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Ten Ways to Leave your (Writers’) Group

Ten Signs You Should Leave Your Writers’ Group

I’ll be honest: it’s been close on twelve years since I had a writers’ group, but I didn’t leave so much as the group fell apart due to various reasons beyond our control, mostly relating to jobs, free time and where we each were at the time. Two attempts to restart a group never got off the ground, one due to my own time issues at the time, the other to the fact I realized no one in the group was actually going to give me a critique, so there was no point.

I have friends who read my stuff — different friends for different books – and a group of dedicated fans who beta for me, and who are completely unafraid to tell me when I dropped the ball.

However, recently, a meme on facebook with a writers’ group critique of an Emily Dickenson poem reminded me of all the friends, mentees and acquaintances who’ve been permanently maimed by writers’ groups.

Does this mean I advise you to stay away from writers’ groups?  I don’t know.

The ten years I was in a writers’ group were my years of highest productivity.  That alone caused some advancement.  Did the critiques also help? – most of the time I either ignored them or “interpreted” them in my head.

A writers’ group is essential for one thing.  If I may paraphrase a very ancient writing, it is not good that writer should be alone.  We tend to get lost in our own head, and become fascinated by our own concerns and tics.  Left to my own devices, I would probably never have finished anything, because around the time we started a group I’d managed to convince myself every short story needed 3 months of polishing.

What I was doing to them, in fact, was turning them into recital pieces, stiff and lifeless.  But that wasn’t obvious until this year.

Meeting with other writers, even once a month, finding out where they are, what they’ve discovered, and what they are working on, and what they’ve promised to write, having someone check your productivity, and simply hanging out with someone who knows that you’re not completely insane just because you have voices in your head.  (Your workaday acquaintances tend not to get it at all when you say things like “But the character didn’t want to do that.)

There is a balm to the heart and soul – and the stomach if the group runs to cookies – in knowing others are going through the same struggles.

But on the other hand…

I used to advise that everyone get a writers’ group, even though it was difficult to find one that didn’t do more harm than good, because you simply couldn’t be informed about every editor, read every magazine, and have contacts in every con.  Having the connection of a writers’ group helped, both shape your writing so that it fit better with what the publishers were looking for, and with what the market (which meant selling first to publishers) expected.

Nowadays?  I still advise you to have beta readers.  This is important because you can do the strangest things and not notice, since it’s your story and you lived with it so long.  For instance, in Noah’s Boy I cloned a car.  It stayed in the parking lot, went to the forest, then must have vanished soap-bubble like because no one fetched it back.  (Sigh.)

So you need second and third eyes – and I recommend establishing a group of ten trained betas (if you are good at it, they’ll arf for fish 😉  I’ve yet to get one to balance a ball on his/her nose yet, though.)  Preferably betas who don’t know each other though you’ll inevitably end up with a committed (married or otherwise) couple or two in there.  That way if three people hit on the same thing “Jonny needs to be a guy.  She’s not working as a girl” or “I don’t like this fight scene” you can be sure they mean it, and they’re not just saying it because someone just before them gave that critique and they thought “oh, yeah, that’s kind of true.”

Because that’s the problem with critiques in a group: because humans are social creatures and try to atone to the group they’re in.  (Whether virtual or in person.)  So people agree with the most forceful personality, not necessarily the best critique.

I know two writers who stopped writing for years because critique groups convinced them they do not nor ever had “what it takes” (though the one of them who’s resumed writing has more what it takes than I do.)  I’ve known a half a dozen writers who became obsessed with whatever the particular bugga boo of their group was, like “Don’t mix latinate and anglo-saxon words” to the marked detriment of their prose.  I know writers who continue writing stuff that obviously will never sell, not because it’s what they want to do, but because their group has convinced them anything else is selling out.  In fact, I’ve known more harm than good caused by writers’ groups – particularly now when you take in account that conforming to “the one way of writing that will sell to NYC” is no longer an object.

