On 1 July, I’ll be giving a talk on Nonfiction for Today’s Reader at the Ann Arbor Public Library’s Westgate branch. 6:30PM EDT.
If you’re around and have any interest, do come by and listen to me spill the secrets of my craft.
Dear writers: Delete your Findaway Voices account NOW
When Findaway Voices first appeared, it made it comparatively easy for independent authors to do audiobooks. Audio was still hard, mind you, but it was possible.
Spotify bought Findaway. They began playing with payments, refunds, and returns. And now, the licensing terms have changed.
Accordingly, you hereby grant Spotify a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, fully paid, irrevocable, worldwide license to reproduce, make available, perform and display, translate, modify, create derivative works from (such as transcripts of User Content), distribute, and otherwise use any such User Content through any medium, whether alone or in combination with other Content or materials, in any manner and by any means, method or technology, whether now known or hereafter created, in connection with the Service, the promotion, advertising or marketing of the Service, and the operation of Spotify’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including for systems and products management, improvement and development, testing, training, modeling and implementation in connection with the Spotify Service. Where applicable and to the extent permitted under applicable law, you also agree to waive, and not to enforce, any “moral rights” or equivalent rights, such as your right to object to derogatory treatment of such User Content. Nothing in these Terms prohibits any use of User Content by Spotify that may be taken without a license.
Spotify may now do anything they want with your audiobook. They will–not can, will–feed it to their AI system and use it to rip off your work. They specifically declare you can’t complain about derogatory uses. They can mix your book with work you find abhorrent and release it as a new product. They can use a speech recognition system and create a printed version of your book.
I have one audiobook. I pulled it from distribution when the royalties problems started and I stopped getting paid. That audiobook became exclusive to my store on 17 January 2023. It has fewer sales, but I’ve made more than I did in all the years before. (“But exposure,” some folks will say. People die of exposure.)
It’s not enough to stop distributing your work via Findaway. If you use them to store your audio files and nothing else, the new terms apply. They have no automatic option to delete titles from their site. I just sent this email to their technical support.
Hello,
Findaway’s new terms of service are unacceptable. Please delete my
book and my entire account.Thank you.
No need to be rude. It’s not the tech support flunky’s fault.
Also, I’m super happy with how my one lone audiobook came out. If it sold more, I’d do more.
Finding a way to “Speak the Truth”
One of my biggest rules for writing nonfiction is “speak the truth.” It might be *my* truth, others might disagree, but that truth is absolutely necessary.
A book I’m planning to write after Run Your Own Mail Server really needs to use Debian as the reference platform, for reasons I’m not gonna get into here. But my heart is obviously and publicly in BSD-land. How could I write this and be truthful?
I’ve been chewing this over for a while, but the obvious just hit me: it’s about voice and theme.
I need to write this book with a motif and theme that fits the topic. I’d been pondering using a Trek motif, but this specifically needs a DS9 theme.
Specifically, a “O’Brien managing Terok Nor” theme.
NOW I can write this book and be truthful. (bang)(clang)(grind) (BOOOM)
The detail that this requires a DS9 rewatch is purely incidental.
DNSSEC, Badgers, and Orcs, Oh My!
Talk about one weeeird mass escape.
DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd edition hardcovers, paperbacks, and ebooks should now be available everywhere, so that book’s officially out.
Today is the official release date for Domesticate Your Badgers. I made this a pre-order, so it’s available in all formats everywhere. I don’t bother with preorders for tech books, but I wanted the Kickstarter backers to get a chance to have theirs in-hand before the general public could order it. It didn’t quite work that way–backer books have started to arrive in the last day or two–but they’re on their way so it’s not a complete failure.
Last, the Fiction River anthology Broken Dreams comes out today. The author list includes my name. The book description says something about alternate history, in Detroit, with orcs. It’s at all major retailers, and a bunch of minor ones.
If I had pushed, I could have released “Letters to ed(1)” today, but that’s too much even for me. A couple more weeks on that one. Consider yourself warned.
“$ git sync murder” is out, so: how many books have I written?
The hardcovers are in stores now, so I think it’s official. $ git sync murder is out everywhere except my print bookstore. You can get it at all of the usual stores. I have the ebook in my store.
Every time I release a new book, or dare to show my face in public, folks ask me how many books I’ve written. My answer is, “define written and book.” That’s not as snarky an answer as you might think.
