Category Archives: Essays

Labor in the Publishing Industry

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Things like close-open shifts at bookstores, where booksellers got less than 10 hours off the clock between closing one night and opening the next day. Co-workers at the B&N I worked at faced it more than once or twice.

It’s commonly known in the industry that most editors have to do most of their reading and/or editing at home, *after* putting in full-time hours in the office doing project management/meetings/etc. On salary, so no OT. That’s a culture of habitual crunch.

Publicists given 12 or more titles per month to cover, requiring either shoddy support for some titles and/or substantial, *habitual* overtime. Again, likely uncompensated.

Sales reps asked to read up on the titles they’re selling, which almost always happens outside of office hours. Again, uncompensated. I’m told this happens with some indie booksellers, too.

Unpaid overtime is, from what I can see and what I’ve heard, the *norm*, not the exception. Especially in the entertainment industry, where “passion” is supposed to sustain you. Where there are a hundred people eager to replace you if you leave your under-paying position.

New York State has done a version of this just on the NY level, which is a step in the right direction. Assuming it is enforced and workers aren’t intimidated into working unpaid overtime and not reporting it. I don’t know how it’s working in practice.

Also, let’s talk about how many agents are paid *only* on a commission basis – where it frequently takes several years to build up a client base with sales at a level necessary to make up a living wage.

Oh, yeah, what about the people that write the dang books?

So that’s a lot. And that’s not even including authors. If there’s one type of actor in the publishing industry without whom it could not even begin to function, it’s authors.

How many hundreds of hours of labor goes into each book? What % of book deals actually cover that spread at a level that comes out to even minimum wage? The fastest I ever wrote a novel was 31 days. 71k words for the first draft. About 3 hours a day.

I took Sundays off. So that’s 26 days times three hours a day. I put in *at least* 50 hours of editing & extra writing, and that’s lowballing. But we also have to count outlining, brainstorming, copy editing, page proofs, and promotion. Say another 100 hours for all of that.

(26 x 3) + 50 + 100 = 228 hours. I’d wager that is far onto the low end for a full-length adult novel. Even written very quickly, my $4k advance divides to become $17.5 an hour. Also, it’s not W2 money, that’s 1099 money, so I paid more taxes on it. Plus 15% of the gross went to my agent (which I do not begrudge at all). So I maybe, maybe, hit $15 an hour on that one, pre-tax. So $10 an hour post-taxes.

And that was the *only* novel I’ve been able to write anywhere near that fast. Most I’d say took twice to three times as long. The fast novel was the fourth in a series, so I really knew the characters and had a big arc ending to push for. I was also in good health at the time.

If it takes 500-1000 hours to write a novel and you’re getting $5k to $10 in advances, many of which don’t earn out, you’re looking at maybe $10 an hour, minus agent commission and taxes. For the person *who wrote the damn book everyone else gets paid to help publish*.

Staff and booksellers and other publishing professionals work on a lot of books at once, so the jobs are not a direct comparison. And they for sure add value and deserve to be compensated. Ultimately, my point is that just about everyone is getting screwed until you get into (probably) upper management or the C-suite.

Authors, editors, publicists, sales staff, booksellers, all grist for the mill. And who profits? Who is doing *really well* in this equation? Executives, stockholders, and a *very* tiny percentage of authors. Most of the costs and risks are born by the folks at the bottom. The authors that get dropped when a series doesn’t take off. The publicist let go because they struck out despite working their ass off. The booksellers let go when a chain liquidates to pay out stockholders.

As I think about this, I try to remember that I’m not the only person in the hot seat. I’m in the grind with my agent and (probably) my editors, publicists, sales team, etc. But Passion. But Love of Books. But Literature.

The people at the top are counting on passion. They’re counting on the fact that there is no end to the # of people that want your job or your spot on the list. But we have to do better. We have to demand better.

We can create a world where work is fairly compensated. Where people aren’t pushed to their breaking points to stay on top of the schedule. Where the expectation of unpaid internships doesn’t keep excluding marginalized writers & staffers.

So, what’s the takeaway?

What can I do? What can any of us do?

1) If you’re in a position to set work culture in your office, be a leader in taking care of your staff. In pushing upper management for overtime pay and/or more sensible hours.

2) Remember that you are not alone, not if you’re an author, agent, junior publicist or bookseller. That passion that gets used against us also links us with other people in the field. We can fight for one another.

3) Vote for candidates that support living wages and stronger protections for workers.

4) Investigate unionization and labor advocacy in your workplace.

5) Take care of yourself. Especially if no one else is. And then, if you can, try to help someone else.

Story World Dossier #1 – Western

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This is the first in a series of essays prompted as stretch goals for the Genrenauts Season One Kickstarter, re-published here so non-backers can read them.

