I was happy in the sun, but now I must ask: What is your bidding my master?*
Sun! <3
Iz my blanket, go ‘way!
And: Go spring!**
*I know that’s not natural for cats, but Nutmeg’s a little odd.
**Reblogging this when it’s six below out makes that picture all the more appealing…sigh.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 29 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
If I were bigger, I’d eat you. You know that, right?
Why yes, I am a sun worshipper. How did you guess?
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 15 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
I’m not at all convinced of the value of self promotion, but I’ve got a book coming out in just a hair over two weeks and I end up going back and forth on the subject. It goes a little like this:
MythOS comes out in 2 weeks!
That means that you’re at the point in the launch cycle where you should be frantically trying to do ninety and nine kind of promotion, right?
*cricket noises*
Right?
No…Maybe…I really don’t know…but probably, no.
Wait, isn’t that heresy. I mean, your publisher isn’t going to do a whole lot since you’re midlister and this a late book in the series. If you don’t do it, no one will, shouldn’t you be panicking?
There’s something to that. My promo budget is almost certainly minimal by publisher standards. At the same time, I’m not going to spend my way to a successful book launch. Not without a lot more money than I’d ever earn back, thus negating the point of the whole exercise. Even that assumes facts not evidence, i.e. that anyone knows how to apply money to the problem of book promotion in such a way as to generate significant sales for midlist books. If it could be reliably done, the publishers ,who have a lot more experience at the whole thing and a lot more books to sell, and hence greater incentive, would already be doing it.
But what about things that don’t cost much money? Shouldn’t you be frantically running around trying to drum up free publicity?
To an extent, sure. I’ll do any interviews that anyone wants to offer me. But checking in with my radio and print and bookstore contacts takes about an hour. What next? I could spend a ton of time to generate more effect, but I’ve got the same problem there that I have with money. Time is more expensive than money since there’s no way to get it back and there’s a diminishing returns effect that kicks in very quickly. In general, I think most self-promotion is a bad use of a writer’s time
Really? Why is that?
Anyone who is good enough writer to get something published, is almost certainly a damn good writer. This is for the simple reasons that the odds of success are lousy. I’ve got a highly specialized skill set for writing and none of the specialized skill set involved in promotion. That being the case I’m almost certainly better off investing the time and effort I’d spend on promotion in making my next book irresistible. I’ll have more fun that way and I’m more likely to be successful.
Okay I can see that, but I still think you should be out stumping for your book. Got anything else?
How about the numbers argument? Lets say that by doing a ton of promotion I can move a few hundred copies of my book that wouldn’t have sold otherwise. 20 at this signing over here. 50 by appearing on local radio. 50 by going to a con that I wouldn’t otherwise have gone to, and so on.
That’s great!
No, it’s not. A few hundred copies doesn’t really matter that much when a moderate print run is 10,000-20,000 books. Take my first book, WebMage. In the first six months I sold an average of 75 copies (mmpb) a day, every day. That earned out my advance plus ten percent. That was fabulous and I was delighted. But I need to double it.
Double it?
In order to make a marginal living I need to sell at least 150 mass market paperbacks a day every day for the rest of my life +inflation. Ooh, better double it again. To make a decent living I’d need to bump that up to something more like 300 a day. To crack six figures it’d have to be ~800 a day. Now do you see why I’m not that excited about spending many hours to sell a few hundred extra books?
I guess so. But you make it sound like there’s no way to win at this game.
I don’t think there is, not through self-promotion. I would love to believe that I could come up with a self-promotional effort that would have an ongoing several hundred books per day kind of impact on my sales and that wouldn’t eat up so much time it would be counterproductive in terms of writing the next book (or preferably the next several books). I’d also love to believe that my cats will support me in my old age….
That’s depressing. All right, Mr. Pessimist, so what do you suggest a writer does about it?
Write.
What?
It’s very simple. Write. If I take the same energy it would take to do a ton of self promotion and I focus it on what I’m good at–writing books—I can produce a complete extra book (or maybe even two) a year. Given that the best promotion that I know of is to have another book come out, one that’s as good or better than the last one, that seems like a simple bet. Especially when I consider that in addition to a new book’s impact on backlist, a new book generates its own sales to add to that books sold per day number. Not only will it promote my books in the best way possible, but it brings in new revenue and it’s a ton of fun. I love writing. That’s why I’m in this business.