First, they’re asking the wrong question. I’ve written many books that were not published and that you will never read. Immortal Clay didn’t pick up a bunch of 4-star and 5-star reviews by being the first novel I ever wrote. It got those by being my fifteenth finished novel in a series of deliberate practice that continues to this day, and my first published novel. So, let’s change the question to “how many books have you published?”
Here’s the current output of the SNMP object where I keep my publications catalog. (Accessing this object is an easter egg in the Networknomicon or, if you’re still attached to your sanity, SNMP Mastery.)
SNMP table: TWP-MIB::mwlBooksTable
titleIndex title year genre length
1 Gatecrasher 1992 fiction full-length
2 Believe it or Else! 1993 fiction full-length
3 Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995 fiction full-length
4 Women who Run with the Werewolves 1995 fiction anthology
5 Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
6 Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
7 Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
8 PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
9 Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
10 Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
11 Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
12 Horror Library volume 2 2010 fiction anthology
13 Opening the Eye 2011 fiction story
14 Breaking the Circle 2011 fiction story
15 SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
16 Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012 fiction full-length
17 DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
18 Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
19 Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
20 No More Lonesome Blue Rings 2013 fiction story
21 Sticky Supersaturation 2013 fiction story
22 Lavender 2013 fiction story
23 Pax Canina 2013 fiction story
24 Wednesday's Seagulls 2013 fiction story
25 FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
26 Immortal Clay 2014 fiction full-length
27 Waking Up Yesterday 2014 fiction story
28 Calling Control 2014 fiction story
29 Moonlight's Apples 2014 fiction story
30 Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
31 Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
32 FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
33 Forever Falls 2015 fiction novella
34 Spilled Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs 1) 2015 fiction story
35 Whisker Line 2015 fiction story
36 Wifi and Romex 2015 fiction story
37 PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
38 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
39 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
40 Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016 fiction full-length
41 Hydrogen Sleets 2016 fiction full-length
42 Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016 fiction novella
43 Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016 fiction full-length
44 Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016 fiction novella
45 Butterfly Stomp (Beaks #0) 2016 fiction full-length
46 Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth 2016 fiction story
47 FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
48 git commit murder 2017 fiction full-length
49 savaged by systemd 2017 fiction story
50 Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
51 Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction novella
52 Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction novella
53 SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
54 Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
55 Bedazzled by Blockchain 2018 fiction story
56 Face Less 2018 fiction story
57 Boundary Shock: Tuesday After Next 2018 fiction anthology
58 Boundary Shock: Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My! 2018 fiction anthology
59 Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
60 FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
61 Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019 fiction full-length
62 Winner Breaks All 2019 fiction story
63 Boundary Shock: Apocalypse Descending 2019 fiction anthology
64 Fiction River: Superstitious 2019 fiction anthology
65 Snot-Nosed Aliens 2019 fiction anthology
66 An Interpretation of Moles 2019 fiction anthology
67 SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
68 Boundary Shock: Alien Dreams 2020 fiction anthology
69 The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
70 Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
71 Boundary Shock: What Might Have Been 2020 fiction anthology
72 Face The Strange 2020 fiction anthology
73 Bloody Christmas 2020 fiction anthology
74 Drinking Heavy Water 2020 fiction full-length
75 Final Gift 2020 fiction story
76 Woolen Torment 2020 fiction story
77 Drums with Delusions of Godhood 2020 fiction story
78 Uncollected Anthology: Deities 2020 fiction anthology
79 Woolen Torment 2021 fiction story
80 Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021 fiction full-length
81 Fiction River: Chances 2021 fiction anthology
82 Fiction River: Dark and Deadly Passions 2021 fiction anthology
83 TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
84 Only Footnotes 2021 nonfiction novella
85 git sync murder 2021 fiction full-length
86 The Holiday Spectacular #2 2021 fiction anthology
That’s 86 things with my name on the cover, excluding articles in periodicals and web sites. (I don’t have the energy to go through all that stuff.) So, I’ve published 86 books.
Except some of these are stories in anthologies. Anthologies are written by multiple authors. They’re only partially “by me.” Excluding those, the catalog has 70 entries. I have published 70 books.
Except some of those are basically chapbooks: single stories, put out on their own in print. I have many more stories than these, by the way, but they’re electronic-only. I ran out of energy before I collected all that information.
47 things with my name on them that are classified as either “full-length” or “novella.” This categorization is incorrect, however. The word “novella” means “a short novel.” The definition on “novel” has bloated over the last one hundred fifty years, driven by manufacturing concerns. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, is about 43,000 words. Publishers would laugh at Doyle today and tell him to try a chapbook publisher based on the length alone. In the 1920s, a 20,000-word tale was considered a novel and might be published as such. I have a great big stack of Rex Stout mystery novels, and many of them contain fewer than 40,000 words.
