Subscribe to my mailing list for book releases, readings, & more:

Your address won't be shared with anyone!

• May 2012
• April 2012
• March 2012
• February 2012
• January 2012
• December 2011
• November 2011
• October 2011
• September 2011
• August 2011
• July 2011
• June 2011
• May 2011
• April 2011
• March 2011
• February 2011

blogbooksstoriesarticlesreadings

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.

So this morning over on the Twitters, @elkoholick asked me a question:

. . . I said I thought that was a slightly wide-ranging question to answer in 140 characters, and promised that I would write up a blog post about it instead.

I suppose first off, I’d point you to a couple of things I’ve written before: “Making the Leap” is the introduction to my latest book, and it goes into some detail about my history with writing and publishing, and the road I took to making the decision to self-publish said book. You might also want to check out “Saying No to Ninety-Nine”, where I talk about why some writers are pricing their e-books at 99 cents, and why I don’t think it’s a good idea.

. . . Okay, you’ve read those? All right, so, let’s talk actual advice.

1. Figure out if you’re honestly going to be satisfied with self-publishing.First off, I have to give the caveat that I don’t have a ton of experience with traditional publishing — I’ve sold to some on-line markets, and had some small-press success, but the only time my work has appeared in what you’d call a Real Actual Goddamn Book was my story for “How the Doctor Changed My Life.”

But, well, I’ve never really had a lot of interest in the idea of traditional publishing, either.  Real publishing moves too slowly for me; I’m way too impatient. It can take years to place a book with a publishers, and maybe a couple more years after that to actually get your finished book into bookstores. Also, all the promotion that publishers used to do to advertise your books? Yeah, they don’t really do that anymore, not in this economy, not unless you’re Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer. New traditionally-published authors, and even established midlist authors, have to hustle just as hard as indies to make sure people find out about their books. So the way I figure it is, if I’m going to be the one doing all the work, I am sure as hell going to be the one keeping all the profit.

So that’s my “victory condition” — making the most money off of my work, keeping all the control over the product. But that might not be your victory condition. You might end up deciding that what you really want is to have a “real” book, to have the legitimacy and respect of having a big publishing house behind you, to maybe see your book in bookstores. If you decide that’s what you want, don’t let anyone talk you out of it. You’re playing your game, and no one else can decide for you if you’re winning or not.

2. Keep your e-book prices down.99 cents is too low — you don’t make any money and people are going to think your work isn’t worth more than that. But they’re not going to pay a lot more than that, either, not for someone whose name they don’t recognize. You’re going to want to publish through Amazon’s Kindle store — that’s really where all the action is — and $2.99 is the lowest price point where their royalty rate switches over from chicken feed to a decent 70%. Price your novel at $2.99. If you ever have a series of novels someday, a lot of people have had success at pricing the first one at 99 cents and the rest of them at $2.99 or higher. Something to keep in mind someday.

3. Print-on-demand is awesome. But don’t expect to make any money at it. POD books used to be crap– cheap paper, a binding that would fall apart, a cover whose glossy plastic surface would start to peel at the edges. Those days are gone. The books you get from somewhere like CreateSpace look and feel practically indistinguishable from anything you’d pick up in a bookstore. And there is nothing like holding a physical book in your hands that has your name on it. They’re wonderful. And people are not going to buy them.

If you suspect people might think twice about spending as much as $2.99 on an e-book from an unknown writer, then you know they’re not going to plunk down $12-$15, plus shipping charges, for a physical book from said same writer. But, on the other hand, setting up your book on CreateSpace is free. So why not? Think of it as being there to be available in case anyone who loved your novel decides they have to have a copy to grace their shelves. Think of it as something that might make a nice present for your Aunt Millie. Or, if you do want to really sell a few of them, you can do what I do: order copies for yourself, at cost — it’s pretty cheap to go that route — and sell them by hand. Sell them to your friends, sell them at readings, sell them at conventions.

4. People do judge books by their covers. If you’re not an artist/designer — and I mean a good one — then you need to find someone who is. Your cover absolutely has to look good enough to compare favorably with a cover from a major publisher. People scrolling through lists of books on Amazon glance at each cover for literally less than two seconds before moving on. (They’ve timed it.) If your cover doesn’t make them go, “Oh, hey, what’s this?” then it’s never going to matter how good your book is — people aren’t going to look at it. Some cover that you think is just merely “good enough” is going to look like amateur hour to your potential readers. Get a good cover.

5. Oh, yeah, and your words matter, too. The words inside the book, natch — someone other than you will need to edit and proofread the damn thing, and you’ll probably have to pay them. Having another set of eyes is crucial — believe me, I’ve done proofreading professionally for years, and I can’t catch all the mistakes in my own prose.

The words in your book description matter, too. Again, just like your cover, a flat and uninteresting description on your Amazon listing will make a reader’s eyes glaze over almost faster than they can hit the back button. Go look at some listings of your favorite books, see how their descriptions are written, study and replicate their structure.

