a great way to find new books to read via recommendations from people with similar tastes.
• Let them know you like their stuff.  Odds are, your favorite writer has a website, blog, Facebook page, or some other on-line means of contacting them.  So why not, you know, contact them?  Drop them a short note to tell them how much you like their writing.  Unlike the other suggestions on this list, this won’t increase their sales, but feedback is always nice, too.  Send them e-mail, leave a comment on their blog, send them an “@” message on Twitter, show up on their doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and a handgun.

Uhhh — let me look at my notes again, here.  Yeah, no, scratch the “doorstep” one.  But the rest of it’s good.

(If you’d like to show my book, Slices, a little love, here’s a link to it’s Amazon page.  Give it a thumbs-up, a couple tags, or even a review, and I will love you forever, I honestly will.  Happy Valentine’s Day, you lovely people, you.)

You might notice, looking back on things I’ve linked to and posts I’ve written, that I’m a big fan of blunt advice, the kind that grabs you by your shoulders and shakes you up a little.  Tough love, you might call it.  I think any problem is best tackled with a wide-eyed, clear-headed, no-nonsense approach, and I don’t think that you help someone get to that point by talking around the issue and sparing their feelings.

I think this is especially important when we’re talking about writing, because writing is not just about truth, it’s about Truth — capital-T, 48 point gold-embossed type Truth.  Even if we’re writing about spaceships and monsters and vampires with rayguns, if there isn’t real human emotion contained in your fiction, it’s not going to be worth reading.  You can’t bullshit your way through telling a story, not a story that matters, so I don’t think you should bullshit yourself about the process of how you tell those stories, either.

So I appreciate reading any writing advice that makes me sit up and pay attention and say, “Oh, crap, you’re right.” This list of six reasons you’re not going to make it as a writer did just that:

Wondering when you’ll reap the fame and fortune that come with your dream of being a writer? Well, probably never. If:

1. You don’t read

At least, not the right things. You read all the books on writing and polishing and publishing, and all the books that literary critics are praising, but nothing of any real value. You don’t read books that light a fire under you, you don’t read in your genre, you don’t read non-fiction for fun and inspiration.  You don’t have an Audible membership or a library card and you couldn’t name a book that has meant anything to you since you turned 20.

[...] 5. Your Writing Sucks

When you do make the time to write, it’s hard. The words do not come dripping off your pen easily; all the elements in your story don’t come out in the right order; your characters are flat and uninteresting and they speak in cliches; you want to give up.

And that is what Anne Lammot calls your ‘shitty first draft’. It has to be got through in order to get to the second draft, the third, and the polished end result. If you are too scared to suck, too scared to fail then you will never be a writer, because all writing involves putting some truly terrible prose on the page — and excising it later or, like William Faulkner, throw it out entirely and start again.

– 6 Reasons You Will Never Be A Writer

That first point hit home for me especially hard.  I’ve known for years that I wasn’t really reading as much as I should be if I wanted to write well.  Fortunately, that’s really turned itself around — since I first got my Kindle, less than a year ago, I’ve probably read more novels than I’d read in the last three or four years combined.

The rest of the list was definitely worth checking out, too, and contains some great quotes from famous writers.  You should go read it.

1.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.  Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money.  Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.

2.  While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.

[....] 18.  People use whatever is close at hand for bookmarks–toothpicks, photographs, kleenex, and the very ocassional fifty dollar bill, which will keep you leafing through books way beyond the point where it’s pr0ductive.

[....] 21.  A surprising number of people will think you’ve read every book in the store and will keep pulling out volumes and asking you what this one is about.  These are the people who leave without buying a book, so it’s time to have some fun.  Make up plots.

– 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore

NOTICE

(This post has been removed from this site by order of the United States government for linking to copyright-infringing material.)

Naaah, not really, of course. Our government would never do anything like that.

No, if SOPA passes, they’d never be cracking down on individual posts. Instead, if they found a post, a comment, anything that contained such a link — well, they’d just kick bloodletters.com off the Internet entirely.

Wait a minute, you might be saying, practically every website that exists probably has at least one link somewhere to copyrighted material that shouldn’t be there …. They can’t be serious, can they?

Serious like a heart attack, kids. This is a stupid, dangerous bill — well, two bills, really, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House — and they’ll have tremendous consequences that could shut down websites you use every day.

You probably already know about this. Major sites are doing their best to get the word out. Some sites, like Google, are blacking out their logo, like I’ve done above; other sites, like Wikipedia, are shutting down for the day entirely in protest.