Let’s take a nonfiction “novella.” Ed Mastery. It is a short book, but it’s unquestionably “a book.”
Alternately, consider Drowned Mirovar the second Prohibition Orcs tale. It’s over 30,000 words. In the era it was set, it would be a full novel that would appear first in a magazine, then as a standalone book. Today, it’s a prologue. As it’s packaged, it’s “a book.” It would look just fine on the shelf next to any of my 1950s novels.
Then there are collections. Vicious Redepmtion is a collection of my short stories. Aidan Redding Against the Universes collects short stories and novels. They’re listed here as “full-length,” which they certainly are. Should I could those as books?
Surely there’s a culturally-accepted standard or industry standard on how to count the number of books you’ve written?
Er… no.
Isaac Asimov established a standard that “if I appear in it, it counts.” He counted anthologies. He counted chapbooks. By that standard, I’ve published 86 books. I am uncomfortable with this definition.
I know authors who won’t count anything shorter than 60,000 words. By that standard, I’ve published 22 books. It excludes all of the Mastery titles except SNMP Mastery. That’s clearly not right for me, either.
For me, the original question is about milestones. It’s about accomplishments. I want to be able to say “I made this thing” and stand by it.
My preferred definition is, if I whack you with it, will it leave a mark? Bystanders would object, however. And I have created some titles that, while they’d leave a mark, I don’t consider them independent books. An example would be the Bail Bond Denied edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. It is literally the exact same text as the regular FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, but with a cover drawn in crayon by yours truly. It is a thing. It gets offered up for charity auctions. I have a small amount of pride in it. It’s not really a discrete book.
So I’m trying this definition.
a) 15,000 words or longer
b) requiring distinct and discrete effort to create
c) something I’m not embarrassed to call “a book.”
This definition lets me exclude titles like the ZedFS version of FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS, the Beck and Provost editions of Terrapin Sky Tango, and the Manly McManface version of Ed Mastery. Only Footnotes might have brand new footnotes in it, but it wasn’t hard to make. It’s excluded. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of these, but only because they polish my reputation as the good sort of troll. I knocked them all off in a morning. (They’re still in the pic of me with one copy of every edition of everything I’ve written, because that picture is only for fun.)
It lets me include works like Ed Mastery and Cash Flow for Creators. I spent three weeks writing the cash flow book, and thirty years learning how to write the cash flow book. It include volumes like the Networknomicon, because producing that required a whole bunch of work. It was a different sort of labor for me, but that unspeakable tome fine educational work is clearly a discrete, unique book.
I’m also counting collections. Again, the “how many books have you published” question is about milestones. Writing enough of A Thing to create a collection is a milestone. Aidan Redding Against the Universes is the closest thing to a Brandon Sanderson doorstop I’ve produced on the fiction side. (Also, that hardcover has two different covers, one on the dust jacket and one on the laminate, and they’re both lovely.)
Applying this definition leaves me with these titles.
1 Gatecrasher 1992 fiction full-length
2 Believe it or Else! 1993 fiction full-length
3 Gatecrasher 2nd edition 1995 fiction full-length
5 Absolute BSD 2002 nonfiction full-length
6 Absolute OpenBSD 2003 nonfiction full-length
7 Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2004 nonfiction full-length
8 PGP & GPG 2006 nonfiction full-length
9 Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd edition 2007 nonfiction full-length
10 Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition 2009 nonfiction full-length
11 Network Flow Analysis 2010 nonfiction full-length
15 SSH Mastery 2012 nonfiction full-length
16 Vicious Redemption: Five Dark Fantasies 2012 fiction full-length
17 DNSSEC Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
18 Sudo Mastery 2013 nonfiction full-length
19 Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed 2013 nonfiction full-length
25 FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials 2014 nonfiction full-length
26 Immortal Clay 2014 fiction full-length
30 Networking for Systems Administrators 2015 nonfiction full-length
31 Tarsnap Mastery 2015 nonfiction full-length
32 FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS 2015 nonfiction full-length
33 Forever Falls 2015 fiction novella
37 PAM Mastery 2016 nonfiction full-length
38 FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS 2016 nonfiction full-length
40 Kipuka Blues (Immortal Clay #2) 2016 fiction full-length
41 Hydrogen Sleets 2016 fiction full-length
42 Drowned Mirovar (Prohibition Orcs #2) 2016 fiction novella
43 Butterfly Stomp Waltz (Beaks #1) 2016 fiction full-length
44 Earthquake Kitten Kiss (Beaks spin-off) 2016 fiction novella
47 FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems 2016 nonfiction full-length
48 git commit murder 2017 fiction full-length
50 Httpd and Relayd Mastery 2017 nonfiction full-length
51 Ed Mastery 2018 nonfiction novella
52 Ed Mastery, Manly McManface Edition 2018 nonfiction novella
53 SSH Mastery, 2nd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
54 Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd edition 2018 nonfiction full-length
59 Sudo Mastery, 2nd edition 2019 nonfiction full-length
60 FreeBSD Mastery: Jails 2019 nonfiction full-length
61 Terrapin Sky Tango (Beaks #2) 2019 fiction full-length
67 SNMP Mastery 2020 nonfiction full-length
69 The Networknomicon 2020 nonfiction full-length
70 Cash Flow for Creators 2020 nonfiction full-length
74 Drinking Heavy Water 2020 fiction full-length
80 Aidan Redding Against the Universes 2021 fiction full-length
83 TLS Mastery 2021 nonfiction full-length
85 git sync murder 2021 fiction full-length
This makes $ git sync murder my 45th book.
