Don't Think about Your Reader (But Do Care about Them)

During my sabbatical from Novel Spaces I toyed with ideas for a year’s worth of columns – and often resolved to write them while the were fresh in my mind. I did not. And this morning, when I realized my first column for 2018 was due, I was caught completely flat footed.

While flapping in circles wondering what to do, I came across some old advice about never thinking about your audience or market when you write, just write! I realized I had something to add to that. Because, like all absolutes, it’s not really.

My current novel series, Dirt and Stars, is young adult science fiction. The protagonists’ ages are 15 to 16 in book one, Down to Dirt, and age through 16 to 18 over the course of books two and three, Life on Dirt and Rise from Dirt. The market for YA fiction is, of course, everyone, but publishers usually target readers a year or two younger than the protagonists – in this case, 13 to 16. This perception of who will be reading the novel impacts how the editor and publisher feel topics like cursing, sexuality, emotional trauma, social issues, and other potentially sensitive issues are addressed.

And they’re right to be concerned – I live and have taught in a North Carolina county where Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is banned from public schools and libraries because a 15-year-old boy describes the joy of – not the act of – masturbation. The novel intelligently depicts eating disorders, racism, poverty, alcoholism, suicide, and cultural identity – topics that should be addressed and discussed in middle and high schools. But that one paragraph has kept it out of untold numbers of school districts – which translates to the loss of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of copies sold to English classes.

Dirt and Stars is written in multiple first-person, told through the frequently-intersecting journals of five characters. Mara Duval of Tombaugh Station must write about her visit to dirt (Earth) for academic credit; Jael Alden intends to do great things and her father (half jokingly) told her to keep a record so she’d have the facts right in her memoir; Beth Duval writes because her best friend Jael writes; Lije Bronislav dreams of being an entrepreneur and believes great ideas can come from random observations; and Fatima Kielani has a social communications disorder and records her daily interactions for discussion with her therapist.

For thirty years I taught in an alternative high school, or taught “those kids” – the ones in the self-contained room at the end of the hall – in a traditional school, was a community support case manager, and did in-home and community “coaching” for family preservation services. When you’ve been around teenagers long enough that you’re part of the furniture, they’ll converse about all kinds of things in front of you. (Especially if you cultivate the impression you’re a little hard of hearing.) I drew on the things I learned and observed working with kids in crisis when creating my characters, how they thought and felt and how they spoke. And my first try was pretty upsetting for everyone who saw it. Eventually I figured out that realistically depicting what I’d experienced didn’t work for my story – all of my characters came from stable homes, were clean and sober, and didn’t have kids of their own. I had to draw on what I knew, not reproduce it; be authentic without being graphic; and make my people accessible without being generic.

Cursing, as Maggie King wrote so well about on December 22, Do You Let Your Characters Swear?, was an issue. Science fiction tends to attract younger readers and has a tradition of using made up curses. Firefly gave us gorram an evolution of “goddamn” and Battlestar Gallactica simply replaced “uc” with “ra” to give us the ever-popular Frak!
There’s one actual curse word in Down to Dirt, and it’s there for legitimate effect. The rest of the time the dirt kids say “crap” a lot and Mara says “blow” – which is, you guessed it, a made-up curse word. The trick was making this work without being too cute about it. I imply, but do not explicitly state, that while they only say crap "on camera", they use other words in other situations. And, about a third of the way in, after Mara vehemently exclaims “blow”, I have her explain it in this entry from Beth’s journal.

“Why do you say ‘blow’ like it’s the f-word?” I asked.
Mara looked at me sharply ... then the corner of her mouth twitched. “Because it is like the f-word,” she said. “Only not about that.”
“Oookay,” I said after waiting for her to add something more. “How is it like the f-word only not about that?”
“A blow is a catastrophic decompression,” Mara said. “Like a hull breach, or when you’re outside and your EVA suit is punctured, or the seals on your waldo rupture.”
I didn’t know what a waldo was, but evidently having its seals rupture in space was really bad.
“So you’re saying that if someone in space has a blow,” I said carefully, “they’re pretty much f-worded?”
“Pretty much,” she agreed solemnly.
Jael laughed. “Beth, you are the only person I know who says ‘f-word’ when there’s no one around.”