So why am I taking your time to point all this out again? Just so you keep thinking about it. We can’t stay silent on this. The bill is dying as we speak, but we’ve got to keep the pressure up to make sure it stays dead.

So. If you haven’t done it yet, go visit americancensorship.org or Google’s “End Piracy, Not Liberty” page and sign their petitions.

Not convinced that signing an online petition will do any good? Yeah, me either. Here’s a convenient way to contact your representative in Congress:

house.gov: Write Your Representative

Here’s a slightly less convenient way to contact your Senator:

Senators of the 112th Congress

I just wrote to Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, and Jay Inslee, and here’s what I told them:

As a voter in your district, I want to urge you to vote “no” on the STOP ONLINE PIRACY/PROTECT IP Act on Jan. 24th.

I understand that online piracy is a problem, but this bill is not the way to attack it. Forcing American social networks, blogs and search engines to censor the Internet only hurts the wrong people, and would have an insurmountable chilling effect on free speech and innovation. The Internet, as it exists, has created millions of jobs and created an inprecedented resource for information and communication, and deserves your protection, not only for the sake of everyone using it today, but for generations to come.

Thank you for your consideration.

Go, do it now. (If you’re trapped at home in the snow today, like me, you really have no excuse not to.) You’re welcome to use my words above, but we’re more likely to be taken seriously with something other than form letters, so please consider writing your own. Thanks.

It’s here, it’s here! “Detritus,” the anthology I sold a story to a couple of months ago, has just been released, and man, it looks good.  My story, “Heroes and Villains,” looks like it’s in great company:

The impulse to collect springs from deep within the human psyche Squirrels gather acorns, rats collect shiny things, but only humans assign meaning to the objects they collect. Detritus is a collection of stories about the impulse to collect, preserve, and display gone horribly wrong. [...] Each of the stories, whether about a collection that is world changing or intensely personal, is sure to linger in readers’ thoughts and make them consider the possibility that malice and evil just might lurk in their own hoard of stuff.

– The Detritus Anthology is Here!!! Happy Friday the 13th | Omnium Gatherum.

If you’d like to add this book to your collection, the electronic edition is available now at Amazon, and the print version is available directly from the publisher, Omnium Gatherum.  Just scroll down to the big, shiny, candy-like button.

Remember that book giveaway I did at Goodreads back in October?  The main reason that writers do those — I mean, the main reason aside from our inherently generous and giving natures, of course — in in the hopes that some of the people who receive your book might review it on the site.

So I’ve been sitting back and patiently hoping for reviews ever since.  (Well, as patiently as I ever do anything, anyway.)  I’d kind of assumed that when someone reviewed my book, I’d automatically get an email letting me know.

Well, either my assumption was wrong, or the notification ended up buried in my email somewhere, because when I looked at the Goodreads page for “Slices” today, I was surprised and delighted to see that there are in fact already reviews on it!

Check them out!  Great comments like:

I do not like short stories, but I liked these short stories. I do not like spooky stories, but I liked these scary stories. What does that mean? You have a new fan.

And:

[...] I was pleasantly surprised by how varied, and interesting, each of the stories in this anthology truly were. Montoure uses familiar tropes such as vampires and ghosts, and yet twists them into a very different re-telling of the usual stories told again and again in our current culture.

And even:

An interesting collection of horror stories. Some were great, others not so much.

Hmmm.  Well, maybe not that last one.  Heh.

It’s great that this book is starting to get out there and find readers, and so much fun to see how people are reacting to it.  Very, very gratifying.

(Hey, if you don’t have a copy yet, and you’re the kind of person who likes writing reviews — contact me.  I’m happy to give away free e-book editions to people who will promise they’ll post an honest review on Amazon.  Thanks!)

My first video! Here I’m performing “Remake,” one of the stories from Slices, at the Reading Room in Seattle last Halloween. It’s a little over thirteen minutes long. I’ve got a couple more of these from another reading that I’m going to post soon — let me know what you think. Thanks!

Watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3xr88Fw7hpk

Hey there, good morning. On Friday, I posted a few words about setting goals, and about what it means to do that. I told you I was going to sleep on it over the weekend, and come back and tell you what I’m setting out to accomplish this year.  This is the post-bullshit, scrap the New Year’s Resolutions, cold-slap-of-reality version. This list looks pretty reasonable to me.  You can hold me to this — if I don’t live up to these by December 31st, I’ll buy you a drink. Yes, you.