6. Get ready to hustle. Remember all that promotion I was saying traditional publishers don’t do any more? You have to do it. Don’t worry, you don’t have to buy ads in the New York Times and go on a multi-state book tour. But you do need to build a following, using every bit of social networking you can — Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and more. A lot of people put their book up on Amazon and sit back and wonder why it’s not selling. Simple — it’s not going to sell unless people know about it. And that’s your job.

Well — that’s about all I can think of off the top of my head, and probably enough rambling out of me for one day, anyway. Any questions?

I’m really pretty psyched about this — I’d asked Timothy C. Ward if he’d be willing to review “Slices” for me if I sent him a copy, and he said that he would, sure — but that his reading list was so stacked right now, he wouldn’t be able to get to it immediately.  No worries, I told him, and sent him a copy anyway.

Turns out that he read at least the first story, and he liked it so much that he’s starting a new column on his blog just to spotlight short stories, and mine was the first he’s reviewed!

“The premise of a hypochondriac mom turning a whole city on its head is layered with intrigue and suspense, as her son tries to figure out how to stop a plague that might or might not really be happening. Michael’s details and present tense first person create a tactile experience of the chaos to come when people start getting sick. Great psychological horror like this puts the reader in terrifying circumstances where one has to get a little dirty in order to survive. I really enjoyed seeing the character arc in motion, and was completely engaged to discovering the solution to his epic problem. The mythos of his mother’s powers creates layers within the story that make this a story you can read over and over. The ending is perfect, and keeps you wanting more.”

You should definitely go check out the rest of the review at his site — he asked me a few questions about the story, and you can read my answers there, and listen to the exclusive audio excerpt he managed to sweet-talk me into doing.  (Creepy piano music in the background is courtesy of Kevin McLeod.)

If you haven’t had a chance to read “Cold Season” yet, and this review talks you into it — since it’s the very first story in “Slices,” you can read it for free by downloading the Kindle sample of the book.  Just go to the Amazon listing and look for the box on the right that says “Try it free.”

Man, I just realized — I never announced the winner of my Coffin Hop giveaway, did I?  Here I made such a big deal about it, and then I left you hanging.  Sorry!  I’d already mailed the winner directly, and I made an announcement on my mailing list, but I never posted about it here.

Okay, well, let’s correct that — the winner is J.C. Martin — writer, kung fu instructor, and fellow creepy doll enthusiast.  Congrats, J.C.!

I’ve also contacted the other entrants and offered them copies of “Slices” in exchange for a review of same, so no one had to walk away empty-handed.  I think all of them enthusiastically agreed — I don’t think anyone’s unaccounted for.  So, yeah, I will be dropping those books in the mail sometime this week.

Now I bet you wish you’d entered, don’t you?  Well, take heart — if you’d be willing to review “Slices,” I’m always willing to hand out free coupon codes for an e-book version.  Just drop all the way down to the bottom of the page and you’ll find my e-mail address — just let me know you’re interested and I’ll be happy to set you up.

Many thanks to everyone who entered!  Hope you all had a great Halloween.  (I’m still not quite ready to admit Halloween is over, myself, although the calendar tells me otherwise.)

Another year, another Halloween, another successful reading! Sorry I haven’t posted sooner — on Wednesday I was too busy with the Day Job, and on Tuesday I was too busy nursing a hangover. (Apparently, a couple of White Russians, plus a liberal amount of Halloween candy? Not a good idea. Who knew?)

Many thanks to everyone who came out, especially to those of you who brought friends who had never been to one of my readings before. I’m glad they had a good time, and I hope I’ve helped to cement your reputation as someone who knows when the cool shit is happening.

Everything went very smoothly, except ironically enough, after years of me telling people to turn off their damn cell phones before I start, I forgot to turn mine off.  And so my “go-to-bed” alarm went off during the last story.  Twice.  Considering that I have stopped talking to a friend of mine who actually answered her cell phone during one of my readings, I’d say I at least owe myself a good hard slap.  Well, maybe we’ll take the hangover into account and call it even.

Oh, yes, and one other thing happened.

My curse struck again.

No, really, go back and look through my list of readings I’ve done and you’ll notice a strange pattern emerging.  The first readings I ever did outside of science-fiction conventions were at a little Goth/Industrial coffee shop — yes, really — called Aurafice Internet and Coffee.  I started doing readings there in 1999, and kept doing them there until they closed down in 2006.

From there I moved onto Wayward Coffeehouse for my 2007 reading, and kept going there until a fire forced them to close their doors in 2010.

In January of this year, I had a reading at The Night Kitchen, a much-missed establishment that closed down back in August.

