Kelly McCullough – Page 56

Friday Cat Blogging

Evil egg, I escape thee!

It’s hatching…OMG, it’s hatching!

Sorry, can’t hear you over the om-nom-noms.

Now, that’s disturbing.

Nope, that’s catfood Nirvana.

Om—mani—foodme—om…

Okay, maybe cats do come up with good ideas once in a while…

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

I hate you. That is all.

Halp I’z bein carried off!

What do you mean, vampire cat?

I wuvez you zis much!

Duuuuuuude!

Worship me or I will destroy you

Lola: Dog of the North!

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 25 2011, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

2015 Update: This post about adapting to having two contracted books a year was originally published as I was working on Bared Blade. The pressures remain pretty much the same, and though I’ve since managed to write a Blade book in just 88 days now, I’m not sure I’m really capable of much more than two books a year.

So, this year I made the jump from having one book under contract per 12 month window, to having two books under contract per 12 month window. Now, at first glance you might say: That’s a doubling of your work load, what were you thinking?

What I was thinking was that in each of the previous four years I’d written two books, one on contract, one on spec. And, since I haven’t yet sold any of the spec books, though I do expect to, I would be doubling my income with no concomitant increase in work load. Turns out I was wrong.

Over the last decade or so I’ve tended to work in spurts with gaps of weeks or months between. Since ’06 that’s produced around 150-160k words per 12 month period, or one adult fantasy and one YA written on spec. And that’s been a mostly stress free level of production.

Under the new deal I’m only contracted for 180k per 12 months, which shouldn’t have been that much more work. But I also made the jump from contemporary fantasy to secondary world high fantasy and that seems to add about 20 percent more effort to the process. I’d heard something like that from George R.R. Martin at some point, but he was moving from science fiction to fantasy, and I was just changing types of fantasy. Surely it wouldn’t be that bad…

Add in that the first book went 7k long and that I expect this one to do so as well, and suddenly it’s the equivalent of 220-230k of what I was doing before. That’s 70-90k extra, or nearly another adult novel’s worth of effort. I’m getting it done and not dying, but it’s a major change.

The biggest adjustment from one book a year to two is how fast it catches up to me if I take a break. I’ve often dropped out for a month and a half of downtime at the end of a book, or when I needed to think about the story, or just to spend more time with my professor wife when she’s off from the University. Now, if I haven’t worked ahead, a month and a half is a 22k word deficit that I have to make up some time in my remaining four-and-a-half months.

When that was on a spec book, it didn’t really matter. I could always punt my personal deadline a little further out. I almost never did, but knowing that I could made a huge psychological difference. So, an extra novel’s worth of work plus more than doubled pressure. I think I’ve found a balance that makes it work for me, but it’s going to be very interesting seeing how things go when we hit my wife’s summer break this year.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 23 2011, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Friday Cat Blogging

I hate sitting for formal portraits, but duties of state…

I iz more noble and more snide.

I prefer to go for lugubrious.

Aloof, cats are supposed to be aloof.

Here, watch me loof!

Self Promotion, Lyda’s Question, and Confirmation Bias

In a post on the Wyrdsmiths blog, my colleague Lyda Morehouse posed the following question about self-promotion:

But it does seem to work for some people on some level, and I always end up wondering by what magic is that done?

I think it’s pretty straightforward actually, and it all comes down to that word seem. Here’s how I think it works (all numbers made up).

If fifty percent of all authors do self-promotion, and a random six percent of all authors cross over into best-sellerdom than three percent of authors who do lots of self-promotion are going to cross over into best-sellerdom purely by chance. Then, at least some of those authors are going to figure that it was self-promotion which made the difference whether it had anything to do with it or not. See also: confirmation bias.

Likewise, if you’re watching from the outside, you might think the only thing that differentiates them from the herd is self-promotion, and then leap to the same conclusion. For that matter, I will even concede that some particularly clever bit of self-promotion that hasn’t already been done a bunch of times might catch the mood and go viral, but I think that’s as much a form of luck as having the book do the same thing.

Great books with tons of self-promotion die. Barely adequate books that get very little push become best sellers. Most of the difference there is luck in hitting the right literary kink for the moment.

We want the industry to make sense, so we tell ourselves stories–we’re authors, telling stories is what we do. That book did so well because the author came up with the really awesome book trailer. That one did poorly because the cover sucked. This one over here is a best-seller simply because it’s that good.

But the truth is, nobody knows what’s going to make a book take off. If there was a real answer, there’s be a publisher somewhere that didn’t sell anything but best sellers.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 22 2011, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

Not looking at you!

Totally looking at you! Where my fud?

I’m ready for my closeupzzzzzzzz…

I’z cutness personif… puzin… its own self!

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 18 2011, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Retro Friday Cat Blogging

I iz teh mysterious!

Must go to the light…

Mighty hunter stalks the fluffball

Dude, turn out the light!

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 11 2011, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Authorial Constructs

I suspect that one of the big disconnects some people are having with the discussion is in seeing this as the authors involved complaining about a problem.

I don’t think the discussion is primarily about a huge problem anyone is having at all, so much as it about talking about cognitive tools for understanding a phenomena that is encountered in greater and greater degree the more broadly you are known of beyond the circle of people who simply know you.

For some people it certainly does become a problem. For some the idea of authorial construct is a handy tool that allows them to separate from their work. For some it’s simply a fascinating cognitive phenomena. It’s also important to note that it’s not only or even mainly about a person’s deliberate public persona.

In the case of authors, at least, people form opinions about who a writer is sometimes based entirely on what they’ve read in the writer’s books, and without any clues other than that and name.

This is one reason why several of my readers have been quite startled to find out that I’m a burly bald man and not the bookish woman they built in their heads by working with my gender-ambiguous name and the stuff of mine that they’ve read.