Conversations about sex can be both realistic and PG if neither character is sure of the other’s limits or expectations (or orientation) and they’re both sounding each other out without being explicit.

Late in Down to Dirt Mara is sexually assaulted. That scene went through more rewrites than the rest of the scenes combined. In the final iteration I describe just enough of the physicality to give context, but focus not on the act but on Mara’s panic—evoking the horror without detail. In the end, I think this worked better than any graphic description would have. And, relevant to the point, it made the scene accessable to the reader who might be overwhelmed (or offended) by a rawer telling.

So. Don’t worry about your reader when you write? Maybe not in the first draft, when you’re getting everything out so you can work with it. But at the same time, you should be mindful of the person listening to your story. Not readers in the generic – that’s the publisher’s concern, when they’re marketing the story you wrote – but that one reader you want to read, remember, and share what you’ve given them.

Beware Vanity in Independent's clothing

In July of 2011 I launched Kvaad Press. Kvaad started off offering editing and e-publishing with the promise of print on demand in the near future. I knew going in I'd want to pay things forward, having benefited from the generosity of more established writers throughout my career, so I let it be known Kvaad Press was eager to work with new and aspiring writers. After a half-dozen queries from aspiring authors who expected to have their 400-page masterpieces edited for $100 or less, I pulled down my "editing" shingle. I still edit, but only through professional or academic networking. I've occasionally done piecework for a book packager, frequently edit players' resources for various role-playing games, and am taking time away from editing my second doctoral dissertation to write this column.

Though I'd backed out of freelance editing pending development of a better marketing strategy, I continued to look into becoming a publisher. I read up on the rapidly evolving industry, attended webinars, even acquired a SCORE mentor who helped me develop a business plan worthy of wooing hypothetical investors. At the end of six months of intense exploration and education I determined that I didn't want to be a publisher. Or, to be more accurate, that I possessed none of the character traits and few of the work habits that enable successful publishers to be, well, successful. I could fake them, of course, but I'd be miserable doing so. And when I got tired enough to abandon the act, my business would spiral into the ground. Maybe take my house with it.

So I started looking into existing independent publishers—men and women who were doing it right. To be honest, in addition to looking for a potential partner in publishing my original fiction I was kinda hoping I'd unearth a few editing gigs in the process. It was while looking for editorial work that I discovered the cockroach in the soufflé.

Four and a half years ago I crossed columns with a fellow Novelnaut who was singing the praises of indy publishing. At that time I was a traditionalist who tended to conflate indy press with vanity press and saw nothing good about either. She set me straight—or rather got me interested enough to investigate on my own and discover how different the two forms of publishing are. Now, years later, as I started my investigation I was impressed with how indy had expanded—gone mainstream, as it were. It looked as though even the major houses, the big traditional publishers, were embracing the movement with special imprints devoted to helping the indy writer/publisher get on her feet. I shared my observations with a long-time writing and editing buddy of mine in Indiana who, having lost his position as an English instructor a few years ago, was now editing for a book packager. My cheery naiveté compelled him to let me in on the Awful Truth: He does not work for a book packager. He's an editor with Author Solutions. (For those who are wondering: This revelation did not end our friendship; didn't even come close. I understand doing what you must to feed your family.)

