Where I'm At - April 20th, 2015

In July 2014--the month after I turned 35--I quit my day job. Since then I've been earning my living as an author. It hasn't been easy, and I've been tempted to give up more than once, but nearly a year later I'm still at it. Sometimes I'm nearly overcome by the challenges, and sometimes I feel nearly drunk on joy. I've achieved some of my greatest dreams, but I've also faced more self-doubt and uncertainty in the last ten months than I have in most of my last ten years. And it's partially because of that manic up-and-down emotional roller-coaster that I'm considering reviving this blog.

I'm hoping that keeping a journal of my writing life will provide me with a more objective vantage point from which to view my progress (or lack of progress). I'm hoping that jotting down my thoughts and feelings will give me a record that I can reference whenever I'm feeling particularly high or low. I'm hoping this blog will help with my long-view, since it's so easy to get completely wrapped up in the here-and-now.

I've also learned a lot and grown a lot since quitting my job to pursue my dream, and I plan on writing about those things here, too. Putting my thoughts into words has always helped me to more fully process and understand those thoughts. It helps me figure out why I think what I think, and I'm hoping this blog will help me on that front. I want to better develop my strategies.

Also, the fact that this blog is public is significant. Writing can be a pretty introverted and isolating activity; I'm hoping that putting my thoughts down in a public venue will help to keep me from falling into insular thinking, even if I'm the only person reading those posts.

So that's where I'm at right now.

Hurrah! Moving forward in 2014

Whenever I've looked at the sales information on my Smashwords account, I've seen reports of a few sales directly through their website, and a bunch of zeros for all the other places they distribute my books. I assumed this meant that the books weren't selling any copies anywhere else. And then, yesterday, I realized there was a little 2013 button showing up on the page. I clicked that button, and saw that copies of the books have been selling, especially Zombie City, especially through Nook. It was a wonderful, and significant, surprise.

See, I'm a pretty insecure guy, and even though I've been writing for almost 20 years now (since I was 15), I still sort of tend to think that no one out there is going to want to read my stuff. It hasn't stopped me from writing--indeed, writing seems to be a sort of compulsion that I can't stop doing, no matter what--but it has inhibited my self-promotion efforts, and impacted my motivation.

Up until yesterday, I'd figured the Zombie City series was a failure. I'd sold about a dozen copies through Amazon, and just a few more than a dozen through Smashwords, in the three months since I'd published the first episode. I figured people weren't that interested in it. I didn't try to promote it, or to find any reviewers willing to rate it. I'd even decided to put it on the backburner for a while, to see if I could come up with a different story that people might want more.

But yesterday I found out that people have been buying it. There have been about 55 Smashwords affiliate sales for Zombie City, mostly through Nook.

I know, I know: 55 sales is pretty small potatoes. Still, I was excited, especially by the third episode sales. I reason that if people are going on to buy the third episode, they're pretty invested in the story. Not everybody keeps going, but more than half of the people who bought the second episode also went back to buy the third.

For me, that's validation I can use to beat back the paralysis my insecurities had given me about that project. It tells me that there are some people out there who want to read what I write.

So here's my plan:

1) I'm going to jump back into the Zombie City series. I hope to finish Episode 4 before the end of January, and maybe wrap it up with a fifth episode sometime in February.

2) I'm going to try to get Episode 1 to price-match for free on Kindle. Right now it's free everywhere else, but Amazon hasn't price-matched it yet, and I haven't really made any effort to get them to do it (cause I figured no one wanted to read it anyway).

3) I'm going to start trying to promote the series. Most importantly, I'm going to start contacting reviewers, in hopes that I can get a few ratings to show up for it. Right now, none of the episodes have any ratings, and I get the feeling that people are much less likely to try a book if they don't think anyone else is reading it.

4) I'm going to get more active in my efforts to build a mailing list. So far, the only thing I've done to get people to sign up is post a widget link on this blog, which hardly anyone reads. I'm planning on including a link to the sign-up in the books themselves.