Get back to a better blog posting schedule. For a while there, I was doing really well with Bloodletters — I had a routine of putting together three posts over the weekend, and timing them to go live during the week. That was working out quite nicely, and like all good habits, it was really easy for me to let it slide. However I want to end up scheduling things on my end, I want to make sure I don’t end up going silent for a whole month again like I did in December. “Better” is a very subjective term, and I’d have a hard time holding myself publicly accountable for that, so let’s turn that into a nice, concretely quantifiable goal: Maintain an average of posting at least twice a week throughout 2012.

Post video content. So I have this spiffy high-definition digital video camera I bought back in April of last year. Since then, I’ve filmed a couple of my readings, and taken some behind-the-scenes footage during filming for Causality. Have I bothered to put any of this cool stuff online? No — no, I have not. In fact, I never even sat down and figured out how to get any of this footage off of my camera and onto my computer until last night. This is more than slightly ridiculous, and I need to fix that. So, let’s say: Post at least half-a-dozen readings and at least one book trailer in 2012.

Do everything I can to get Causality Season One finished. Okay, see what I did there? I originally wrote, “Finish Causality Season One,” and then I remembered what I said last week about goals being things you have the power to accomplish on your own, and I realized I was being a tremendous hypocrite. We have a pretty amazing team working on Causality, and I feel pretty sure we will have it done by then. But all I can promise myself is that I will try my hardest and do everything I can do.

Finish and release Still Life. This is the big one. Still Life is the novel-length continuation of the story “One Last Sunset,” which appears in my collection Slices and which many people have told me is one of their favorites. If it’s one of your favorites, and you’ve wondered what happens to Nikki Velvet after the events of that story — well, the answer to that has been sitting on my hard drive for years now. There’s quite a bit of work that needs to be done on the manuscript still, but I think it’s entirely doable to rewrite it, edit it, format it, and have it online in time for this year’s Christmas season. (And now that I’ve said that in public, I’m going to sit over here in the corner and hyperventilate for a while.) I love this story too much to keep neglecting it, and I owe to Nikki to get her story out there.

Get my individual short stories up online. That’s what I meant to have done in time for this Christmas season, but it fell by the wayside. I’m going to release some of the stories from my collections as stand-alone e-books, as well as several short stories that haven’t seen the light of day anywhere else. Let’s say I’m going to have at least twenty short stories available for sale in 2012.

Submit to at least half-a-dozen anthologies. This seems to work for me — I see a call for stories for an anthology, I get an idea from the requested theme, and it actually gets my butt in the chair to get some writing done. And if it doesn’t get accepted, well, I still have a new short story. That went well last year a couple of times — one of those stories did end up in the anthology, and it will be out this month. It’s a good habit and I need to keep it going.

Release another collection of short stories. Kind of a no-brainer. People do seem to like them. I like them.

Publish a new edition of Counting From Ten. By this point, the original has been out of print long enough that the rights have reverted to me. (And if my original publisher has any argument with that, he should answer my e-mails every once in a while.) I have a few copies of the original edition left, but not a lot of them. It’s time to dust it off, polish it up, revise the stories in it a little, maybe add a new story or two, and definitely some bonus content, and get it back out into the world.

Actually promote things once in a while. This is another big one. I’ve been doing all this cool stuff, and I’ve been doing a lot of research about how an indie writer like myself can promote his work on the Internet, and now I need to start doing some of it. I need to come up with a more detailed marketing plan, which I’ll tell you about when I’ve done it, but for now let’s say I’m going to approach at least fifty book-bloggers and buy advertising in at least three places in 2012.

Okay. Umm, that all looks like a lot. I’d better get to work. Talk to you soon.

… Good grief, has it really literally been an entire month since I last posted?  Sorry, everyone — my birthday is in early December, and between that, Christmas, and New Year’s, I was running on maximum distraction mode.  I did manage to get a few things done last month, but blogging apparently didn’t make the list.

Anyway, if you’re anything like me, you’ve finally caught up on sleep after New Year’s Eve, and the hangover might be starting to fade.  You’re looking over that list of New Year Resolutions you made and thinking, hell, I’ve blown half of those already.  This might depress you enough that you might even be looking in the back of the fridge to see if there’s any of that pitcher of sangria left.

Okay, stop.  Let’s back up a second — toss out that list of resolutions and let’s start over.  Let’s start thinking about our actual goals.

No, wait, keep backing up.  Let’s make sure first we know what a “goal” is.

I’ve always had the same definition as Dean Wesley Smith, who says that a goal is something that is within your control.  If you have a “goal” in mind that relies on someone else — an editor, an agent, anyone else — then that’s not a goal:

So when some writer talks to me about a goal of selling a book to a traditional publisher by the end of the year, I just snort and they walk away insulted. I wasn’t laughing at their ability to write. Not at all. I was laughing at the goal they set and put a deadline on that was out of their control completely. Such goals are guaranteed to create disappointment.

via Dean Wesley Smith » New World of Publishing: Failure is an Option. Quitting is Not.