For those who may not have heard, Author Solutions Incorporated, ASI, is a highly predatory vanity press—that is to say a publisher whose income is dependent on fees charged writers, not sales of books. ASI's business is convincing new and inexperienced writers it can provide services beyond their reach; services that are in fact readily available if one knows where to look. The only benefit ASI offers is their own substantial markup. Anyone who's been in the business knows to avoid ASI—and a lot of initially unsuspecting writers who've been burned turn from ASI to one of the many new publishing avenues that had so pleasantly surprised me.
Except.
Way too many of those new roads to publication are the same treacherous street.
Author Solutions also does business as Author Hive, Author House, Author Learning Center, BookTango, FuseFrame, iUniverse, Palibrio (in Spanish), PitchFest, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris. The link between those DBAs masquerading as stand-alone companies and ASI is pretty easy to see if you look. They all live at the same street address in Bloomington, Indiana, for one thing.
But ASI's other operations are more difficult to detect.
Take Writer's Digest, for example. Whatever you think of the quality of their advice, WD has always been about helping writers, right? Unless you decide to take advantage of their indy-support publishing service: anything submitted to their Abbott Press goes straight to Bloomington. Americana bedrock Reader's Digest offers LifeRich Publishing to hopeful new writers—another pipeline to ASI. Feel-good inspirational publisher Hay House feeds ASI through their Balboa Press. Guideposts does the same through Inspiring Voices. And Thomas Nelson, the nation's largest Christian publisher, calls their ASI chute WestBow Press.
The major houses play, too.
It may not be surprising that Penguin's Book Country press for new writers is actually ASI—Penguin owns ASI, after all. But Simon & Schuster's new-writer-friendly Archer Publishing and Harlequin's Harlequin Horizons imprint are both ASI as well.
Perhaps most disturbing to me was the discovery that companies that do support—or have in the past supported--indy writers have partnered with ASI. Bowker Identifier Services's editing and layout packages and a whole slew of editorial and promotional services offered by Lulu are really ASI.

So what's wrong with a vanity press? Sure, ASI charges authors for services they can get elsewhere, but they offer the convenience of packaging them together, they're entitled to make a little money doing that, right?
The Kirkus Review carries a lot of weight with libraries and bookstores. Anyone can buy a review in Kirkus for $425. The review will be honest—there's no way to buy praise the ms doesn't deserve—so Kirkus doesn't publish the review until you release it. The review will then appear on their website and be included in their e-mail newsletter at no charge. Some reviews are selected by the editors of their print magazine; there's no charge for that, either. However, if you want the review in the print magazine you can pay for its inclusion. You can also buy Kirkus ads and have your title and review distributed to the booksellers in their database. Want your book reviewed by Kirkus Reviews, maybe featured on their website and mentioned in their newsletter? Kirkus offers promotional packages for $1,500. So figure $425 + $1,500 = $1,925; pretty solid exposure from a respected source for less than $2,000. Of course you can get exactly the same service through any of ASI's services for (and this is from the Lulu site) $3,199. In other words, the convenience of not having to deal directly with Kirkus will set you back $1,200.

Am I saying don't trust any of the small publishers who say they want to work with new independent writers? Of course not. Even though—contrary to the victory cries of hundreds of indy publishers—the big traditional houses aren't going anywhere, these little, independent presses have a lot to offer both readers and writers. If you're not going to publish yourself, seek them out.
But don't sign a thing until you've done your homework and know who you're really dealing with.

E-Book Experiment

In my last post, I shared the cover for my upcoming paranormal thriller The Mummies of Blogspace9.  So this week, I'll tell you about the marketing experiment I have planned.  

It's bold, it's dangerous, it's potentially disastrous, but as my wife always tells me - this is what you do for fun, so if it stresses you out, stop writing and find something that doesn't stress you out.  

I've briefly considered the following alternative non-work activities: macrame, yoga, darts, and scrapbooking.  And I concluded that I still very much want to write.  So it's time to be bold and not stress too much about the consequences.  That being said, let me know what you think, and if you have any suggestions, I'm half ears.

To date, I have five books published; four novels and one archaeological tome.  Three were published by commercial presses, and two I did myself.  All are available on Amazon.com, and all have middling sales.  So I'm going to do something new for Mummies.  

I've been following the wisdom of Joe Konrath, the master-blogger and writer who compiles the Newbies Guide to Publishing.  He suggests the following steps for publishing success (and I'm paraphrasing here): 

1) write a truly great book; 

2) produce a truly great cover; 

3) offer the book exclusively in e-book format using Amazaon KDP Select; 

4) price the book at 99 cents; 

5) offer the book free for the first week; and finally 

6) pay to have your free book giveaway promoted.  

So that's my plan.  The final draft of The Mummies of Blogspace9 is currently being tuned by the experts at KindleGurus.com.  When I get it back, I'm going to shell out $230 to have it promoted on Bookbub.com, as Konrath suggests.

The hope is that the initial offering creates a bounce and results in more sales.  Of course, offering the book at 99 cents on Amazon will result in only 35 cents in royalties.  But as the economists tell us, it's all a matter of volume.  I don't know if I'm going to get rich from this, but like I said, it's an experiment, and I'm not going to worry too much about it or my wife will make me knit or weave something instead of writing.