Basically, in general, I'm planning on working harder at this whole self-publishing thing. There's definitely a lot more effort I could put in, and seeing that there are people out there who want to read my writing has motivated me to try harder.

studying Howey's story

Have you heard of Hugh Howey? He's one of the biggest success stories in self-publishing. One of his stories was optioned by Ridley Scott for a potential feature film. He's turned down seven-figure offers from major presses wanting rights to his ebooks, and eventually negotiated a print-only deal with Simon and Schuster (keeping his ebook rights for himself).

My brother told me I should read Hugh Howey's blog to try to find out the secret to his success. So I started at the beginning, and read a bunch. I don't know if I discovered Howey's secret, but I did learn a few things.

Howey started out pursuing traditional publication, and succeeded in signing a deal with a small press for his first novel. After the first novel, he quickly (in the course of the next year) wrote three follow-up novels, but he published them by himself, on Kindle. During this time he also cranked out a novel for NaNoWriMo 2010 called Half Way Home, which was also self-published.

Throughout the buildup to his small-press release, and after it too, Howey seemed to do all of the right things. He wrote the aforementioned followups, he worked at spreading the word about his books, he worked at building an online presence and developing himself as a "brand." His efforts resulted in some success, but it was limited.

And then he broke out with Wool, a novelette that he made no efforts to promote, and which he never really expected to go anywhere. For some reason it did, getting hundreds, and then thousands, of sales, building more and more interest, all on its own. Wool created the snowball effect I mentioned in a previous blog.

Howey didn't seem to understand why Wool was having the success it was. But that didn't stop him from making an effort to capitalize on it. Once he realized Wool was becoming a break-out success, he cranked out 3 followups in the course of a month, and they helped to blow that break-out into one of the biggest book success stories of 2011. Eventually he published a total of nine Wool-related titles. They have sold more than a million copies, and have been translated into at least 24 languages.

So, what's the main thing I learned from the above?

Howey's success came as a surprise to him. It wasn't a novel-length work, it wasn't part of a series when it first started selling, and he wasn't putting effort into promoting it. It seemed to take off all on its own, but when it did, he seized the opportunity it presented.

What kind of strategy can I come up with after studying Howey's story?

Give up on self-promotion. Give up on spreading the word, and building a fan-base. Give up on "professional cover design and formatting." Give up on writing novels. Give up on writing series. Instead, focus on writing and publishing short, self-contained stories. Keep cranking them out. If fortune hits, be ready to turn the lucky story into a series. And do it quickly.

the problem with Woody Allen's new movie

I've watched Woody Allen's last five movies in the theater, and I'm not big on going to theaters. In other words, he's on a roll as far as I'm concerned. Every movie has been a cut above the usual stuff that I can't be bothered to shell out $10+ to go see, and some of them (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for example), made five-star status in my book.

But his newest movie--Blue Jasmine--is a bust.

It's so much of a bust that I forgot all about it less than twenty minutes after walking out of the theater. In fact, the movie made so little of an impression on me that I only just now remembered it existed, and that I saw it.

I had high hopes going into it, too. The reviews were good, peppered with Oscar buzz for Cate Blanchett, and accolades for Allen himself. One critic went so far as to claim the movie was a "quantum leap" for Allen. Consider that claim for a second. Old Woody's been making movies for just shy of 50 years. His films have earned 23 Oscar nominations, and 4 wins. Sounds like he's already got things pretty figured out, and now a critic is claiming this new film is a "quantum leap" above the rest of Allen's stuff. What the hell does that even mean? Does the movie reveal the meaning of life, or something?

Just in case you were wondering: the movie doesn't reveal the meaning of life. And it doesn't live up to the hype, either. Not even halfway.

Here's why: remember that roll I mentioned earlier, the one that Allen is on? One key element of it is the way Allen uses the settings of the movies like actual characters. The culture of each place becomes integral to the plot. In fact, the city-settings are so important they're mentioned in the movie titles: Midnight in Paris, To Rome With Love, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The hype about Blue Jasmine was that he'd been giving San Francisco that treatment. But then he didn't.