The Shootout Solution – Western

My first memories are of living in Texas. As most Americans know, Texas isn’t the South, it’s Texas. Texas’ regional identity is closely tied to the American narrative of the Western and the Cowboy. It’s the state of the Alamo and the Ranger, of wide open spaces. It’s a state defined by an assertion of singular independence. Living in Texas as a very young child, there’s little wonder that Westerns would stick with me, even though I’ve lived most of my life in cities and suburbs, seldom out in the country.

The first inklings of a fascination with Westerns, the ones that framed my expectations as a child came from the works of legendary author Louis L’Amour. For what felt like two years, L’Amour’s books on tape (aka old-school audiobooks) were my bedtime tales. I didn’t retain the details of the individual plots very well, nodding off before the sixty minute side of the tape was complete, but what I did absorb was the aesthetic and the feel of the genre—the archetypes, the common stories: the lawman vs. the bandits, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the reluctant killer who has to take up the gun again to protect the town/their lover/etc., the lone hero struggling through the desert, the loyal deputy, the schoolmarm, and so on.

These days, Westerns mostly show up in hybrid form, combined with other genres—weird Western, Western SF, Western romance, etc. The familiarity of that genre brings recognizable but interesting contrasts with other genres, or uses other genres to invigorate the tale types and archetypes of the Western.

Which is exactly what I set out to do. By starting the series with Westerns — a genre with what I see as very stable genre expectations — I could use that baseline to give me room for complexity in other aspects, like characterization and the overall setup of the series.

But while tropes and structures of Westerns are pretty familiar, especially to an American audience, I had to figure out the practicalities of telling a post-modern Western without continuing the genre’s history of sexism and racism (not that I wanted to write that kind of story to begin with).

For inspiration, I turned to my favorite, loving parody of the Western genre—Blazing Saddles. The film tackles the racism of the period/genre, challenging expectations of what a Western hero acts like as well as what they look like with Cleavon Little as Sheriff Bart. The film shows the emotional consequences of being a gunfighter with Gene Wilder’s character Jim, but doesn’t then delve into the darkness, it brings the character back into the light. Madeline Kahn’s Lili Von Schtupp is a brilliant, self-motivated send-up/remix of dance hall Marlene Dietrich, and in the finale, the film’s zaniness rises to such a level that it doesn’t just break through the fourth wall, it knocks the whole thing down, the fight spilling out into the world around the production of the film. Blazing Saddles isn’t perfect, especially in terms of its homophobic punchlines and Native nations representation, but I could learn from its lessons and build on them.

First off, I wanted to make sure that women and people of color played important roles in the story. I had a leg up there with my main cast, but I wanted the Western characters to show the diversity of the period of history that inspired the genre. And I also wanted to play with the tale types themselves, since Genrenauts is all about finding broken stories and getting them back on track. I decided to focus on the “who gets to be a hero” aspect of Westerns, providing some alternatives and exploring heroic motivation with different leading characters. The series required a balance between historically-accurate representation (most cowboys were Latinx and/or black, not white) and what is accurate to the genre – where cowboys of color are largely erased, instead spotlighting white heroes.

So much of genre is how each one comes with expectations—the common stories, the expected plot twists, the aesthetic checkboxes many readers bring to a story, looking for a fresh take on familiar stories. In Westerns, I knew readers would be looking for gunfights, shady saloons, working girls, dastardly black hats, rugged white hats, and sullied but strong anti-heroes caught in the middle.

There’s great comfort in the familiar, in being just one step ahead or behind your heroes, seeing the twist coming or being caught unawares. I wanted to play with expectations in The Shootout Solution, giving readers the familiar with one hand and throwing curveballs with the other. Since my Western town was intentionally generic, I turned that aesthetic checklist into a feature wherever possible, using my POV lead to talk about all the places where this Western was like any other Western. And perhaps even more importantly, I gave her an attitude toward it—she relished the back-lot sound-studio feeling of the town.

One lesson I learned writing the Ree Reyes series was that pop culture references are more resonant when they matter to the character—the POV character’s passion or snark provides an emotional access point for the reader. Therefore, Leah Tang, my lead, needed to have a perspective on the bizarrely familiar world of Western World. On top of caring about the story she and the team were trying to put back on course.

And then, against that backdrop of generic tropes and Leah’s responses, I designed the episodes guest stars to stand out—a sensitive aspirant chef who is truly a reluctant hero, and his highly capable sister, with secrets of her own. These characters let me make my points about the genre’s failings, its lies by omission, and more.

Something I’m not satisfied with from the first episode is the inclusion of native nations characters. Westerns usually demonize and stereotype native peoples, so I wanted to make sure to avoid that bad impulse but to also show some native peoples, to not erase them. I don’t think I did the best job of balancing that. While I did have central Mexicanx characters, there are very few native characters in the story, just in the crowd scenes. The story in The Shootout Solution is very tightly focused, but that’s not an excuse. It’s something I’d need myself to push and do better with if/when I return to the Western World in Genrenauts.