But I'll still worry a little.  So if you have any thoughts, let me know.

Juvenile Fiction

This week is spring break for the public schools in New Hanover County, NC, and at some point during her time off our eldest daughter, the high school math teacher, will be taking me to see The Hunger Games. In preparation for this event, I read the book. The only thing I did not like was that it was written in the present tense, old-school past-tense guy that I am. The story itself was every bit as good as its reputation.

For those of you who have somehow missed the Hunger Games phenomenon, the Wikipedia article gives a fair summary of the first novel. Haven't read volumes two and three, so I don't know how accurate the other wiki articles are.
Some critics have dismissed the hoopla surrounding the movie's release as "hype," but they're missing the point. Suzanne Collins' trilogy became popular on its own merits long before the movie promotions - and with a broad spectrum of readers. The first copy of Catching Fire I saw was being read by a US Marine sergeant while we were waiting outside traffic court. These books have captured imaginations the way Harry Potter did a decade and a half ago, and for many of the same reasons. That they are well written has a lot to do with their appeal, of course, but it's the universal nature of their stories that enables readers to connect, to become personally invested in events.

At this point you may be objecting that you've never been a wizard nor have you fought twenty-three of your peers to the death on global television - how can these be universal? We'll get back to that.

Elsewhere I have reported that I became a reader during a long convalescence the autumn I turned twelve. I resisted at first, but alone in a room with no TV I eventually gave into the pressure of my own boredom and looked at the stack of books my mother had brought from the library. She had asked the librarian for stories a boy might like and though I don't think I ever knew that worthy's name, I owe her a debt of gratitude; she gave my mother a stack of Robert Heinlein "juveniles" - the sub-genre now called young adult. I have always called the first Heinlein book I read the gateway novel to my addiction to science fiction - but in fact it's responsible for luring me into a lifetime of reading: Have Space Suit - Will Travel. Over the past half century I've outgrown Heinlein's politics and his theories about religion, psychology, culture, or language, but I am still a fan of the novels he wrote for "young readers" - from Rocket Ship Galileo (1948) through Podkayne of Mars (1963). Heinlein had more respect for his preteen and teenage readers than most writers of the era - he addressed self-doubt, tragic consequences, doing all you can in the face of problems that could not be solved, and struggling with ethical choices. None of Heinlein's heroines or heroes ever approached anything like the popularity of Katniss or Harry, but the family resemblance is clear.

The Hunger Games trilogy, like the Harry Potter saga of the 1990s, is aimed at the young adult market, but they've had an impact on readers of all ages; that universal nature I mentioned. It's simplest to say what makes these stories universal is that they are all coming of age stories; tales of personal journeys as adolescent protagonists discover who they are and what they are capable of as they grow into their destinies. But it's more complex than that. Forgettable coming of age novels and movies are legion. What gives the works of Rowling and Collins power are thoroughly realized characters facing well delineated obstacles or adversaries and believably rising above themselves to triumph. These writers respect their characters and respect the readers who follow them on their journey (and will put themselves in the story). In Hunger Games teen Katniss Everdeen does what she can to live and take care of the ones she loves in a world over which she has no control. Like most high schoolers she spends a lot of time worrying about how what she does appears to others, trying to figure out what other people are thinking or why they do the things they do, and completely misunderstanding the thought processes and motives of peers of the opposite sex. (To my mind, one advantage she has over Harry Potter is Katniss doesn't inherit any special abilities and doesn't have a phalanx of supporters; she worked hard to master every skill she has and the only person she can rely on is herself.)

Will the Hunger Games trilogy spawn a swarm of imitators? Of course. Will they be worth reading? In most cases probably not. Because most imitative writers will focus on the superficial trappings of the stories - heroic struggles against dystopia, angst-laden love, cool fight scenes, and discovering hidden talents or reserves of inner strength. But even if we never write for the young adult market, we can learn from Collins and Rowling. Find what is universal in your story - the chord with which others can resonate - then nurture and build on that element, that theme, that journey, with respect. And give that same respect to your readers.