Have you seen the movie? It's a New York movie, filmed in San Francisco. The Mission District is Allen's stand-in for Staten Island--you hardly even see any Latino people, and definitely don't hear a word of Spanish. Union Square becomes Park Avenue--a bunch of rich shoppers, not a tourist in site. There isn't even a single Asian character, and more than half the people who actually live in San Francisco are Chinese!

Instead, you've got all the New York stereotypes plugged into a San Francisco setting: loud-mouthed, blue-collar Italian-American characters; snobby blue-bloods for those blue-collar boors to clash with; people jumping in and out of Taxi cabs. All of that is New York.

In the real San Francisco, the Italian-Americans are actually Italian. They hang out in North Beach, wear fancy suits, and speak with Italian accents. The old-money blue-bloods are a marginalized group relegated to Nob Hill, with relatively little presence in the wider city. San Francisco's real money-class is the dot-com startup CEOs.

And that points to a crucial thing about San Francisco that Allen's movie missed entirely: its love of the new, the innovative, the exotic. San Francisco is a city that has always been in love with the wider world. New York is a city in love with itself.

Because of the writing I've been doing recently (my new series is set in San Francisco) I've been thinking about this stuff a lot, trying to understand what San Francisco is, what it means. I lived in San Francisco for more than a third of my life, and I still think a complete understanding of its nature is beyond me. But one thing I will say, with no hesitation whatsoever: my writing comes closer to the real San Francisco than Woody Allen's film does... even if the San Francisco in my stories is being overrun by zombies.

And you can tell Woody I said so.

The Snowball Theory

Why do some books sell like crazy, and others... don't? A lot of people have spent a lot of time pondering this topic, myself included. One idea that people seem to come up with is: book sales are like a form of mass. The more sales the book has, the greater its mass becomes. The greater its mass, the greater the gravity it exerts, pulling even more sales its way.

Take The Da Vinci Code as an example. It's one of the bestselling books of all time. It reached a sales momentum that actually seemed to propel itself forward to greater sales. Everyone was talking about it, and because of that, even people who don't normally read felt motivated to buy a copy, just so they could participate in the conversation.

That was back in the days of mega-bookstore dominance, when every town of notable size had at least one Borders bookstore and/or one Barnes & Noble, and the mega-bookstores fueled bestsellers sales. They offered bestsellers at significant discounts. They arranged the store displays in ways to maximize bestseller visibility.

Things have changed a bit since then. Book sales are no longer overwhelmingly channeled through the megastores. Borders went bankrupt, and rumor has it that Barnes & Noble is hurting too. Online sales, of both print books and ebooks, have claimed a growing portion of the pie. How will that effect the bestseller-phenomenon?

I think it'll make it even more pronounced.

From what I've seen, online booksellers tend to exacerbate many of the factors that feed into the bestseller-phenomenon. Mainly, they give more visibility to titles that are selling more copies. An online store is sort of like the old mega-bookstores, but instead of displaying books on tables and shelves, they're displaying the books on a screen. The more copies a book sells, the more likely it is to appear on the screen. And instead of dealing with a few dozen--or even a few hundred--people walking into a physical store on any given day, we're dealing with hundreds of thousands--even millions--of people looking at a screen.

Some readers might point out that there isn't one specific screen that all people see. Online booksellers like Amazon customize the screen to the viewer--if you like Fantasy fiction, they'll make sure that some of the books on your screen are Fantasy books. But I think that the underlying factors are similar. Not every Fantasy book you see on your screen will be seen by other people who like Fantasy, but there will probably be some titles that are shown to every reader of Fantasy books. And the more copies those titles have sold, the more likely it is that you'll see them.

More sales mean greater visibility. And greater visibility leads, exponentially, to more sales. I call it the Snowball effect.

What this means for self-published authors, in a practical sense, is that you're facing obscurity unless you can generate sales. If a month goes by without a title moving any copies, that book will receive none of the benefit of greater visibility. People won't see it unless they go looking for it, and since there are more than a million self-published books on Amazon alone, people are going to have to look pretty hard to find your book.