Could this definition be gamed? Sure it could. But I don’t care enough to game it. I stopped counting my releases somewhere around 17 or 18 books. I counted titles on my brag shelf at one point a few years ago, using my gut as a definition, and got a number like 31 or 33 or something like that. I haven’t cared enough to count until today, when I’m putting off doing real work. Now that I’ve counted, I suspect I’ll maintain a silent count until I break 50 and then lose count again. 50 is a milestone, after all.
If you want to argue about my definitions, please find someone else to argue with.
the Write Stuff bundle, featuring: me!
My book Cash Flow for Creators lays out exactly how I make a living in this deranged business. You can get your own copy for a paltry $6.99.
Right now, you can get it for $5 as part of the 2021 Write Stuff Bundle at Storybundle. Plus three other books and classes on building a career from your craft. That’s even cheaper than my usual cheap. Or you can spend $20, and get ten excellent business books from people who know what they’re doing, who make a living with their craft, and who are cheerfully sharing how to do the same.
I’m delighted to be in this bundle, and not just because bundle curator Kris Rusch called Cash Flow for Creators “one of the most important books you’ll read all year.” (Mind you, I’m gonna keep that quote in a safe place so that when the world catches on to what a complete doofus I am, I can take it out and cuddle it.) But there’s some top-notch writers and business people in this bundle.
Johanna Rothman is best known as a business and technology consultant. She also writes charming heart-warming stories that remind me of fairy tales for some reason, because they’re totally not fairy tales. Except when they are. I’ve met Johanna at several conferences, and for a quiet and unassuming itty-bitty lady she knows how to put herself out there. I’d absolutely listen to her on getting speaking slots at a conference. Or, in this case, read her Writing a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts.
Joanna Penn writes top-notch fiction and hosts the Creative Penn podcast. I was lucky enough to have lunch with her at a conference on the Oregon coast a few years ago and frankly, I have no idea how she gets the energy to do half of her stuff. She’s a smart people, and has built one heck of a creative business doing this weird… what’s that word? Oh, yes. “Planning.” Something I constantly and consistently fail to do. I really ought to perform the exercises in Your Author Business Plan. I should also take her advice that I need to weasel my way onto more podcasts, because the whole “wait patiently for invitations” thing doesn’t work well.
Stefon Mears once worked in computing, but he got better. I’ve known him for years, and the interesting thing about Stefon? It’s not his obsessive Blue Öyster Cult fandom, though that is one of his better traits. It’s not even that I once made him laugh so hard that bystanders asked if he was having a seizure and if they should call an ambulance. It’s that he’s just this guy, and he keeps writing book after book after book in the grand pulp tradition. One after another, he churns them out like Rex Stout or Zane Grey or Lester Dent or any number of others. We’ve talked about how to write a novel every month, and I overwhelmingly agree with the advice he gives in The 30-Day Novel and Beyond!
All this for five bucks. But the bonus books, for those who pay $20 or more?
Award-winning writers and editors Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch have survived several economic crashes in this trade. They were the first professional authors I ever met who understood that writers don’t write books; they create and license intellectual property. I don’t always totally agree with them, but they back up their arguments and make me think about why I’m doing the things I do. You can’t buy that. Except you can. In several ways. In this bundle.