Now, I’ll put in a caveat that part of this might be personality. I was never very good at submitting to group judgment and the older I get the less I wish to.

However, these are the ten signs you should leave your writers group, even if they have really good cookies.

 

10 – You’re the only one who writes in your field in that group.  You might think good writing is good writing, but let me tell you sister (or brother) you’re wrong. It’s not just that each genre has conventions – you can get around those.  It’s that the conventions can dictate things like plot. The first few romances I read (five years ago – grin) puzzled me a lot.  There are things that are not and cannot be realistic, like, the one kiss where you know it’s forever.  Then I realized that it’s as stylized a form of storytelling as a fairytale.  I shudder at what I’d have done to a romance writer who gave me their stuff to critique before that.

 

9-You’re the one who writes the most in the group.  Now, this was more or less always true for me.  I’m prolific.  BUT it’s a big difference between the fact that most of the time I was doing a short story a week I was also doing a few chapters on a novel, but everyone else was doing a short story at least every other week, and groups I’ve seen where no one ever writes, except one lone member.  If you’re the only one writing you’re improving and learning, and leaving them all behind and their critiques will become less and less relevant.

 

8- Every critique starts with a detailed enumerating of all the commas you missed and how wrong your word choice was.  While there is a place for grammar and syntax (I assure all my copyeditors past, present and future – including Ms. Thistlewist who committed suicide rather than edit me again – that I honor grammar and syntax.  I honor them so much I tend not to use them, lest their shine wear off) it is not the be all/end all of your critique.  For that you have copyeditors.  Also, given how idiosyncratic punctuation (and even word choice) can be in English, nine times out of ten the mavens of grammar are just using it as a stick to beat you down. My group did this right.  Such things were marked on the manuscript and could be followed through on or not – but they weren’t spoken of.  (Critiquer’s Secret.  What a name for a grammar book for fiction writers.)

 

7 – Revenge critiques are the norm. You’re afraid to tell Bob what you think of his sex-with-alien-cats novel, because you know that no matter what you bring in next time, even if it’s as good as Pride and Prejudice – or better – he’ll tear it down from the first word to the last.  And you’re still getting revenge critiques from Jennie because you thought she failed to establish the scene setting in her fantasy world romancing.  You tried very hard to not do anything that was ad-hominem and you didn’t say “this is the stupidest world building I’ve ever seen.”  Instead you concentrated on how the character who made the crops grow is starving to death and that makes no sense.  Because this pretty much killed her novel, she’s been telling you that your worldbuilding is wrong, your characters are unbelievable and your grammar sucks for the last three years.

 

6- Ad hominem critiques.  Usually this come from confusing the writer with the character and sometimes from misunderstanding the story in the bargain.  The two worst ad hominem critiques I ever had, both of which I stood there with someone screaming at me were because the person failed to understand the story AND viewed it as a failing on my part what they thought the story was saying.  The first one, I got accused of not researching and being anti-gun.  The reason?  I talked about burners.  Burners, in my universe are laser weapons.  That’s what they’re called, like we say “gun.” Now this was a time travel story but – yes, I did – I established that up front, as well as that my character was using a future weapon.  The critiquer must have skimmed.  He went on and on and on about how I used “burner” to avoid doing research on guns and went on from that to make (wrong) assumptions about my beliefs.  It was highly amusing.  To his credit, after he heard the other critiques, and after the meeting he came and apologized because he realized he’d got it all wrong.  The second one I was accused of moral turpitude for a short story where there was NO open sex.  The reason?  The critiquer read the five or six characters involved in an alien association as an orgy with homosexual males.  (No, truly, you don’t want to know.  Yes, I used “he” as a pronoun because “alien” is not a pronoun.  These creatures didn’t even have sex organs as such.)  Now, my story wasn’t very clear.  It’s one of the ones I’ve never published because well… I don’t like aliens and I don’t write them well.  BUT TRUST me when I say that there was a jump in imagination involved – it would be like thinking spaceship docking is sex – and to go from that to infer ANYTHING about my moral beliefs was yet another step. If you’re getting these, at best they’re not reading you, and at worse they really don’t like you and are looking for excuses.