Oh, I guess that makes sense. So, you’re not going to do any promotion?
I have a simple rule for promotion: It should involve no money, no time, and no effort.
That sounds like no promotion, all right.
Not quite. I’ll do a little. Here and there. Take this blog post, for example. I’m willing to bend my rules a little for pure promotion’s sake, but not much. I’ll spend some time, a little effort, a couple of bucks. I will also bend them for things that I enjoy doing, like cons, readings, and interviews. I’m a social person and an escapee from the theater asylum. I like meeting new people and being out on stage. I would do these things even if I wasn’t writing, though the book sure helps get interviews. I’m just not going to get wound up about the whole thing.
Any last thoughts for the folks who’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this post?
Yep. If you’re a writer who doesn’t like doing promotional things, or if you’re not good at them, don’t feel guilty about keeping your self-promotion to a minimum. Even if you do enjoy promoting yourself, realize that it’s a trade off. Time spent on promotion is time spent not writing, and writing is the point of the whole thing. Isn’t it?
So, I’ve been working on the proposal for a successor series to the WebMage books. The funny thing is that somewhere along the line, writing book proposals went from being an awful task to kind of fun.
Because of where I am in my career, I no longer have to have a completed book to synopsize, and it’s much easier to plump a cool idea out into a book outline then it is to condense a novel done into one. That helps…a lot. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve been working on the screen porch on a lounger surrounded by cats and a beautiful Wisconsin spring. But the most important change is that I’ve done this enough (way more than 20 times) and read enough successful proposals (30-50) that I no longer worry about the mechanics. It’s just another form of the story/play that is what I love most about my job as a novelist. I feel like I am finally becoming truly comfortable in my skin about all of the aspects of being an author.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that I will continue to have a career under this name, because that’s entirely dependent on book sales, and I have very little control on that front beyond writing the best book I can every time, which I would do anyway, just for me. But that’s just how the business works. I guess the point of the post is simply this:
It gets better.
Every one of those writing tasks that seem daunting now, eventually gets easier and less painful. Keep practicing, keep growing, keep sending stuff out, and some day, when you’re not expecting it, the tasks that seemed impossible once might even have become fun.
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 5 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog May 1 2009, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)
Laura and I spent three weeks traveling in Hawaii and New Zealand over the holidays. Per our usual division of labor I took pictures and she wrote journals. I also made some voice notes. We do this both to remember the place and to give me a good basis for using material from major travel in my books. I’ve already got some wonderful ideas for incorporating a lot of setting material into the Blade books. I will also at some point probably set a novel or novels here. In the interests of sharing the experience as much as we can I’ve posted my albums and Laura’s notes both. The albums are Facebook and viewable to all whether you have an FB account or not—might as well use someone else’s bandwidth for that and I’m over there, but the journals are here on kellymccullough.com. I’m still captioning and pictures and will probably add a few videos later but this is most of it.
12 Jan. Today will last approximately 43 hours. We wake up around 08:00, and we check out by 09:45. Our flight to LAX doesn’t leave until evening, so we have some time to do a few more things. There is a zoo in Hamilton, as well as botanical gardens. Having seen several gardens, we choose the zoo. It’s cloudy today, light sprinkles, pleasantly cool.
The Hamilton zoo is really nice! Good landscaping and design on the paths around the enclosures. We see some black chimpanzees, simangs (a gibbon relative), tamarins, ring-tail lemurs and ruff-neck lemurs. Sumatra tiger, bobcat, a painted hunting dog with beautiful coloration. As we head toward the tiger exhibit, Kelly stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk. I look ahead to see what has caught his eye. The winding path has tall grasses and flowers along the sides, and the zoo has taken a life-sized photo cutout of a tiger and hidden it behind the grasses. It is quite startling!
We head to the plains/savannah exhibit. I look at the giraffes at the far side of the enclosure, and Kelly says “Hey, there’s an ostrich!” I start to look around and then jump as the ostrich approaches me, walking along the other side of the fence about ten feet away. How you can miss a bird like that, I do not know, but I had no clue it was nearby. It is a great mellow morning. The sun is coming out occasionally and the rain has ended. We sit for a few minutes at the cafe, watching the arrogant peacock looking for handouts.