It's like your book is a pebble sitting on top of a snow-covered mountain. If no one buys a copy, the pebble just sits there. As the hours and days and weeks go by, your pebble sinks into the snow, and more snow falls on top of it, and pretty soon it's lost. What you need to do is prod at the pebble--try to get eyes on it, try to generate sales--and keep prodding until you can get it to move. If you only get it to move a little--sell only a few copies--the pebble loses its momentum and stops moving and starts to sink. But if you can give it a good jolt and start it sliding, it's more likely to have snow stick to it. And if it starts rolling down the mountain, and keeps picking up snow as it rolls, you've got the chance for it to become something big.

So, the initial efforts are the greatest. There are millions of pebbles out there--they're small and hard to see. Once a pebble starts rolling and taking on snow, you won't have to be as diligent to keep it rolling. It'll start to roll on it's own, at least for a little while.

And the good thing for self-published authors is the fact that we don't have such a strict time limit to get that forward momentum started. Physical books get taken off the shelves after a few weeks if they don't sell. Ebooks are still there, still available. We can keep trying to get the snowball rolling. Our main limitation is our own energy (which is a very real limitation).

Of course, that's how things look to me now, with Blood Brothers an inert pebble. I've never really got a snowball rolling, so I don't even really know if there is a snowball. Maybe I'm totally wrong about all of this.

why I'm not interested in watching Brad Pitt's World War Z

I like zombies. I'm a big fan of George Romero's movies, and Simon Pegg earned a special place in my heart with Shaun of the Dead--a place that continues to flow forth goodwill despite the fact that most of the other movies he's been in have been pretty disappointing (the new Star Trek movies being an exception). But I'm not at all interested in going to see Brad Pitt's World War Z. Why? Let me tell you why.

It's not a zombie movie.

Zombies, in my mind, are compelling subjects for very specific reasons:
1.) they represent the inevitability of death
2.) they represent the triumph of oblivion over thought and consciously directed will
3.) they are human in form, but possess no humanity.

When you take those things away, when you feature a zombie that doesn't have those characteristics, you remove the essence of what makes the zombie concept interesting. And, from everything I've seen or read about the World War Z movie, it looks like they've failed to incorporate all of those crucial things.

First of all--and this is a problem that many recent zombie movies have fallen into--the zombies move way too fast. Crucial to the George Romero portrayal of zombies is the fact that his zombies are slow, lurching things. They're corpses, reanimated bodies in various states of decay. It makes sense, therefore, that their bodies are not in optimum athletic condition. It makes sense that they aren't capable of outrunning an Olympic sprinter.

And that reduced ability highlights the first point I mention above: zombies represent the inevitability of death. Despite the greater physical condition we possess, zombies are inescapable because of their inevitability, which is like death itself. The knowledge that our physical condition, even when we're in the prime of our lives, is a temporary thing--that's a compelling thought. And zombies represent that thought in a carnal form.

Now on to the next problem: the zombies are displaying organized, cooperative behavior. I read an article about the making of World War Z, and in the article the film-makers say they wanted to do something "new" with zombies. So they drew from natural phenomena--salmon swimming upstream, animals hunting in packs, ants swarming onto each other until their bodies create a rising column (like in the picture). And this detracts from the second point above: zombies represent the triumph of oblivion over thought and consciously directed will.

In certain ways this second point actually just builds on the first point. Zombies show us, by their mindless action, that our cleverness and our determination--just like our physical ability when we're in the prime of our lives--don't make us safe. We're smart, we're capable of concentrated effort and deliberate action, and yet such things pale in the face of a relentless, mindless horde of zombies. The Brad Pitt movie--by having the zombies show the ability to work together, by showing that they can think--removes that feature too.

And finally, zombies are compelling because they look like humans, but show no sense of humanity. The George Romero movies highlight this aspect beautifully. They show people struggling to come to terms with the fact that a zombie, while it has a human body, has no human sense of compassion or sympathy or fraternity with other humans. All they have is a desire to kill. And when the zombie used to be a friend or family member, dealing with that lack of humanity becomes even more difficult.

But in the Brad Pitt movie, at least what I've seen of it in previews and commercials, the zombies are running around so quickly, in such great numbers, that you hardly get a sense of them as individual things. And so there isn't time to face the idea that they used to be human.

So all in all, it looks like an Epic Fail to me.