 

5 – They have started coordinating their taste in literature, and particularly their taste in what they critique.  Some of this can be alleviated in beginning groups, by simply requiring written critiques, which are then discussed at the meeting and making it a rule that no story will be discussed between members before the group.  The rule will be broken, of course, but at least people will try to hide that.  In older groups… well, we’re all human, right?  In our group, (not the same group referenced above) with a resident gun nut, we all learned to be very disdainful of incorrect gun scenes.  Now, this was by and large harmless, except a stranger to the group would think their whole story should be discarded because they had a safety on a Glock, when in fact we were just coordinated-over-reacting.  Most groups get in a coordinating thing on some aspect.  If it’s to the point they all sound alike, leave.  Leave now.

 

4 – They all like authors you don’t like.  This is usually determined when you go in or within a very short time, but even if these people read in your genre – if all the people they admire and cite as examples are people you threw across the room at the second sentence, you probably don’t want to stick around.  I mean, unless you’re perverse enough to use their critiques in the reverse.  (I don’t have to confess anything!  You’re not the boss of me!)

 

3- They dismiss your stuff with a couple of words and a comparison to someone you don’t know.  “Oh, well, if you want to write like Jacques Prevert, we can’t help you.”  On reading up on the man you find he’s a French absurdist and you are neither gratified nor shocked, because you have no idea how your story about alien robots can be compared to that. After all it’s not even in the same universe.  The wrong thing to do is decide you’re very ignorant and these people will improve you.  The right thing to do is to leave.  NOW.

 

2 – You’re the only one in the group who gets bad critiques time after time after time after time.  Now, this happens to all of us for a month now and then.  Not just because all of us go through valleys of suckytude now and then – disease, being busy, getting enamored of some French absurdist – but also because group mechanics develop that way.  Say there are six of you and you all turned in sucky writing (this is fairly normal before the holidays, when everyone is phoning it in.)  But Jennie’s cat just died.  Bob is worried about his son who was caught selling pot.  Mike is in the middle of the slow collapse of his relationship of ten years. Fay’s mom has just been diagnosed with cancer.  Mary was laid off last week.

None of those people are getting the critiques they deserved because you all – even you – are pulling punches.  But you just got engaged and still have a job.  Yeah, you’re gonna get it.

But if this goes on month after month, it either means they don’t like you personally or more likely that the group taste has moved away from what you write.  It’s time to leave.

 

1-And the number one reason to leave your group: You’re never critiqued.  EVER.  They will note your typos, maybe, if you’re very lucky, but even those are presented with a sort of reverential “and if you don’t mind, milady.”

This is fairly normal when you’re the most (or the only) published author in a group.  It’s not inevitable.  My betas poke holes in my stuff all the time, though few of them are published at all.  BUT group dynamics being what they are, it’s fairly normal for groups who meet in person.  Now, if it’s a critique group, you want a critique.  If you’re so far above the others they see nothing wrong even with glaring mistakes, it’s time to pack it in and move on to a system of betas or something.  Or perhaps it’s time to change your critique group into a “Writer and indie publisher support group” – something I’m considering starting myself.  There you can have the cookies (yay, cookies!); discuss what is selling of your stuff, and what isn’t; and trade names of proofreaders, ebook “typesetters” and programs that have worked for you.  It’s an idea whose time might have come.