So what I’m getting at is, when I showed up at The Reading Room — which only opened, what, a couple months ago?  – I was pretty floored, but once I stopped to think about it, honestly not all that surprised, to find this sign out front — “Our final night.”  (Click to embiggen.)

Yes.  Really.  They were closing the next day.  I am now killing venues dead on contact.

What I’m really getting at here, kids, is that I’m gonna need a new venue to read at.  So — if you can think of anywhere in the Seattle area that would be perfect for my needs, and that you would like to see go out of business, please, by all means, let me know in the comments.
______
(A couple of people have pointed out to me that Wayward Coffeehouse found a new location and just reopened, so it seems to have escaped my curse.  These people are ruining my perfectly good doomsaying with their irritating logic. I am happy that Wayward’s back, though.)

I just wrapped up my book giveaway for “Slices” on Goodreads — it ran from October 12th to October 26th. I had five copies of my book up for grabs, and as soon as I found out who won, I dropped them in the mail that very same day in the hopes they’ll get there in time for Halloween.  A few people have asked me how the giveaway went, so I thought I should post about it.

In just two weeks, 1,264 entered for a chance to win, which was way more than I expected. According to this interview with Patrick Brown of Goodreads, the average giveaway gets about 750 entries. So I’m pretty excited about the response.

Why did it do so well? I think there were a few factors at work here. First, I think giving away a horror book at Halloween is probably about as easy as giving away snow cones at the beach in August. Secondly, I think the work I put into having an interesting book description and a professional-looking cover must have paid off.

Thirdly, I have a ton of friends on Goodreads right now — over 700. (Did you know you can import a list of your Twitter followers into Goodreads, and it’ll find which of your followers have Goodreads accounts and send them friend requests automatically? I sure didn’t, but I’m glad I figured it out.) Now, I have no way of knowing how many of those people found out about the giveaway by checking my profile, but it can’t have hurt.

Anyway, even more exciting to me than how many people entered the contest is how many people added the book to their “to-read” list — 179 people. So I can definitely say that running this giveaway has been good for increasing the visibility of my book, which is awesome.

If you’re not on Goodreads — or if you are on Goodreads, and you’ve been wondering what you can do there to support the authors you love – Deb’s Answers has a good, simple quick guide to how you can do just that:

Add their books to your shelves. Rate and review the books that you’ve read. Like quotes from their books. Enter new quotes from their books. Answer trivia questions or quizzes about their books or enter trivia questions or quizzes.  Add them as friends, if they are goodreads authors. Add yourself as their fan. You don’t have to choose, you can friend authors and be their fan too. Read their blogs and reviews, make comments or like the reviews and blog posts [ . . . . ]

Once you’ve become the fan of some authors, go to your profile page and scroll down until you see your favorite authors on the right of the screen below your friends. Click on edit and you can re-order your favorite authors and change your options to follow updates and get email notices about new blog posts.

– How can I support authors on Goodreads?

Oh, and don’t forget, I’m still running my own giveaway here as part of the Coffin Hop Blog Tour, so if you’d like another chance to get a copy with considerably better odds than one-in-1,264, you can enter that between now and midnight on Halloween.

Well, that was kind of irritating.

I have an ad campaign running right now on Facebook for my horror reading.  I know, I know, you hate Facebook, all the cool kids hate Facebook these days — I don’t like it any more than you do, but they still have the best, most targeted advertising platform I’ve ever seen.  The ad I’m running right now is only shown to people who live within 25 miles of Seattle, who are 21 and older who like “horror fiction, books, halloween, horror, reading, readings, short stories or stories,” and who haven’t already RSVP’ed to the reading.  That’s pretty cool, and I think it’s the best bang for the buck.

But yesterday morning, I woke up to an email from them saying that my ad had been “un-approved” because the image I was using was against their advertising guidelines.  Wha — ?  Then how did it get approved in the first place, and why were they suddenly changing their minds about it?

So I went and read their advertising image guidelines and all I can figure is that the problem was this part:  “Images may not use shock or scare tactics.”  

Here, for your reference, is a screen-capture of the ad as I originally had it:

Wait, what?  Seriously?  I can’t have anything scary — for Halloween? Now, if it had, like, dripping blood or gore I could see it as being maybe offensive, but, come on.  What should I have instead — Casper, the Friendly Ghost?

I was momentarily stumped, but ended up changing it to a Jack-o-Lantern face — glowy orange features on a black background.  Slightly lame, but still hopefully eye-catching.

Okay, good to go?  Apparently not, because it took them thirteen hours to finally approve the new image and get the ad running again.  Four days until Halloween and I lose an entire day’s worth of advertising.  Terrific.

I know, I know, First World problems.  Heh.  Thanks for listening to me rant.  And if you live within 25 miles of Seattle, are 21 and older and like “horror fiction, books, halloween, horror, reading, readings, short stories or stories,” I hope I see you Monday night at 8:00 at The Reading Room.

← Previous Page — Next Page →