Mark Leslie LeFebvre was a bookseller. He’s worked for Kobo and Draft2Digital. He’s a fantastic writer and editor. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s worked at a printer. He knows this business like I know that weird growth on the back of my left hand. (Don’t worry about me, they always drop off before they hatch.) I respect this man’s mad skillz enough that when I finish the Current Giant Epic Fiction Thing I’m working on, I’m going to buy an hour of his time to talk through how to optimally release it. If you want your work in bookstores and libraries, he’s the man to tell you how. Oh, hey–An Author’s Guide to Working With Libraries and Bookstores. What a coincidence!
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Tonya D Price at more than one conference. Her excellent writing survived MBA school, a feat not many people manage. A Writer’s Introduction to Social Media Marketing is exclusive to this bundle, so I haven’t read it. Yet.
Writer, editor, and game publisher Loren L Coleman might be best known for his work in Battletech, but I mostly know him for his phenomenal Kickstarter chops and his devoted Prohibition Orcs fandom. Anyone who can raise multiple millions in a Kickstarter has my attention. He recently Kickstarted Crowdfunding Your Ficton: a Best Practices Guide. Kickstarter is on my Things To Play With list, so I backed it. You can get his book after those of us wise enough to back him, but before the great unwashed masses.
A cut of the purchase price goes to each author. Another cut can go to Able Gamers, if you check the box. You should totally check the box.
Also, the price is completely “pay what you want.” None of us would mind if those of you with real jobs realized that this bundle is dang near theft and chose to pay a bit more for it. If you read these and act on their advice, you’ll turn a profit easily.
New podcast interview: Alive After Reading
If I was to choose a pseudonym, one pronounced “Need A Writer” would be too on-the-nose even for me.
Tim Niederriter was born that way.
Tim interviewed me for his podcast Alive After Reading. I signed on thinking that I’d promote the new Montague Portal stuff (the first short novel, Forever Falls, is now free everywhere, Drinking Heavy Water is fresh out, and there’s an omnibus collecting all things Montague Portal).
Instead, we mostly talked about the craft of writing. Specifically, how to become a better writer.
Yes, you can become a better writer. Hint: use the exact same techniques used by craftspeople for millennia.
Unrelated: the title of this episode of Alive After Reading is perhaps the most appropriate of any interview I have ever given.
My books on Google Play, for now
Google has been actively hostile to authors for years. That has changed, somewhat. You can now find much of my fiction and nonfiction on Google Play, for now. I rather expect Google to reverse their less-hostile stance without warning, so these might come down as quickly as they appeared.
What do I mean when I say that Google has been hostile to authors? Forget the bit where they scan millions of in-copyright books and make the text available. That’s a separate problem.
Google Play offers separate terms for traditional publishers than individual authors. I own my own publishing company, but I don’t produce books quickly enough to get access to the publisher terms. Fine.
Since its inception, Google Play has let individual authors put a suggested retail price on their books. Until recently, they reserved the right to cut the price for their customers. If they cut the price, they would pay the author their cut based on the suggested retail price. Google used this to boost their platform. They could take, say, SSH Mastery, and make it free for the next thousand downloads. I would make my $6 or so on each download. I get paid, so what could I possibly object to?
I object to it destroying my business, that’s what.
Modern publishing is an ecosystem. Changes in one distributor affect how other distributors behave. Other major ebook distributor either respects the suggested retail price I set on their platform (e.g., Gumroad) or they have a Most Favored Nation clause in their terms where they can match competitor prices. Apple had this for years, but I’m not certain of its status after the antitrust lawsuits. Amazon still has this MFN clause, and it actively monitors competitors for prices to match.
Here’s how this goes horribly wrong.
- Google makes one of my best-selling books free.
- Amazon sees it and price matches.
- A few thousand people download the book on Google Play. I get paid for those.
- Tens of thousands of people download the book on KDP. I do not get paid for those.
- Google restores the suggested retail price.
- I spend days begging Amazon to restore the normal price.
- Everybody I might sell that book to got it for free.
That book is dead. I made a few thousand dollars in a month but that book brings in nothing more, forever.
Writing is a passive income game. I count on each live book to bring in a few hundred bucks a month. Some, I’m delighted if they bring in fifty bucks a month. I count on last year’s books to pay this year’s bills. If you want to know more about how this works, check out Cash Flow for Creators.
Free books are a valid promotion strategy. (I’ll be announcing a free novel soon, to suck people into the Montague Portal omnibus.) I need to control their use, however.