Joining the dots

I’m quite stupid sometimes, so maybe there is a big something here I am just not seeing, something that is as obvious as can be to everyone who doesn’t have to take their shoes and trousers off to count to twenty one. (It’s my tail I’m talking about. You just connected the wrong dots.) You know what I mean: there is a pattern of dots… and as dots they don’t make much of a picture, except perhaps of a Dalmatian. But what humans (and surely particularly science fiction writers) do, is to join the dots of known things and say: “look, I see a fresh paw-print (dot a). It is large and cat-like (dot b). I see no other paw prints. (dot c) I do see some scratches in the bark of the tree. (dot d)… The picture I am getting is that there is leopard in the tree above me, and they like to eat monkeys and humans are a kind of monkey. The rest of the picture I get in my head is me taking rapid evasive action, and keeping my spear point straight up.” Or alternatively to say: “oh look at the cute paw-print. Let me kneel down and take some photographs… and the rest of the picture involves some bloody splatters.

Extrapolation is what stopped something digestive having taken humankind to extinction long ago and far away. Writing a story – unless you are doing it very badly, involves setting up circumstances which could logically be extrapolated to what happens next. If you’re really really good, the reader scratches their head and says ‘It’s so obvious, why didn’t I see it coming?” If you’re merely good the reader takes that as a natural possible progression of events and thinks no more of it (which, trust me, is an achievement of no small order). If you’re rotten useless, the reader thinks… oh drivel, loses their suspension of disbelief and does not continue to read, often with a book flung at the wall, and that author off the buy list. To take this a bit further: If you’re a good pantser you are literally putting your characters in a scenario, and working out what they would be most likely to do, based on their characters and the circumstance. Literally joining the existing dots to make the picture, generating more dots as you go. If like me, you’re a plotter… (And especially if you’re a good plotter, possibly not like me) you know what you want the picture to be, and manipulate the positions of the dots (the circumstances and the nature of the character) so the outcome is believable and plausible… and achieves your picture. Well, mostly. Sometimes the dots cannot be shifted enough to get to your planned outcome, and you have to settle for where they take you.

It ought to make you quite observant of dots, even ones which seem to have nothing to do with each other and very good at interpreting how they can fit together to give likely, or at least plausible outcomes. Of course some authors just get very good at providing dots for drawing leaves, and don’t even see the forest, but people like the leaves and buy those. Fantasy, to my mind has a lot of good leaf artists. Hard sf… should be more forest… (But that’s just how I extrapolate the dots of data).

So let me talk about some of the dots I see in the writing and wider world… and I’d ask you to tell me if you get the same possible pictures as I do, and if not – what have I missed?

Recently we’ve had a huge fuss about sexual harassment at sf/fantasy conferences. (Translated, complaints about men, white, heterosexual, doing/saying (or even looking or just being present) an unwelcome something (defined as anything unwelcome to the complainant) to women at Science Fiction/ fantasy conferences. (dot A)

Dot B Many well-meaning (as well as some opportunistic camp followers) have demanded something be done. They are female, have female friends, daughters and the future to think of. Typical among these is the white male heterosexual (you know, people from the group who are being complained about and labeled as a group of identical perps.) who say in tones of horror they have young daughters they want to be able to safely go to sf/fantasy cons without having to complain of being harassed. Part of this assuredly genuine care for their children, and part of it is wanting to state, very clearly, that they do not support the harrassers.

Dot C Involves a great deal of reaction, mostly aimed at looking after complainants, and making the making of complaints easier with less possibility of the accuser ever having to specify what was done, or take any consequence for doing so. The group of identical perps is guilty unless they can prove otherwise, and there are considerable barriers put up to their possibly being exonerated. Trial by internet is fashionable and acceptable.

And that seems to be where most folk stop joining dots. They like the picture they’ve drawn.

But there are a lot more dots… some of which are part of the picture. It’s a very big picture. The end one I am seeing is not good for daughters (or grand-daughters) the society we’ll leave them, or even sf.

Dot D – there is a clear correlation between reading and education, especially tertiary education. It’s hard to tell which is causative, but they go hand-in-hand. Tertiary education proportions have become substantively skewed to females (7:3 in some colleges), particularly in the arts, where the ratio is even worse. It must make things very… interesting, in terms of dot G.

Dot E – there is a negative correlation between educational achievement and sexual violence.