The Shootout Solution was just my first foray into genre exploration via storytelling in the Genrenauts series, but looking back on my youth, on decades of Westerns, remixed, deconstructed, or played straight, it’s not surprising that it’s where I’d want to turn to launch the series. There’s plenty left to say about the Western and what its endurance as a narrative tradition says about American conceptions of our own past, about America’s horrendous treatment of native nations peoples (among others), the use of violence, and our self-defining narrative of how the country was born. The Shootout Solution’s heroes rode off into the sunset, but there will always be another town, another crisis, another time when people wield power and spill blood in dusty streets or wide-angle shots of the dusty countryside.

And I’m not alone in playing with the genre. Logan drew upon the tradition with an explicit shout-out to Shane and Westworld tackling the tropes and archetypes of Westerns in a different kind of science fiction setting. This old genre can learn some new tricks as new creators bring their perspectives to the contested Old West.

The New Landscape, Part Three – Bifurcation, Specialization, and Hybridization

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Today I started a twitter thread inspired by Chuck Wendig’s post about writing series. I’m re-posting it here because it’s really a continuation of my The New Landscape series that has been fallow for a while because my life 2016-2018 has been pretty overwhelming, even post-Angry Robot.

If you missed Part One and Part Two, here they are. This post re-treads some of this ground, but it might be handy to have read the previous bits if you don’t mind me repeating myself a bit here.

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It’s pretty remarkable to me that trad and indie SFF are diverging so sharply on series. Trad moving away from longer series for new writer/work because of retail death spiral while indie SFF writers are finding the best success with series where they can create a product funnel.

I understand the reasons – shrinking shelf space in the retail marketplace, difficulty in breaking out new authors, etc. vs. a MOAR CONTENT! high rate of consumption, KU-dominated indie model where rapid publication is logistically easier and maximizes reader retention.

I have, for a while, talked about a bifurcating market, where indie and trad are two models uneasily sharing an industry, each in the shadow of and reacting to the other. Trad-focused sites and figures talk about print resurgent and ebook fading while indie-focused reporting talks about a massive increase in the readership of SFF. It’s a heightened version of positionality and confirmation bias mixed in with results extrapolated from poor data.

It’s hard for trad publishers to do well with digital-only books (I know from experience) because they’re not as comfortable in the digital space and don’t work on indie timetables. They also don’t want to undermine print, where they have a massive structural advantage.

Indie authors are increasingly beholden to AMZ as KU and Audible continue to dominate the ebook and audio marketplaces. Print distribution, meanwhile, remains largely inaccessible.

Trad can put a huge amount of push behind individual releases, but can’t magically make more shelf space for sequels, watches Mass Market die a slow and struggles to adjust b/c they’ve largely sacrificed digital to protect print.

Indie authors have developed tons of tools to drive discovery and to keep readers coming back for more in a series, but they’re caught in an ever-faster loop of rapid publication, a flooded market of competition, scammers, stuffers, and hustling constantly to stay afloat in the insatiable seas of the algorithm until they hit their 1k+ true fans, etc.

Many writers have already unpacked and explained the utility of a hybrid career, but as the two models diverge, each demanding more and more of writers, it gets exhausting even when you’ve got the energy and time to do both. And all the while, the writer always gets paid last.

I don’t have any easy answers. The answers I do have for writers involve lots of hard work and effort put into being an entrepreneur. And for publishers, they involve drastically re-working how to approach print/ebook/audio as well as thinking about who their customer is.

This is the part where I remind readers that they can hire me to help them with sales & marketing strategy. 😉

Floating islands against a blue sky. Text reads 'Strategic Vision'

Born to the Blade continues with “The Gauntlet”

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Born to the Blade episode 4 “The Gauntlet” is here!

Kris will face six warders in their challenge to win Rumika a seat in the Warders’ Circle.

Born to the Blade - Episode 4 - "The Gauntlet" by Michael R. Underwood. From Serial Box Publishing

But has Kris made the alliances needed to win? Will they try to power through on prowess alone?

“The Gauntlet” completes act one of the season. Relationships are put to the test, characters forced to choose between orders & their own desire.

This episode was an absolute delight to write, and here’s some of the why:

“The Gauntlet” was the first episode I’d written once I had already read other team member’s takes on the characters and world. We’d already developed the characters at the summit, but as a writer, it is a whole other thing to read how other writers depict characters.

This episode was where I really started to see what this project could do in terms of impacting my craft, the challenge of working back and forth with the team as well as putting my personal stamp on the world in prose and not just concept.

A big part of that stamp was The Gauntlet itself. I drew on my personal experience competing in martial arts tournaments, from TKD to SCA fencing, as well as non-physical tournaments, where mental will is perhaps even more prominent as a factor in determining success.

Putting Kris through six life-defining duels over a very short period of time, while trying to maneuver politically to garner support even when they might not win, meant drawing on my own experiences as a competitor. It meant remembering the bruises, the heartbreak, the elation.