He calls these not-goals “dreams”, which I think sounds a little dismissive.  I’d call them “ambitions,” maybe.

The point is to think about and focus on what you can do.  You can’t say, “I’m going to sell 500 books on Amazon next month,” because that literally relies on what 500 other people do, and that’s not something you get to beat yourself up over.  You can say, “I’m going to finally buy that ad space on Kindle Boards like I keep thinking about,” and with any luck maybe that will help you sell those 500 books.

You can set goals for your writing.  Maybe you can decide you’re going to write a thousand words a day.  Not bad, totally reasonable.  But then you start thinking, but wait, what if I don’t manage to write those thousand words every day? What if I fail?  And then we’re back to the sangria again.

Okay, look, if you don’t manage to write anything at all after setting such a goal, then maybe you can say you’ve failed.  But if you’re actively reaching for your goal and you fall short of it –

Well — so what?

How many of you took part in NaNoWriMo this past November?  Did you make it all the way to 50,000 words?  No, huh?  Petered out at 38,000 and you’ve been kicking yourself ever since?

Look, you may not have hit your target, but if you’ve written a substantial chunk of a probably perfectly salvageable novel, that is not a “failure” by anyone’s definition except yours.  Think of that one friend of yours who hasn’t written a damn word since English class ten years ago but keeps saying he’s “going to be a writer someday.”  Him?  He’s a failure.  (Although you might not want to say that to his face.)

You didn’t hit the target, then you stop, reload, take aim again.

This weekend, think about what exactly you want to take aim at throughout this next year.  I’ll be doing the same, and we’ll meet up again on Monday.

When I was a little kid, Star Trek was one of my favorite things in the world. I loved the idea of computers you could talk to. In one episode, they showed an apparently ordinary typewriter that took dictation. A character from the 20th century was very startled by it — “it’s typing everything I’m saying!” she said.

“Man,” I thought, “if I had that typewriter, I’d be able to get so much writing done.”

You see, the problem is, like many writers, I’m inherently lazy. (It’s true! We really are. Why do you think so many of us refuse to find proper work?) And there are some days when my mind is clear and the ideas are flowing, and I would love to get some writing done, but the idea of just sitting down and actually typing something seems like way too much work. Also, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a cat who loves to curl up in my lap, who makes it a little difficult for me to type. He’s doing it right now, in fact.

So I’ve been keeping an eye on speech recognition for a while. For a long, long time, the state-of-the-art was pretty primitive. There is a book about the subject that has a title I’ve always loved: “How To Wreck A Nice Beach.” (If you don’t get it, say it out loud, really fast.)

I tried buying some speech recognition software, oh, probably about a decade ago. It didn’t go very well. I had to spend a long time “training” the software to understand the peculiarities of my voice. And once I was done doing that, well, the results were not too good. Sentences would start well, but then trail off into random strings of deranged rambling. (Any smart remarks about how this is no different from my normal writing style will be summarily ignored.)

After that, I pretty much ignored any advances made in the field until recently, when I noticed that the speech recognition of my Android phone’s search feature was actually pretty damn good. Huh, I thought, I wonder if the desktop software equivalent has gotten any better?

I started seeing reviews from other writers talking about the very same software that I had abandoned years before — Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The reviews ranged from “hey, this is not bad,” to, “this has changed my life.”

I was more than willing to give it another try, even though I was slightly annoyed to realize that I couldn’t just buy it online with a credit card and download the damn thing. I had to actually buy a CD of it and have it shipped to me in a box. But, when Black Friday came along, I decided to see if Amazon had it on sale. Turns out they did. I got it for less than 40 bucks.

As the more clever among you may have guessed, this very post you’re reading was created using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (If you didn’t guess that, jeez, try to keep up.) I have a really decent USB microphone, the same one I bought back when I thought I was going to start podcasting, and I’m sure that helps the accuracy here. But the software itself has definitely gotten a lot better too.

All in all, this post probably took me a little longer to compose using this software than it would’ve if I had just typed it. And, yeah, I did have to go back over it all by hand and correct some of mistakes that I made. (Especially in that last sentence, ironically enough.) But once I get used to it, I can see this actually being easier than typing.

Will this actually make you more productive? Hard to say. But it does remove one more barrier of laziness, and quite frankly, I need all the help in that respect I can get.

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