Dot F – thanks to testosterone men are bigger, stronger, and more prone to physical violence, and have a higher sex-drive. (Ergo, if you have to choose who in a society gets to reading, being educated, that’s worth thinking about.)

Dot G – Evolution has seen to the fact that most humans are heterosexual. Girls are interested, by-in-large, in boys, and vice versa. Only a small percentage aren’t. Take the opposite sex out of a meeting/conference/whatever, and the opportunity for courtship and possibly sex away, and it will lose much of its attraction for those not already in a relationship.

Dot H – despite the silly-stunts played with census/survey/stats abused for their own ends, if you’re looking for Hetero English speaking males there is about an 85% chance they’ll be white. Even if you take the ‘English speaking’ requirement out, they will be at 70% +. If you want sf/fantasy reading, tertiary educated (or able to be) first language English ones with a similar cultural background to the average white girl… guess what they’re most likely to be? Yep, your standard-model villain. (And given dot D and G, you’ll be lucky if there is one for every 2.5 women at the same or better social/financial/educational level.). Of course if you allow for generations of breeding, those numbers might be different, but it is hard to see how they could be better in terms of dot J

Dot i — Humans push the limits, and are bad at judging precisely where those limits are, without some clues – whether we’re talking about attempts at courtship behavior, or just how many apples/candies you can eat before the boss thinks you’re taking advantage of the system… most of us need those pointers. Remove any policing or obvious border, and people will increasingly push at it, whether you’re talking about taking undersize fish or reporting harassment. Inevitably this has very predictable results, both as to where it goes to (too far), and what happens then (all of the perk/limit/trust is removed). No obvious borders or penalties on harassment and it will go too far. No obvious borders or penalties on claiming harassment and that too will go too far.

Dot J – Evolution has put strong pressure on women to ‘trade up’ – or at least get the best in their mate choice. Think of it in practical terms – big/strong/powerful/wealthy/clever offered the best survival potential for women (because of dot F) and their offspring.

Dot K (which links very neatly to dot D) Male writers (an indicator of readers- the proportion of writers will always be representative of readers, unless for some reason writers of that group are excluded.) and readers are a rapidly declining species.

Hmm. The picture I’m starting to form is one in which horror of the daughters and certainly the granddaughters complaining of sexual harassment at sf cons… is a worry of which my picture relieves their minds. Given C, D,I,G &K, there won’t be any sf-fantasy cons, or if there are they’ll be smaller than cow-poo modelling societies are today, and having gone through a phase of being only visited by men with a partner and permanent camcorder attached. The predatory lesbians (yes, they exist too) will find them disappointing hunting grounds, because dot G will remain. So will the daughters of sf writers looking for a potential mate of similar interest and background. If there are any boys there, who fit dot J, the complaints about sexual harassment, in a ratio of 1 male: many females, will be rare, and suicide for her chances (not a good situation, surely not one any feminist and/or doting parent wants their daughter to be in). Most of these beloved daughters and grand-daughters can, as a result of D &K, be expected as a result of Dot G, to lose out on Dot J, and have to settle for men of lesser education and a higher propensity for sexual violence who don’t read (dot D, E and F). How this is a win for feminism is something of a puzzle for me. Perhaps they join the dots to have man-less households That’s worked really well with the statistical outcomes for children from them, as well as being almost effortless, juggling children and a job. The daydream that the father will pay (if he has a job, if, as less-educated than his child’s mother he can earn as much as she could) hasn’t come out too well so far. Still, maybe there is a dot I haven’t seen. A rich state going to provide welfare payments… oh, wait. Anyone still falling for that daydream needs to do some serious economics dot-joining.

That’s the rather grim picture I see. What have I missed?

I love my genre. I like writing it. I have some hopes that dot sequence I can see coming out of Indie will lead to the Dot D (education and reading) and Dot K being positively affected. I do want to see my grand-daughters (none yet, but I hope, and will love them) able to find partners of the same or better reading status at least. That’s the picture I want. Now as a plotter… how do I best move those variables around do get a different outcome? It’s not social engineering (that is what is being done), it’s playing strategy with a long term view. I can see some places we can add dots and shift them around a little bit.