I half-expect Google to reassert their previous model at any time. Google is spectacularly indifferent to their users. When Google blinks, I’ll be turning them off.
Mind you, I’ll keep the books set up in their publisher dashboard. When they twitch back, I’ll turn them back on.
The Worst that Can Happen to an Author
Kris Rusch has a lovely blog post today on the need for courage in the writing business. I started to comment on it, but the comment grew to such a length that would be rude to leave it. “Comment” does not mean “lengthy diatribe.” So:
A key component of courage is the willingness to accept the risk of pain, and perhaps actual pain. Publishing is full of emotional pain. Every time I write something, I wonder if I should make it public. If I should put it out there. And then I remind myself of the very worst that could happen.
The Book Police will show up at my door with their lead-type-studded cudgels to drag me by my ankles to the front lawn of the Library of Congress, where they’ll put me in stocks for the day with a sign hanging around my neck declaring me a Bad Writer and place a bushel basket of rotten fruit a few feet away for amateur literary critics’ throwing pleasure, while simultaneously the Bad Art Correction Squad will break out their erasers and hard drive degaussers and eliminate all trace of my work from meatspace and Internet alike.
No–wait. That’s not it. Sorry.
The worst that can happen is nobody notices. Nobody cares. That the thing I spent hours or weeks or even months writing gets no attention and attracts zero readers.
That hurts. I’d rather take rotten nectarines to the face for a few hours.
As long as I don’t publish, my comforting dream of this book’s explosive success remains alive. I avoid the risk of pain.
Writers, especially new writers, believe that their books are special. I hear writers call their books their babies, their special friends, their precious. And it’s simply not true. Or worse, they don’t call their books that. They call their book (singular) that.
If you’ve just finished writing your first book, or your second, this is understandable. It’s even natural.
But it’s a terrible mindset for any artist.
Writing is a creative skill, like any other art. You can learn to write just as you can learn to paint or throw clay or staple yourself to the world’s largest ball of string and have your friends set you rolling down the freeway and call it performance art. A potter would not expect to find success from their first successful vase. A painter would not expect their first portrait to win awards. No, these creators finish a piece, take a moment to appreciate and contemplate it, and start on the next one.
Successful writers are the same way.
Don’t get me wrong, the dream of success is great. The dream of fame and glory and supple book groupies can keep you going.
But being a writer is about being able to take a punch and either laugh it off or full-on ignore it. I’m a full time writer, and not a week goes by that I don’t get a scathing review from someone who didn’t read the book description or even look at the cover. (Don’t read your reviews. Seriously.)
Is that email from an unfamiliar sender spam? Or is it a vitriolic screed against one of my books or my entire career? Is it from someone who read the Immortal Clay novels and wants to helpfully inform me that I require intensive therapy, immediately and preferably inpatient, as if every single person who’s ever met me hasn’t already informed me? It might be from someone offering me money, so I guess I better open it.
People who’ve previously said they loved my books take lengthy detours to tell me this latest one is not up to scratch, but they figure I needed the money.
Being ignored hurts. Being noticed hurts more. Writers must have the courage to face the risk of emotional pain. Just as with athletic pain, critical pain gets easier to cope with the more you overcome it. It doesn’t get better. You grow stronger.
Yes, we all want our books to be noticed. To achieve success. The only way to make that dream reality is to consciously, deliberately, and with premeditation murder it and accept the risk. Your work cannot succeed so long as you hide it.
If you can’t accept the risk, feel free to cuddle your dream. Just don’t complain to any pro author about it. We want to help folks who are willing to take the necessary hits.
You’re willing to face the pain, but you need that dream of supple book groupies to keep you going? You need hope? That’s not only dandy, that’s human. Hope is the greatest gift.
But make a new dream for each book. Even if it’s the same old dream with the serial numbers filed off.
By the time I publish one book, I’ve already started writing the next book. The published book will live or die as readers dictate. But the book I’m halfway through writing right now? That one’s gonna hit big. I guarantee it.
I’m a potter fondling the next lump of freshly-scooped raw clay, convinced that this next piece will be my greatest triumph.
Full-Time Writing: Five Years In
On 8 October 2014, I announced my new career as a full-time writer. The actual decision coalesced in the preceding month, but as the public announcement was the Point of No Return, let’s go with 8 October.
This makes 8 October 2019 my five-year anniversary. For one thousand eight hundred twenty seven days, my family has relied on my writing to pay the mortgage. Some of those years, I bought health insurance as well. I do not consult. I do not provide publishing services or rely on affiliate fees. I barely advertise, and that only in the last few months.