By any other name....

Sometime over the last couple of years Clinere cleaned up its act; or at least its packaging. Restoring or refinishing old furniture is a hobby of mine, something I do to relax. I'm not very good at it, but it's me I'm working on; the hutches and chairs and bookcases are more or less innocent bystanders. Sanding layers of finish and paint down to the wood generates a lot of flying dust, and while I have a mask for my nose and mouth, my ears sometimes need clearing out – which is how I discovered Clineres. These are little plastic do-jobbies with a scoop on one end

and a brush of sorts on the other marketed as ear cleaners. The original box proclaimed boldly Clineres were a safe and effective way to clean your ears; inside the box was a warning that you should never put anything in your ear. The box has recently been updated to say Clineres are for cleaning the exterior of the ear only – something any washcloth can do. I wonder how this has affected their sales.

Though all writers focus on the craft of writing, those who make a living from their writing also put a lot of thought and planning into selling what they've written. Packaging, marketing - how we present ourselves and our works - are essential considerations.

Romance novels make up fifty percent of all fiction sold in the world. This one genre, with its several sub-genres, sells as many volumes as mainstream and all other genres combined. Everything else being equal, a romance novel involving a mystery will outsell a mystery novel. There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a writer who sent her agent a science fiction manuscript about a woman who fell back through time to the medieval court of her noble ancestors and not only brought about humane reforms but married royalty. Her agent told her she could market the ms as science fiction and earn four figures or pump up the relationship, market it as a historical romance, and earn six figures. She did and she did.

Recently I opined in print that Suzanne Brockmann's "Troubleshooters" series of romantic suspense novels could hold their own as suspense novels without the romance. Take Into the Storm (selected because it's within reach of where I'm sitting). Thumbing through to refresh my memory, I'd say maybe thirty percent of Storm is romance; the rest of the book is a serial killer thriller of Criminal Minds intensity. True, a good part of Storm's non-romance seventy percent deals with the dynamics of the cast of recurring characters within the "Troubleshooters" universe, but relationships – what makes the characters both good and bad human – are part of any thriller. Part of any story involving conflict, in fact. Relationships establish why the antagonist does what she does and what the protagonist stands to lose if she fails. I can't help but wonder if Brockmann had a "you can write suspense and earn $x, or you can write romantic suspense and earn ten times $x" conversation with herself. Or her agent.

My first love as a reader was science fiction, though now my tastes are more varied (mystery, romance, historical, and western novels now crowd my sf collection). Looking at some of my early science fiction favorites with my now broader sense of the world of fiction, I've begun to notice patterns.

Anne McCaffrey, whom we lost a few months ago, was a master of novels that blurred the line between science fiction and fantasy; novels in her Dragonriders of Pern series have won awards in both categories. (McCaffrey herself was firm about being a science fiction writer; all of her famous dragons were genetically engineered.) But almost every analysis of her work mentions the "romantic intensity" of her novels. McCaffrey has said that when she began writing sf in the sixties, the genre was dominated by male writers and readers – to the point most female writers used male pseudonyms or concealed their gender – and she set out to write strong female characters to whom female readers could relate. However, her first novel – written years before the Pern cycle – was clearly a romance in a science fiction setting. Restoree is dinged by sf critics for plot elements that don't seem to fit the genre. Those elements are romance tropes: A young woman with no self-confidence finds herself a prisoner in a strange world. Motivated by her feelings for a fellow prisoner and tapping into inner strength she didn't know she had, she overcomes her own insecurities as she battles prejudice and injustice to rescue herself and the other prisoner – who turns out to be the planet's rightful ruler, whom she subsequently marries.

Lois McMaster Bujold has said her Vorkosigan Saga – which focuses on the life of Miles Vorkosigan, scion of Barrayar nobility, as he takes on the status quo and matures from unconventional, rebellious youth to unconventional, inspiring leader through tales of intrigue, combat, and mystery – is modeled on C.S. Forrester's Hornblower Saga.