Can you?

And yes, I do the same thing with the future of publishing, the future of the human race… and with my book plots. Maybe you think they’re just as crazy.
The stats for this month for A MANKIND WITCH
and THE FORLORN

are AMW 62 (105 last month) and Forlorn 12 (5 last month)

Open Floor

Hi, Everyone. Apologies, but the Dark Forces have combined this week to prevent me from getting my blog together. I’ve been looking at new power supply technologies for space-based missions and I promise an interesting look at a new application of an old (200 year old) technology next week.

Anyone got any interesting space news?

Meanderings

I was thinking earlier today (I know, bad idea) and it occurred to me, there’s something a lot of writers do that can get us into trouble – mostly because what actually happens is a hell of a lot less sensible than what we do…

See, like economists (shaddup and listen, this will take a while to get there), we’ve got this tendency to do our world and character building based on the concept of a “rational actor” (economics term. Translates roughly to “someone who thinks about things logically and chooses what’s best for them”). The problem with this is that there ain’t no such beastie. If one existed it would be agonizingly slow because to really evaluate any choice based on the evidence at hand you’ve got to do a whole lot of thinking and digging and so forth… This explains the relationship between economists and reality rather well.

For us, unless you’re an extreme pantser, the tendency is to build the cultures and characters according to what makes sense – which can easily leave things feeling a bit “flat”. (If you are an extreme pantser, you’re more likely to spend a lot of time wondering why in the heck you wrote that in).

Things don’t make sense in the real world, and they often don’t make sense in real cultures, either. Perhaps they made sense a long time ago when they started happening, perhaps not. I’ve heard rumors that the stereotypical “upper class English twit” accent is the result of a member of the royal family having a speech impediment and all those in his set wanting to sound just like him. The Chinese (okay, Imperial Chinese) insularity largely stems from court infighting where the explorer faction lost (this back in (if the stainless steel lint trap is correct) the 1400s-ish) to the “none of those barbarians have anything to offer us” faction (Yeah, it was largely true, but still…). Stuff happens, people remember it, not necessarily all that well, and the things they do to work around the stuff become ingrained. Just ask any woman who stores the tea towels in the third drawer because that’s where her mother kept them so that’s where tea towels go. Chances are her mother used the third drawer because that’s where Grandma kept them. And so on.

As for how people make decisions, well… that’s – at least as far as the research I’ve read says – largely a matter of the subconscious pattern recognition routines meeting the emotion routines and picking the path of least resistance. Weirdly enough, it usually works out fairly well – sometimes better than the obvious choice via pure logic (although a more rigorous decision making process – which takes much longer – will often get to the same place as the gut decision). Of course, once the decision gets made, another set of subconscious routines kick in, these ones dedicated to making you happy with the choice you made.

Which, seen through the right filter, does make sense. If our many-times-distant ancestors constantly second-guessed themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to decide that person of the opposite sex was just the thing for a bit of nookie, much less take action on the decision without wondering if they’d have been better off choosing someone else (something that has never been a good idea when dealing with relationships). We’re descended from the folk who saw the big predator and did something (whether running or trying to kill it) instead of wondering what the best thing to do might be.

So, yeah, all that angsty gray goo? Totally unrealistic. Only emo kids and Feminist Glittery Hoo Haas angst over everything.

And don’t be afraid to let your character do something that seems out of character – just make sure you slip in something later to show that yes, there is a reason for this odd action, or have them wondering what the heck they thought they were doing.