I make words. I sell them. That’s it.
I’ve recently come across a bunch of posts about people hitting their one-month or three-month mark as full time writers, like this one from Sacha Black. These posts bring back all the heady delirium of those early days, when I’d finally achieved The Dream.
But the years learn things that the days and months will never know. And here’s some things that time has either taught me, brutally reminded me of, or tattooed on my soul. I’m sure that Lawrence Block, Joe Lansdale, and Lilith Saintcrow would look at my list and say “Oh, he’s adorable,” but I have a ways to go to achieve their longevity.
1) Learn Business and Money
Once your craft becomes your career, you need to manage your craft as assiduously as you would a sandwich shop. This doesn’t take away from the joy of writing. Rather, it can be a different sort of fun. Business and taxes are the world’s most complicated table-top role playing game, under a lackadaisical Dungeon Master who occasionally gets annoyed and goes for Total Party Kill. You best have all your character sheets up to date. Some of it’s tedious–I could do without scanning and saving the receipts for everything I buy. But they’re tax deductions, or potential tax deductions. Perhaps I can’t deduct everything right now, but if my income explodes in 2023 and I need to refile my last few years of taxes, I’ll be thrilled to have them.
If you’re in the US, start by reading Tax Savvy for Small Business.
No, start by reading The Copyright Handbook. I reread this book every year, and I buy every new edition. It’s that important. Remember, authors don’t sell books: we create and license intellectual property. This realization, way back in 1999, was key to me becoming a full time writer.
Wait–you absolutely must read Rusch’s How To Negotiate Anything. It turns the typical authorial introversion into a negotiating advantage. If you can’t negotiate, you don’t have a business.
Real businesses have multiple income streams, and add additional streams any time they can. If you rely on a single income stream, your business is inherently short-lived. Maybe exclusivity with one business has been good to you, but it puts you at the mercy of that company. I won’t sign on exclusively with Amazon. I won’t put all my nonfiction through No Starch Press, exactly as they would not agree to me becoming their only author. A single source of income is short term thinking. My largest single customer (Amazon) is less than a third of my income. Losing them would suck but I’d survive.
Before you make a thousand dollars a year writing, establish your writing as a business. Pick a company name and register it as a DBA in your county. Use that to get a bank account for your business. Deposit all writing income in that account, and use that account to pay for writing-related expenditures. Withdraw money for you and your family as owners’ disbursements. This might seem like overkill now, but you have no idea what’s coming…
2) Plan For Success
Most small businesses fail in their first year. The survivors often fall to their own success.
Treat your writing business like a business from day 1. If the tax man comes knocking on your door you need to be able to demonstrate that you’re treating this part of your career seriously. This means setting up a bank account for the business, and treating that bank account like it belongs to a separate entity. Yes, you can use writing income for vacations but you must account for it.
It’s much easier to convert your DBA to some sort of corporation than to spin one of those entities out of the fabric of your life. Why is this important?
3) You Have No Idea What Will Sell
You never know what readers will react to. You have less idea what will bring in new readers. My most successful book is a novelette of satirical Linux erotica. My new crime novel is doing far better than I expected. I could never have predicted this.
Meanwhile, the technology book I spent six years working on? The one I literally wrote seven books to learn how to write? The one people requested, demanded, and beseeched me for?
Sales-wise, it’s dead on arrival.
You never know. It’s uncomfortable. Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Sow all your seeds, and harvest whatever grows.
4) Try Weird Things, in Craft and Business
I wrote the aforementioned satirical Linux erotica in a single day. The Muse came upon me. He had a whip and a chair and demanded that I perform. I went with it. It succeeded. Other ideas, written similarly, did not. It happens.
Most of us feel just fine with craft experiments, but avoid experimenting in business. What’s the worst that can happen if a business experiment fails? Obviously, the Art Police show up and suspend your license to write.
Or maybe you just lose money.
Financial losses happen in business. Decide how much you can risk, and set up your experiment within those boundaries. I’m experimenting with Amazon ads right now, within clearly defined financial limits, and they’re making me money so far. Book sponsorships work for my nonfiction readers. Patreon works for some of my readers.
And those business experiments can give you room for artistic experiments. The SSH Mastery sponsorships gave me the funding to experiment with hardcovers. The SNMP Mastery sponsors are letting me do something unspeakably squamous with that book.
I wrote a nonfiction book for the deliberate and explicit purpose of telling men’s rights activists that I would continue to use both male and female pronouns in nonfiction. This experiment worked, both in a business sense and for getting those people to stop trying to enlist me to their cause.