The other part that was the most fun was getting to showcase the different warders and their fighting styles. I drew on my experience with historical European martial arts as well as East Asian styles.

And then I got to add wizard dueling on top.

The idea for the magic system in Born to the Blade came in part from a desire to have magic feel *embodied*. To push hard against the direction that D&D pointed, where Wizards have d4 hit dice and can’t swing a sword worth jack.

The duels I wrote in the gauntlet and throughout the series are my current best efforts to further the art of writing duels and combat scenes in the genre.

I wanted to write duels so emotionally compelling that my easily-fatigued-by-action-scenes wife would love them. I wanted to show readers and maybe some writers that action and fight scenes can reveal, test, and develop character just as much as any other type of scene. People show who they are in a million great and small ways when they take up arms or choose not to.

And through it all, there is Kris. This daring, ambitious, dynamo far more at home in a training gym than a court setting. They are the vessel of their nation’s hopes and dreams and they push themself and learn about themself in ways they didn’t expect.

So that’s “The Gauntlet.”

Read “The Gauntlet” by subscribing at Serial Box and get the best deal on the whole season in ebook + enhanced audio.

Or you can read one episode at a time:

Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Kobo

Born to the Blade S1 cover art - by Will Staehle

UBI: Work, Purpose, and the Worth of Human Life

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A big thing that I think can get lost in discussions of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the way that UBI allows for a re-definition of how we think about work, purpose, and the worth of human life. Especially UBI combined with a universal healthcare system uncoupled from full-time work.

  • UBI allows the homemaker that raises children to be valued for their contributions for more than the money you save on daycare. It lets the caretaker parent be more involved in their children’s lives.
  • UBI allows the twenty-year-old that has to drop out of college or trade school to take care of an elderly or sick family member or other loved one and can’t work regular hours to be able to get by and do that critical labor.
  • UBI allows the aspirant creator to dedicate themselves to improving their craft without needing a menial job to make ends meet. How much faster could a new musician become experienced and skilled enough to play professionally if they don’t have to work 40 hours a week in an office job to get buy?
  • UBI means that if you’re a writer, you wouldn’t necessarily need to have a “real” job to get by. You could be a writer that also teaches storytelling to kids. Or a writer that helps out at their church or local school. Or a writer that provides for their family by cooking wonderful home-cooked meals? Those are all ways of contributing, and in a functional UBI system, they can all be supported and valued.

UBI means that we can continue the trend of letting people spend more of their time on hobbies, civic engagement, caretaking, enjoying life, and being fulfilled. There’s a strong cultural dictate that says that life has worth because of work and “contribution to society.” Thanks, Protestant Work Ethic and/or Capitalism. In the US/Developed nations, we were trending toward people having more and more leisure time, because productivity was increasing due to improved tools, better systems, etc. But wages didn’t keep pace with productivity.

In a UBI system, everyone benefits from increased productivity and efficiency. The office administrator can work 20 hours a week and still keep everything flowing. They can use the other 20 hours a week to spend more time with their family and friends and to develop their passion for painting or volunteer at a local community center. And so on.

I think it’s very important to consider and get excited about the ways self-fulfillment and ideation are a contribution to society. Why do we value work at a job you don’t care about as being more important to societal well-being than taking care of family and/or playing music at a faith center or teaching kids how to draw with crayons or running an after-school program and on and on? Capitalism is the thing that values selling your labor for the good of people that own systems of production. Capitalism is not inevitable. It is not intrinsic to humanity.

What is intrinsic is our community orientation. We’re social animals. We need physical touch and shelter and the chance to continually discover who we are as people more than we need to labor for someone else’s profit. We need sunlight and physical activity and love far more than we need a job title and quarterly reports.

If you’re a happier, more whole, more fulfilled person, you’ll be a better friend, neighbor, partner, etc. A better citizen.

This, for me, is one of the biggest, most important things about UBI. It allows us to move humanity forward past a scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset. It can strengthen civic society. Family ties. Political engagement. And on and on.

This is the future I am fighting for. A future where living a fulfilling life is the priority more than selling your time to survive. We don’t have to live in a subsistence, scraping-by paradigm anymore. We can all live better.

Disclaimers and answers to expected questions:

  • Of course no system is perfect. UBI would have to be very carefully implemented to not just re-create or enhance various systems of inequality.
  • Yes, I am a hippie utopianist. That’s my whole deal. That’s what being a speculative fiction writer means to me: imagining better possibilities.
  • No, this won’t lead to a huge % of the population just being leeches on society. See the resources below.

Further reading on UBI, including a variety of perspectives:

Studies on UBI
UBI pilot program in Kenya
UBI in Ontario, Canada
The Alaska Permanent Fund
“The Conservative Case for UBI”
UBI in Finland
“The Wrong Kind of UBI”
Universal Basic Assets
“UBI: The Answer to Automation?”