Guest Post By Peter Grant

*Guest post by Peter Grant, author of Take The Star Road one of those Indie books that have done enormously well — like both of Ellie Ferguson’s books — Peter describes how he came to write, how he came to choose to publish Indie, and what went into making his “overnight” success. Peter’s second book Ride the Rising Tide is now out. I thought you’d enjoy reading about his road to publication)

The Road to Indie

Peter Grant

Good morning, afternoon, evening, or whenever it is that you read this. Sarah’s very kindly invited me to contribute a guest article to her blog. She suggested I describe how I’ve experienced the process of breaking into the independently published fiction market as an outsider. I hope you won’t find my story boring. I’ll do my best.

 

My first book (on a religious/spiritual topic) was published in the USA back in 1984 (I was living in South Africa at the time, where I was born and raised). It sold something like 20,000 copies over the next decade before going out of print in 1994. I wrote several articles for various periodicals at about the same time, but the burgeoning civil strife in my country of birth (caused by the policy of apartheid), and my involvement in trying to help its victims, torpedoed my ambitions to write more. (I’ve written about some of those experiences on my blog – for example, here’s the night Christmas became real.)

 

Over the next couple of decades life was far too busy and complicated for me to do much in the way of writing. I was active in the business world, the military (on a reserve basis) and humanitarian work through the early 1990’s, when I began studying for ordained ministry. I came to the USA in 1997, and pastored a small Louisiana church and worked as a part- and full-time prison chaplain for several years. (I’ll be publishing a memoir of prison chaplaincy during September 2013.)

 

In 2004 I suffered a permanently disabling injury, which made it impossible for me to carry out many normal activities for any length of time without increasingly severe pain. At the same time, for other reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere, I found myself unable to continue in the ministry. I was awarded a small disability pension; but I’d been raised to believe that a man should stand on his own two feet and provide for himself. I was determined to find another way to support myself. Since normal work was no longer open to me, particularly given my new physical limitations, it seemed logical to return to writing. I decided to find out whether I could master the art sufficiently well to earn a living at it.

From 2005-2012 I wrote something like two million words of fiction – most of it execrable! I had to learn the art of not just writing, but also entertaining, and I wasn’t very good at it at first. It was humbling to receive rejection letters, or be told by ‘helpful’ volunteer readers that my work ‘sucked’ or ‘stank’ or the like. However, I knew they were right – and I knew I didn’t have a chance of making it in the book market unless I could produce quality work. I kept plugging away at it. I considered trying to attend a professional writing seminar or course, but those with good reputations were impossibly expensive for someone on my limited income (not to mention the travel and accommodation costs to attend them). Furthermore, my physical restrictions would have made it very difficult to get the most out of them.

 

As part of my writing self-training, I began a blog, ‘Bayou Renaissance Man‘, in January 2008. I set myself the target of posting multiple articles every single day. My objectives in doing so were threefold. First, I wanted to train myself in the discipline of producing work every day, never slacking off. Second, I wanted to practice actively communicating with an audience. I knew the quality of my work would be measured by whether or not people came back for more. If they didn’t, that would tell me very clearly that I’d badly misjudged either my skills, or the ‘market’ for them in the blogosphere, and force me to rethink my approach. Finally, I was strongly influenced by an article, ‘1,000 True Fans‘, that appeared in early 2008. I’m a former businessman, manager and director, and the article’s marketing perspective seemed logical to me; so I wanted to build my own ‘fan base’ through my blog. My ambition was to have several hundred ‘true fans’ by the time I felt my fiction was of a sufficiently high quality to put it on the market.

 

I was encouraged by the success of my friend Larry Correia, who self-published his first novel, ‘Monster Hunter International‘, in 2008. I helped him publicize it through my blog, and when he was signed up by Baen Books, a quotation from my blog review of MHI was included on the back cover of its Baen edition. (It’s still there, which pleases me greatly.) Larry was also kind (and funny) enough to base one of his MHI characters on me. (Here’s a hint; his title begins with the letter ‘P’.)