We decide to take one last walk to the aviary, and start hearing strange hooting calls. Sounds ape-ish? Maybe the chimps are waking up and talking? So we walk all around the zoo again locating the sounds. We end up at the simangs. They have a huge inflatable throat sac, and when they inhale, the sac inflates and it makes a low bellowing noise. Then they hoot and call on the exhale. We stand there watching for a long time. Kids plug their ears as they approach, a baby freaked out and the parents had to leave. It was really loud and interesting.
Then it’s on to Auckland. Since we have time to spare, we head towards the coast at Bucklands Beach. There is a long windy road (last time I say that, promise!) barely two cars wide that heads somewhere. We follow to the end, and there is a car park saying “Musick Point” with a sign showing the way to stairs to the water. We pass a radio station (guessing this is where the name came from) that looks active, lots of cars parked around it. Then a short trail down to a series of very steep steps. The sort where you don’t like to take your hand off the handrail. Especially since the bottom of the steps where there used to be a wide rock platform is now barely a foot wide, with the rocks sitting in the water. We squirm around the handrail to a short rocky promontory and enjoy a few last views of NZ. The waves are splashing the rocks, the sun is out, we have a great view of the harbor.
Back up to the car, we find a pub called the Barrel Inn. They can do GF gravy on their roasts, so I get lamb roast with corn flour gravy, and Kelly tries a lamb kofta. We finally try the Speight’s Cider on tap: it is quite good! Then it’s out to the car, and head to the airport. We drop off the car, and get through security. We actually have a bag to check now. We have a habit of packing an empty large duffel bag on long trips, and then the dirty clothes go home in checked luggage and our souvenirs and expensive things stay with us in our backpacks.
Buy a few last trinkets to use up our NZ currency. (I twist Kelly’s arm really hard to make him buy another pair of sparkly earrings.) There is a set of massage chairs, and it’s two dollars for six minutes. Never tried one, but it sounds good right now. Oh, yes, it is good. I go for two rounds, the second right before we board. Kelly tries it too.
We are aisle/center again. Our seatmate is a smaller guy returning from his daughter’s wedding in Australia. It is a long, long flight to LAX. Scheduled for 12.25 hours, we have the winds so it’s “only” 11.5 hours. Kelly takes the center seat. I have the tough decision: get little sleep and walk a lot to spare my back? or sleep and wake with a back that will hate me for a week? I choose not to sleep. As we fly over the Pacific, I think about general NZ things.
The population is so small that unless you are in a city, there are few stop signs or stop lights. Most intersections are yields or roundabouts. Summertime brings a lot of signs along the road for plums, cherries, blueberries, and other fruits. Bumblebees are enormous! Land Rovers occasionally go by with a snorkel attachment above the hood for fording.
“Sweet as” is a Kiwi phrase roughly translated as a really strong “good on ya!” We did hear “good on ya” a few times. The country tends to be windy, and many places have wind-driven art. The mailboxes often have a “no junk mail” sticker or “no circulars” or something similar.
A t-shirt in Akaroa: I married Miss Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.
Kelly gets good sleep on the flight, thankfully. He will be driving home! Dinner and breakfast are tasty, with GF meals for me again. We get into LAX on time despite a late departure. An interminable line for immigration leads to a thankfully shorter line for customs. Good people herding by the employees. We need to find a bus to a different terminal for our next flight. It takes a while, but we eventually crowd onto a shuttle. A short wander around our section of the airport, and then head to the gate. Another late departure since the incoming plane is deboarding as we are supposed to be boarding. LAX has some nice gate seating, and good power outlets to charge your devices.
The flight from LAX to MSP is fine, the usual cramped quarters on Delta. Arrive on time, we remember to grab our checked bag, and then hail a taxi. A short ride to St. Paul to pick up our car and then the hour drive home. Our weather luck is holding: the polar vortex has left and it is a balmy 30 degrees, so the car starts just fine.
Home, kitties! It’s still 12 Jan, though it’s 30-some hours after we awoke. Fall asleep to four purring beasties, wake up to four purring beasties. This has been one of our best trips ever, but: East, west, home is best.
I’ve been traveling in Hawaii and New Zealand and will be posting links to the pictures soon.
Whenever we travel my wife does a travel diary while I take most of the pictures. I use her notes as my references for later use for books and other things. She has been gracious enough to allow me to share them here on my site for those who are interested.