Writers, Artists, and the ACA

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There’s a call to action further down. If you’re already convinced that the ACA is important to keep, skip down for action steps.

A lot of people are talking about the GOP and the new Senate, Congress, and President-Elect’s likely actions on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly known as the ACA or Obamacare.

I personally used the PPACA exchanges to find a cheaper and higher-quality health insurance package for my 2015 health insurance, and I personally know dozens of writers and other freelancers who use the PPACA exchanges for health insurance. I’ve seen over a dozen direct accounts from writers/artists/freelancers that they’d be dead or back in terrible day jobs without the PPACA, due to the protections it offers against being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions or for other reasons.

The PPACA is crucial in making it possible for many writers, artists, web designers, graphic designers, and many other freelancer able to work in their desired field full-time. We know that 20 million more people have health insurance because of the PPACA. That’s over 6%. 20 million people is greater than the population of the entire state of New York. That’s huge.

Gutting or repealing the ACA would have a massive impact on my field – SF/F prose, as well as comics, visual art, etc. The ACA has let more creatives and freelancers go full-time. If the ACA goes away, the best opportunity for full-time creatives to obtain healthcare for themselves and their families goes out the window.

Even if you don’t use ACA plans, please consider calling in support of the ACA to make sure that your favorite writer, your favorite artist or graphic designer, your favorite freelance pop culture writer, etc. will still have access to affordable health care. The ACA is not perfect, but so far, the GOP has done little more than spread lies about what the ACA does and promise to remove it and somehow give us something better. But without any details.

 

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I’m not saying that the PPACA is perfect. It was the result of a lot of legislative fighting and compromise. But it’s done a lot of good, and we can build on it instead of throwing it all out and starting over or, possibly worse, trying to keep only part of it and throwing out the rest. The PPACA was designed to function because of the inter-dependent parts – the individual mandate brings people into pools so that the price of insuring high-risk people becomes more manageable for the companies and keeps costs down, etc. I’d prefer single-payer or other systems more like Canada or one of the other ally nations we have with very strong health care programs. But right now, we apparently have to fight tooth and nail to keep the imperfect but life-saving system we have.

Additionally, if you are a writer, artist, graphic designer, web designer, or other freelancer that uses the ACA plans, or someone who the ACA has personally assisted, I’d love to hear your story in the comments so other people can see just how much good it’s done.

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ACTION STEPS – Copied over from material shared on FB/Twitter

If are a US person and you support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, please consider calling or writing your elected representatives in the Senate and the House. Here’s a contact sheet with info as well as suggested scripts.

The New Landscape – Platforms, Crowd Funding, and More

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Last November, I wrote a post called The New Landscape – Access, Discovery, and Media De-centralization. I’ve decided to call that essay the first in a series (The New Landscape), and today I want to take the topic in a new direction, jumping off of this point:

Here’s what I see as the dominant progression for a creator trying to make money from their work (visual art, music, prose, comics, video, etc.)

Level 1 – Start small, give stuff away for free, sell some stuff. At Level 1, a creator is almost totally reliant on big systems, for both discovery and fulfillment/delivery. Basically no one knows who they are, so they join larger infrastructures and services to get the word out about their material through algorithmic and organic discovery.

Level 2 – Building Audience & Relationships — At this level, it becomes viable to diversify their portfolio, maybe by selling some merch (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, patches, etc). Here, a creator can bring dedicated fans onto a growing mailing list. This level enables direct sales and stronger performance on retail sites, but the creator may still be largely dependent for discovery-enabled growth and a lot of fulfillment/delivery.

Level 3 – Big Creators – Here, creators have a dedicated audience large enough they can get a living wage directly from their base, either totally direct or through Patreon/Kickstarter. Maybe they supplement their income speaking/appearance fees etc., having a large enough platform that they are in demand not just as creators, but as entrepreneurs/thought leaders in their field. They may still use large systems, but if they do, they do so from a far stronger position – they are less dependent on any given system, since their supporter base is strong, a base that is specific and mobilized, not platform-dependent.

This three-tier system is a bit reductive, as I said in the original post, but it provides a framework for what I’d like to talk about today: the differences between services/systems for Platform Building and those for Platform Mobilization.

At the Nebula Conference, I got to meet with a representative from Patreon, who helped answer some questions I had about their company and business model. Their rep confirmed what I’d already seen from being a patron on that platform – that it is more of a Platform Mobilizing system rather than a Platform Building one.

(Note – a number of writers I admire have found some success already using Patreon to support their other writing-based income, including Saladin Ahmed, Kameron Hurley, and most recently, N.K. Jemisin, who hit and easily passed the goal she’d set to allow her to quit her day job.)

Defining Terms

Here’s what I mean:

Platform: a creator’s established body of work, professional networks, and the way that they present as a creator. A creator with a small platform may just have started releasing works, or they may not have reached a very wide audience. A creator with a large platform may be well-known for some other work before they entered a creative field, or they might have built it as their career developed. A large platform tends to come with and from a large supporter base.