However the series has its roots in her first novel, Shards of Honor, that is itself a romance in a science fiction setting. (Captain Cordelia Naismith is captured by the notorious enemy Lord Aral Vorkosigan, the "Butcher of Komarr," but when the two are forced to survive alone together on a hostile world, she learns the man is nothing like his reputation. He falls in love with her and proposes marriage. She gets rescued and finds herself conflicted about her feelings and loyalties and not trusted by her own people. She flees to Alar's home world in time to see him appointed regent by the dying emperor and help him avert an attempted coup within and to sue for peace without, ending the war. After which she marries him. Cordelia and Alar are Miles Vorkosigan's parents.

My theory is Anne McCaffrey and Lois McMaster Bujold, either never had the "romance sells" conversation – internally or externally – or if they did, chose to go in a different direction.

How about you? Do you as a reader know of some titles that are famous in – or marketed as – one genre that you suspect may be more at home in another? Or do you as a writer make decisions on what elements or your stories you develop more fully based on the genre you are pursuing?

EBOOKS VERSUS PRINT BOOKS...PREDICTING THE FUTURE

In broaching the subject of eBooks, no doubt, again, it merits continued debate as I continue to read various blogs and articles on eBooks versus print books, who's buying what, and what this all means for the future for writers and readers.

There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus one way or the other, but my own sense is that eBooks are the definite wave of the future while also making its presence felt right now.

Clearly print books are still in the driver's seat, so to speak, in terms of overall sales, keeping struggling bookstores afloat, and books on library shelves. From where I sit, there is no substitute for holding a real book in my hands and flipping from one page to the next, backtracking, or riffling through. I also love the atmosphere of a bookstore, be it an intimate independent bookshop or a chain bookseller, where my wife and I can hang out while wandering the aisles, sipping on a cappuccino and hoping to find that diamond in the rough that we must have.

However, I know people (particularly younger readers), who rely entirely on their Nooks and Kindles in reading for pleasure (and even schooling). It is pretty obvious to me that as a society, we are gravitating toward digital for movies, music, TV, and now reading. Amazon recently suggested their eBooks were outselling hardcover titles. Not too surprising here, considering the difference in price, even if most hardcover books are discounted these days, and ease in downloading and reading electronic books.

Twenty years from now, I predict that eBooks will be the primary means for reading fiction and nonfiction. Of course, for most of us writers whose livelihood is wrapped up in print sales, the coming years will be challenging, to say the least.
The best advice is to get with the program now and ease the burden later. One way I am doing this by trying to get my publishers to release out of print titles in eBook or allow me to do so. The results have been mixed thus far, but I will keep working on them.

I am also keeping an eye on the digital royalty rate for future print contracts, seeking to get as much as I can when books are released as eBooks.

Finally, I have begun putting out in eBook my out of print books for which I have the rights back, as well as original eBooks. The results have surprised and excited me. I am selling lots of copies of what has grown to be eight eBooks I control, thus far, giving me income on the side that comes in handy more often than not.

My original young adult coming of age eBook tale, HER TEEN DREAM, has been a hit sensation in Kindle and Nook; as has been my original medical mystery, MURDER IN MAUI, and eBook version of out of print legal thriller, STATE'S EVIDENCE.

I, for one, have truly embraced the digital revolution and intend to ride the wave wherever it takes me in the world of writing in print and eBook formats.

What are your thoughts on eBooks versus print books? Are your eBook versions of print books selling well?

Have you done any original eBooks in Kindle, Nook, Google eBooks, Smashwords, etc.?

Behaving like a writer

It's difficult for me to write a column this week. Not because I don't have any ideas, quite the opposite. My coconspirators here at Novel Spaces have done a wonderful job -- hitting a lot of topics I want to explore further. It's with some effort that I restrict myself to a single thought.

A few interesting things happened during GenCon this year.
>The art director for a game publisher apologized to me for the cover of To Ride the Chimera. He had been in the art department of WizKids when it was designed and -- though he was not directly involved -- knew the dull and static composition had nothing to do with the combat, action and intrigue within. He'd known the image was completely wrong for the target market (it is) and would hurt sales (it did); he had felt bad about doing nothing to change it when he had the chance ever since.
>I signed forty or fifty autographs and listened while people explained what they liked and did not like about my work.
>I was part of a group of male writers thanked by young women dressed as Japanese school girls, faeries, or warrior princesses for being the only men at the convention who did not make passes at them.
>I attended freelancers' briefings; meetings at which game developers tell writers interested in pitching stories what it is they're looking for in the coming year. (These usually happen after things wind down in the convention center -- writers jotting notes from 11PM to 2AM.)
>I was on panels for aspiring writers and panels for writers aspiring to write for some of the IPs I sell to.
>I introduced myself to a couple of game developers whose properties I admire.
>I reread two stories I'd written in 2004 and hadn't seen since (discovering several things I would now do differently in the process) because they were in an anthology that received an award and I needed to be able to discuss them intelligently.