“Nobody would buy a cozy mystery set at a Unix conference!” I wrote git commit murder anyway. It’s a slow but steady seller.
Experiment. Sometimes, good stuff happens.
5) Grab Success
You can’t predict success. Except when you can.
The key component of success is being myself. To put myself in my books, as forcefully and explicitly and gleefully as I can.
In other words: I speak the truth.
In my nonfiction, people accuse me of making jokes. I do not. It’s just that the truth in technology is offensive, outrageous, and downright obscene. People must laugh about it, because the appropriate degree of piteous sobbing takes too much time and runs up the cleaning bill.
I do the same in my fiction, but in a completely different way.
And it’s led to financial success.
When that success appears, be ready to grab it. I’m still not making near as much money as I would have if I’d stayed in the technology field, but if I’d stayed in tech I’d have drowned in my own bile by now, so it’s a wash.
I am at the point where I need to reorganize the business, to switch from little old me to a corporation. I’m actively hunting an accountant who understands how creators and licensors of intellectual property can arrange their business to maximize effective income. Turns out those people are mostly on the coast, not here in Detroit. (If you know of one, I’d appreciate a lead.)
When that happens, though: my business is set up and ready to convert to a massive C-Corp.
What will you do if your new book takes off and a million bucks lands in your bank account before New Years’ Eve? Hopefully the answer isn’t “panic.”
6) Keep Writing
Amidst all of this, keep making words.
Writers get opportunities to travel. My books have taken me to Canada, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, California, Oregon, Virginia, Washington, Arizona, Canada, England, France, and Malta. Next year they’ll take me to Japan, India, and back to Canada. In the last year, these trips have taken more and more of my time.
A four-day trip ruins the week before and the week after for writing. Some folks recover more quickly than I do. Good for them. I just got back from a trip to a city in my own time zone. Not only did I lose the time of the trip, I lost four work days before and ten work days after it.
I hereby resolve to stay home and spend more time making words. To stop “Being A Writer,” and to just write.
Over the years, I’ve promised to go to a bunch of cons. The last few years I’ve tried to fulfill all the promises Younger Lucas foolishly made. I have one final set of promises to fulfill, in Asia next March. And then I’m done. I’m not promising any more “sure I’ll come, one year” trips.
Will I travel? Sure. But rarely. If I don’t write, there are no books. And traveling prevents writing.
7) Forgive Yourself
I write fiction at about a thousand words an hour and nonfiction at about half that. If I treat my writing as full-time a job, and split my time between the two, I should produce a million words of fiction and half a million words of nonfiction every year.
That’s not realistic.
First, you must allocate time to run your business. When I use a publisher, I have to manage that relationship. When I self-publish, I must spend time publishing. No matter what, I must balance the credit card statement every month and deal with the accounting.
And experienced employers know that even the most solid employees are useless 5% to 50% of the time. Marriages, births, divorces, illness, car troubles, exploding toilets, and the other Randomly Falling Meatballs of the Flying Spaghetti Monster disrupt us all. It’s called being alive. Being human.
As authors who have finally achieved The Dream, it’s easy to beat ourselves up for our shortcomings. Things happen. In the short term, it’s infuriating and frustrating and can drive us to tears of rage.
But our craft means nothing if we lose our friends and relationships and all those things that make life worthwhile.
Despite thyroid failures and anemia and cancer scares and family members suffering time-consuming medical problems over the last five years, I’ve written dozens of books. The bills are paid.
Forgive yourself.
I shouldn’t forgive myself, mind you, because I know in my heart that I’m a slacker and I should be writing twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and use the time left over for business. But that’s a separate matter. You must forgive yourself.
8) Keep Learning Craft
This is the key to everything. It’s the most important thing you can do.
Learn. Study. Practice.
Practice is how we learn. I treat everything I write as deliberate practice. In my current fiction project, because of the nature of the project, I’m practicing point of view. Yes, I have decent point-of-view chops. They can be better. In my current nonfiction project, I’m practicing clarity. The baroque language of SNMP lends itself to such practice.
Yes, I’m a full time author. People pay me for my words. I rely on those payments to pay the mortgage.
But I either get better or stagnate. And my readers will go “oh, it’s more of the same” and move on to someone else.
I must grow with my readers. It’s the only way I’ll keep the ones I have, and draw in new ones.
Finally:
9) Don’t Ask How You’re Getting Away With This
The universe might catch on and put you back in your place.