Platform Building: A system or process that is Platform Building is one that includes discovery systems – good ways for people that have never heard of the creator to find them and engage with their works. Producing content is Platform Building, as every work creates the opportunity for someone to find and engage with your creative efforts. YouTube, Twitch.tv, and any retail system where a consumer can follow a creator can serve as a Platform Building system. Platform Building enables creator and consumer/reader/fan to engage through the work as well as enabling other forms of communication to strengthen those relationships.

Platform Mobilizing: A system or process that is Platform Mobilizing is one where a creator can send or bring their fans/readers/viewers/etc. in order to make a project happen or to allow more direct financial support for a project/creator. Kickstarter and Patreon are both Platform Mobilizing companies, though in different ways, to different degrees.

Example – Mobilizing for Genrenauts

I’m running a Kickstarter right now, and as of the time of writing this essay, the project is less than 10% from hitting the $5,000 funding goal (yay!) When I launched the project, I was a bit worried that $5,000 might be too high for a first Kickstarter, that maybe I needed to aim lower and then try to build momentum by over-funding.

But in reality, I hit 50% of the goal in two and a half days, largely based on existing fans and strong signal-boosting from friends and colleagues. Based on how things are going, I’m likely to hit the funding goal about halfway through the campaign, and then spend the final two weeks pushing for stretch goals. That seems like a perfectly solid way of going about things in a single-creator project.

What has surprised me is that according to Kickstarter’s dashboard analysis tools, around 27% of the pledges made to the project have come from Kickstarter’s own discovery systems. Those include their search engine, their Projects We Love recommendations, and so on. I had not expected Kickstarter to provide so much discovery. I’d estimate that close to a third of the backers on the project had not heard of me before launch. This, in my opinion, means that I’d substantially under-estimated Kickstarter’s utility as a tool for not only Platform Mobilizing, but also Platform Building. There are going to be notably more people invested in the Genrenauts series when this campaign completes than when it had started.

Given the opportunities involved, any Platform Mobilizing system that uses a crowd-funding approach like Kickstarter will likely be working on building in some discovery systems. The company benefits if people come to trust their system as a way of discovering amazing new content, and the creators benefit from crowd-funding with a system that helps do more than just facilitate a direct mobilization of existing fans/readers/viewers/etc. And it definitely works for me as a consumer, too – I’ve backed a fair # of projects that I only heard about through Kickstarter’s search system. Patreon’s discovery tools, in my experience, are more nascent, and have a ways to go. The company is also much younger thank Kickstarter, so this is to be expected.

The Inevitable So What

Here’s why I think this is a useful framework: I’ve been following Kickstarter and Patreon each since pretty early in their public histories, and trying to study what they can and do offer to creators. In publishing we have this idea of The Discoverability Problem, which is that it is getting harder for individual creators to have their work discovered, which makes it harder for new creators to find a following and build a sustainable career. There are so many books being released (largely due to digital self-publishing) and more releases means that there are more works to choose from. In publishing, the loss of shelf space from the closing of Borders and the lessening number of indie bookstores in the USA (a trend that has thankfully reversed, as we’re seeing new strong indies doing a great job around the country) means that writers are posed with discovery being an ever-greater problem.

One of the best ways to be discovered is to build your platform. The more people know you and have positive associations with you, the more chances you have to sell your work.

With the proliferation of social media, there are ever-more places creators can go to try to build their platform. You can be on Instagram, Tumblr, or Snapchat, as well as older systems like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Social media channels are a well-trod way of building platform – incrementally growing your readership/tribe/etc. by consistently entertaining, informing, or whatever you choose to do. This form of Platform-Building tends to take time and a lot of effort. The first few people to any platform will be far more likely to benefit from it, growing their profile as the platform grows.

But any one media company can come or go – the fortunes of a social media company rise and fall. LiveJournal and MySpace are mere shadows of what they once were. Facebook lists on, and Twitter is harried by largely-unchecked abusers and the continual frustration of not being able to edit a typo out of a tweet that’s raking up RTs.

If a creator gets in deep with a single platform, their ability to connect with their fans/readers/etc. is bound up in that company’s fate. This is why people have been harping on and on about email lists/newsletters – if you bring you audience to a system that is much more directly under your control, that ability to connect is much more robust.

And from a mailing list, you can then direct your fans to a new platform, mobilizing them in order to help make a project happen.

This is why I see Platform Building systems as mostly being oriented toward Stage One and Stage Two (see the framework from the earlier post), and that Platform Mobilizing systems are more effective for later Stage Two and Stage Three. It doesn’t seem terribly viable (at least right now) to start a brand-new creative career by going directly to Patreon as your main way of interacting with fans/readers/etc.. For the most part, the people succeeding on crowd-funding/crowd-patronage systems are those with proven success and/or an existing fan-base. But once you have those connections and have earned that support, systems like Patreon and/or Kickstarter can let a creator provide an opportunity for fans, and especially super-fans, to go the extra mile in supporting a creator.