None of these things had anything to do with writing as a craft. All of them (from going out of my way to cultivate/learn new markets to helping new writers learn the ropes to conducting myself professionally to the point catgirls notice) had to do with the business of being a writer.

Because writing for a living, publishing, is a business. There's nothing wrong with this, nothing "pure" about writing for art's sake or pursuit of the perfect story. Or sentence. A sculptor can use wood and metal to produce art with the power to affect observers long after they've left the museum for their everyday lives. A furniture maker can use those same materials to produce comfortable chairs and useful tables that people will value as part of their everyday lives. To my mind being a professional writer -- a person who writes for a living -- has more to do with cabinetry than art.

When I teach creative writing -- and I don't yet, but will after I complete my MFA -- my text for teaching the craft of writing will be Jerry Weinberg’s The Fieldstone Method. But I will require my students who intend to write professionally to study Larry Winget's It's Called Work for a Reason as well. This short book (less than 60,000 words) is on business management, not writing, but its subtitle tells the whole story: Your Success Is Your Own Damn Fault. I didn't come across this book until last year and wished I'd found it a decade ago. (Which would have been a neat trick; Winget wrote it in 2007.) It would have saved me a few novels' worth of false starts and wasted time. The fundamental concepts that enable an entrepreneur to succeed in business or a manager to succeed within a corporation enable writers who write for a living to actually earn a living writing.

Writers who write -- as opposed to authors who intend to write -- treat their writing like the job it is. They show up on time, stick with the task until it's done, then move on to the next project. When dealing with customers or management or coworkers (readers, editors, and other writers) they are straightforward and honest; keeping their word and doing what they are supposed to do to specs and on time.

Because success as a writer does not rest solely on literary talent. Of course the ability to create and tell a tale is seminal; and the craftsmanship and guile to tell the tale well are vital. Don't want to downplay the importance of any of that. But it's discipline and integrity and courtesy and the willingness to pay it forward -- to help others -- that marks the professional writer.

Media Tie-In Writing, part 2

When I applied to the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at UNC-Wilmington, I took along some of my published work to illustrate that I am a professional writer. The interviewer glanced briefly at my Star Trek and Doctor Who and MechWarrior titles, then suggested I might want to try a few undergraduate writing courses first to discover whether I was really ready to write seriously.

The prejudice against media tie-in writing is particularly virulent in the halls of academia -- but they tend to view any fiction that sells to a commercial market with suspicion, if not alarm. However it can be found almost anywhere writers and critics congregate. Media tie-in writing is write-for-hire. You are writing a story set in a universe designed -- and owned -- by someone else. Where a writer of original fiction is completely self-directed, a media tie-in writer is part of an ensemble. One is a soloist, the other first chair with the Philharmonic. Different disciplines applied to the same art.

It's a different sort of business as well. In original fiction, you write a story and then you sell it. In media tie-in writing, you sell a story and then you write it. You must first pitch your novel idea to the editor. A pitch is one or two sentences that capture the high concept of the story. If the editor likes the pitch, she asks for a proposal (though some call it a treatment), which is a summary laying out the bones of how you intend to tell the tale. Some editors like short proposals, one to three thousand words, while others like something more in depth. The editor then takes the proposal to the licensors, the owners of the intellectual property, and if they like it, you get the go-ahead to write.
(At this point the process is similar to screenwriting. In an article about "Sister Act" appearing in this week's New Yorker, Paul Rudnick tells us "I wrote a treatment, which is a studio term for: Summarize the story in less than two pages so that an executive assistant can boil it down to one paragraph on a Post-It.")
With the go-ahead comes a contract, usually one-third on signing, one third on delivery and one third on final acceptance of the revised ms. Typical deadline for a full-length novel is 120 days.