21st Century Creative Economics

Here’s another way we can express this:

Most of my books are available digital-first, from $2.99 to $5.99 per book. I also have paperbacks for $12.99 to $14.99. I don’t have any books out in hardcover, so $15 is the highest price for any of my books. If I have a super-fan who absolutely adores my works and will buy anything I publish, but I only ever ask $2.99 to $15 for my work, then they’ll buy as many of those as I can produce, but maybe I won’t actually provide them with an opportunity for them to support me to their satisfaction.

Then I launch my Kickstarter, with a $100 backer level, and they pick it in a heartbeat. They get a lot out of being able to directly support me and the extra rewards I offer above and beyond the book. And I get a big chunk of $ toward my project, plus a way to engage directly with a major supporter.

This is, I think, the source of one of the big appeals of Kickstarter and Patreon: With those company’s business models, I can offer a wider range of commercial interaction possibilities, and find places where the existing mix of products doesn’t satisfy a fan/supporter’s interest. If I have a fan who makes a really good living and wants to be able to help support me, if I make it easier for them to get more out of supporting me, we might both be able to win – me from greater financial support, them from getting more content from me, more direct interaction, and/or more insight into how I make my art.

This is another way to diversify your portfolio as a creator – offer a lot of different ways for people to support you – ebooks, paperbacks, audio, crowdfunded support, large-ticket experiences (critiques, Google Hangouts, etc.), and so on. And offering that wider mix you may find that you’re not only making more $, you’re giving readers/fans/etc. more chances to connect with you and your work. The perfect overlap of Platform-Building and Platform-Mobilizing.

Speaking of that Kickstarter, please check out the campaign and see if you’d like to join over 180 people helping me realize my creative dreams:

What Star Wars Means To Me

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I saw The Force Awakens again yesterday. And I loved it with every fiber of my being.

I am the person and writer I am in no small part due to Star Wars. I know I’m not alone in this. I’m not claiming to be singularly influenced in a deeper way than anyone else, yadda yadda. But here this is my story. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I don’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen Star Wars. Its structure and tone has left an indelible mark on me.

Continue reading →

The Flurry Before The Storm

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Hi folks! I know it’s supposed to be the calm before the storm, but sometimes I get too excited.

I wanted to give you all a heads-up that coming into next week, I’m going to be quite active with promotion for Hexomancy, the fourth Ree Reyes book, and that promo will eventually give way to promotion for Genrenauts: The Shootout Solution.

Hexomancy coverShootout Solution cover

But first, here’s a bit of catch-up of what I’ve been up to over the last month:

At GenCon, Wesley Chu (now a John W. Campbell Award-winner) and I talked with Greg Wilson and Brad Beaulieu of Speculate! The Podcast For Writers, Readers, and Fans) about our publishing journeys, as the start of a new series of episodes.

Then I turned the mic and interviewed Greg and Brad on their journeys so far, their podcasting, hobbies, and life balance.

Tor.com released a free collection with sample chapters from each of the launch list of novellas, including the first Genrenauts story.

Audec-Hal was included in Bradley Beaulieu’s List of Top 10 Metropolis stories.

And right now, Shield and Crocus is on sale for just $1.99 in ebook – grab a copy if you’ve been holding off, or buy a copy for a friend if you feel so inclined.

Deb Stanish interviewed me for the Uncanny Magazine Podcast about my essay on representation in the Marvel & DC Cinematic Universes.

And there’s plenty more to come!

Why Writing Diversely Matters To Me

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The Younger Gods is my fourth published novel, but my first with a white male protagonist. This is not a co-incidence – it was a very deliberate choice.

Stories make our world. As a writer, I help tell the stories that people internalize to set their expectations of what the world is, and who is welcome and valid in it. For me, being a writer means including people from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. To do any less is to erase them from history and deny their existence.

Instead, I aggressively seek out ways to write characters from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences, both to show the breadth of viable lives and perspectives that humanity holds, and to use my disproportionately-favored voice as one with privilege Yatzee (male, straight, white, cisgender, middle class, neurotypical, able, etc.) to bring greater attention to and respect for the diversity of lived experiences in the world.

Writing diversely has been a mission that I embrace whole-heatedly, challenging myself to learn more about the world and about the people in it. I feel that writing diversely greatly enriches my work, helps me avoid cliche and lazy storytelling. In writing diversely, I seek to create stories that people from many different lived experiences can see themselves in, stories that say, “We can all be heroes.”

So, that’s all great in theory, Mike. But do you walk the walk?

In addition to actively casting The Younger Gods in a manner that fits the city’s demographics (numerous African-american characters, Filipino characters, Hispanic characters, South Asian Characters, etc.), I made several conscious casting changes in The Younger Gods – one in the middle of the rough draft, and another change very close to publication. the first change is that the character of Dorothea was originally a man. I wanted my cast to have a better gender balance, and found that writing the Broadway Knight character as a woman was even more interesting for me.

The other changes were the opposite direction, changing a female character to male. In an earlier draft, Jacob’s friend Thomas was his girlfriend, Jennifer – things still went sour after prom, but it was a loss of a romantic partner instead of a platonic friend. The death of Jessica had been part of the character’s story pretty much since the beginning, from when I first had the idea over ten years ago.

But in the process of revisions, I realized that there was no way to keep Jessica in the role without her being an example of Women in Refrigerators (trigger warning: sexualized violence against women). I’d internalized that narrative trend thanks to decades of reading comics and playing video games, etc., and only when I was nose-deep in revisions did I realize that I was replicating it without useful critique or subversion. No matter how I framed the death or demonized it, it was still another Fridging. And I wouldn’t have been proud of the work if I hadn’t made that change. In the conversation I had with my fiance, I had to actively push back the panic and shame I was experiencing about putting a book out with a major fail like that. But thankfully, I was able to make the change, with the support of my editor, Adam Wilson.

The Takeaway

Making that change not only meant that I didn’t have a fridged girlfriend as a motivating factor for my leading character, but what I ended up with was a stronger story overall. Having Thomas in that role – as Jake’s one friend betrayed by his family, sending our hero away from the family – meant that all of the other themes of friendship and alienation throughout the book were enriched by that loss and guilt about Thomas that Jacob felt.

In my experience as a consumer and student of stories, the loss male best friend is a far less common motivating factor for a male character than the loss of a romantic partner. Male friendships are downplayed, contextualized as being ‘bromances,’ often to avoid homosocial/homosexual connotations (because the patriarchy says that gay = effeminate, and since feminine = bad, gay = bad! Thanks, patriarchy! Your logic is as straightforward as it is spurious and toxic). So having Thomas be a major motivator for Jake gave me a new perspective on the story. And I think the novel is stronger for it, since so much of the rest of the novel is about Jacob learning about how to reach out to other people, to build friendships and rely on those friends and allies.

It is not sufficient for me to write only people who look like me, who come from my exact background. Writing diversely gives me challenges, forces me to stretch my writing skills, and creates the opportunity for me to explore the world through the perspective of people who come from and have lived very different lives than I have. I can’t tell other writers that they *have* to write diversely. Even if I did, it’s better for writers to come to that decision for themselves. I think it’s far better to write diversely and to mess up than to be afraid and let that fear of rebuke control you, so that you settle for the easy writing choices and produce another white-washed, overwhelmingly male, white, cisgenger, straight world that Hollywood so often shows us as their ‘default).

Writing Diversity While Playing in Life’s Easy Mode

The weird thing is that my Privilege Yahtzee actually puts me at an advantage even when intentionally writing diversely. I’m more likely to be able to sell a work that has a lot of diversity, than a woman or a person of color is. And once sold, I’m more likely to be lauded for it, as a “brave” or “insightful” or something. All of this, just for meeting a minimum bar of decency that I set for myself. It’s a weird reality, but it seems to be the way of things. And if I can use my privilege to get more stories into the world that acknowledge and celebrate the lived experiences of people from diverse backgrounds, then I will totally do so. And along the way, I’ll also use my privilege to promote the voices and works of people from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. I can do both, and both make the world better.

Writing diversely, and doing it well, is not easy. I will mess up. I have already messed up, and been called on it, and have taken those comments to heart. But I wouldn’t have learned those lessons, wouldn’t have become better-able to write diversely, if I hadn’t tried.

This is not about fishing for cookies, it is not about white/male/anything guilt.

Here’s what it is:

  • A promise to myself that I won’t settle for my ingrained, lazy defaults as a person who grew up in a culture that’s patriarchal, kyriarchal, racist, and more.
  • A realization that challenging my own assumptions will let me dig deeper and find fresh, more interesting ways of storytelling.
  • A public pledge to tell stories about and for as much of the world as I can, to make sure that I do not erase and ignore people who have been marginalized, oppressed, and erased in/from narratives of all sorts (fictional, historical, etc.).
  • An effort to show other writers who are intimidated by the idea or practice of writing diversely for fear of its difficulty or fear of getting it wrong.

To those writers, let me say this: it’s better, in my eyes, to be a screw-up with good intentions, working (imperfectly) on the side of social justice and inclusion than to take the easy route and let your work perpetuate the crappy, marginalizing and erasure-tastic status quo. Your mileage may vary, but this is where I stand.

When it comes to writing diversely, I am proud of The Younger Gods. I put a lot of time into making sure that it showed a more accurate cross-section of the people who live in actual New York even as I was moving apocalyptic sorcerers, Nephilim, and other super-humans around to chase each other and have fight scenes. I feel that it is a stronger book for being diverse, and I hope you will enjoy it.

 

The Younger Gods cover