Breaking into media tie-in writing requires research and persistence. You have to know who to send your pitches to, for one thing, and you have to know the market well enough to be able to deliver what they are looking for. Case in point: I have been pitching to Black Library for three years. A few of my projects have gotten to the proposal stage, but nothing has connected. As one editor put it, I'm too damn cheerful. Of the dozens of Doctor Who short story pitches I sent to Big Finish, only one connected ("The secret of the golem is slime mold and cockroaches. The Fifth Doctor and Turlough must solve a mystery and confront an enemy hundreds of kilometers beneath Prague to save the city from annihilation.") and before that one was approved, I had to change the companion.

Novels are not handed out to unproven writers, of course; you need to establish a track record. Which means any short fiction market related to the IP you're interested in is the place to start. With short fiction there is almost never a proposal, with the project going straight from pitch to story. A few markets take unsolicited stories. (Which ones? That's where the research comes in.) Do not start with fanfic. There are some excellent fanfic writers out there, but fanfic borders on copyright infringement and you do not want to be mistaken for a pirate.

Finally, you have to understand that nothing you write for an intellectual property you do not own is yours. You write the words, you sell them, you have no rights to the story. I had to get the IP owner's permission to post one of my BattleTech short stories in my Live Journal. (Link to story: "What I Remember Most")

If you're unbothered by not owning the words you write and think you'd enjoy the challenge of creating something that is both uniquely yours and part of a greater work, you may want to look into media tie-in writing. I've loved it for nearly a decade. It sure beats writing seriously.

Media Tie-in Writing, part 1

I remember reading an interview with Angela Lansbury a few decades ago in which she commented on the fact fans frequently told her how much like the "real" Jessica Fletcher she looked. What the fans had seen, of course, were pictures of her on the covers of "Murder, She Wrote" novels. There is no Jessica Fletcher and to my knowledge Angela Lansbury has never written a mystery; those novels were media tie-in.

Media tie-in writing is writing in a universe or intellectual property (IP) owned by someone else. In the minds of most people this means novels and stories based on characters from television series or movies. Mysteries are popular -- Monk novels and novels in every iteration of C.S.I. can be found in any big-box book store -- but far and away the most popular genre is science fiction. (Try getting away from Star Wars.)

Only about one percent of the people who are fans of the shows or movies buy related novels and the net profits from print sales would maybe buy everyone at the office a small latte. However, written fiction provides a way to explore ideas that are not commercial enough to warrant the investment a show requires. Among the many precincts of the Star Trek print universe, for example, are the "DS9 Relaunch," which carries the storylines of "Deep Space Nine" forward from the end of the series; the "Starfleet Corps of Engineers," following the troubleshooters who solve the mysteries and clean up the messes the guys who do all the fighting leave behind; and "Vanguard," novels about life on a frontier space station in the early days of the Federation.

Far greater than movie or TV tie-in fiction, however, is the game fiction market. No, I do not mean novels about the grueling championship badminton circuit. Tabletop games, collectable card games (CCG), role-playing games (RPG), and even video games are often set in complex and interesting universes that can only be -- or best be -- explored through fiction.

There are two levels of fiction when it comes to games. First is the "nonfiction" of the universe-- the whos and whats and hows and whys that give gameplay meaning; the atlas and encyclopedia of whatever realm you're playing. In the industry this in-character nonfiction is called "fluff" and provides the context for competition. The second and larger level of game fiction is the novels and stories set in the universe. Go to the science fiction or fantasy section of a big-box bookstore and look at the series. World of Warcraft, Forgotten Realms, Dungeons and Dragons, BattleTech, Dragon Lance, Warhammer 40,000, and Halo, just to name a few. A wall of novels, each one set in a game universe. And unlike movie or TV media tie-in, game fiction is an important part of the IP. More people read Warhammer 40k novels, for example, than play the game, and many newcomers to the game begin playing because they became fascinated with the universe through the novels.

The world of media tie-in writing can be invisible unless you're looking for it, but it is diverse and growing and worth taking seriously as you develop your own writing career.

My next column will explore the differences between media tie-in writing and "regular" writing.