 

Several years passed. My blog readership grew considerably (I currently have an average of 2,500-3,000 readers every weekday). However, I was getting frustrated about my fiction. I didn’t seem able to craft a novel that would attract and hold a reader’s interest – at least, I couldn’t do so according to my standards. (I grew up in a household with thousands of books, and became a voracious reader. As a result, my expectations of authors – including myself – are very high.) Nevertheless, I’d taken to heart the advice of several eminent authors that if one wanted to write well, one first had to write! Several of them suggested that one had to produce a million words or more in order to develop basic competency. I kept plugging away at it, and slowly, over time, my work improved – although not fast enough to suit me.

 

A new factor entered my life in 2009. Through a mutual friend I’d made e-mail and telephone contact with a lady in Alaska, whom many of you know through her comments on this blog. Dorothy and I fell in love long before we met – in fact, when I flew to Alaska to meet her for the first time, I took an engagement ring with me. (She was wearing it when I left!) Our relationship was complicated by a heart attack I suffered later that same year, which was probably partly caused by the after-effects of the injury I’d suffered in 2004. Fortunately, I survived the experience, and Dorothy and I were married in 2010. We settled in Nashville, TN, where we’ve lived ever since.

 

Dorothy doesn’t enjoy military science fiction or space opera, but she heroically set herself to help me improve my writing. This turned out to be a real blessing. Precisely because she disliked the genre, she tried very hard to read my manuscripts with more care and attention than she’d normally have given them; and because she was familiar with other genres in science fiction and fantasy, she could (and did) make very trenchant comments about my shortcomings. (She didn’t pull any punches, either – I think some of my extremities are still a bit scorched!) That sort of input and constructive criticism was exactly what I needed. If I could write well enough to hold the interest of someone who had little or no interest in the genre in which I was writing, the odds were pretty good that my work would appeal to someone who did like the genre.

 

By mid-2012 I was fairly sure I’d improved to the point that I could produce something publishable. I spent the next year writing the first two books of a military/space opera sci-fi series, and the first draft of a third volume in the series. I also reworked a memoir of prison chaplaincy that I’d written a couple of years earlier. I’d learned from reading about the fiction field that a big part of one’s success or failure would be determined by the volume of material one had on the market. I wanted to be able to put out several books very close together, so as to build up a ‘critical mass’ of work available to my readers. Hence, the effort to write several books before I published any of them.

 

I knew I’d have to publish my work independently, as it was (and still is) very difficult indeed for a compete outsider to break into the ‘normal’ publishing world. I therefore applied my business background to work out a marketing and promotion plan. It was built around three major elements.

 

1. I’d rely on my blog readers to be the initial market for my books. My numerous friends in the blogosphere would, I knew, help to publicize my book to their readers as well. I counted on this publicity to provide an initial sales impetus. Blog readers would have to buy enough copies to lift my first book out of the vast anonymity of the hundreds of thousands of independently-published works on Amazon. If I could sell a few hundred copies over a few days, that would be enough to get the book into Amazon’s ‘Hot New Releases’ lists (perhaps even into their ‘Best Sellers’ lists) in my chosen genre and sub-genres. If I could achieve that, I knew thousands more pairs of eyes would see my book and (hopefully) decide to at least skim through the free preview chapters. If my book was good enough, it’d sell itself from that point – and subsequent books would be that much easier to promote.

 

2. I had to find a way to make my work stand out as being better than the average independently published novel. I did some research, finding that most of the complaints about such books concerned – as one might expect – poor plot, characterization and dialog. I figured I’d learned enough to be at least competent in those areas. However, a pet peeve of many readers was the abysmally poor standards of editing found across the board among most independently published books. It seemed to me that if I put in a major effort in that area, I could produce a book that was as well edited as any professionally published work. That, in turn, would probably attract buyers who looked for such standards. Accordingly, I placed great emphasis on editing as part of my pre-publication preparations.

 

3. Book covers would be critically important. Dorothy and I couldn’t help but notice that many indie covers are very poorly thought out. They often don’t stand out visually in thumbnail size on Amazon.com and similar Web sites, which are their main (often only) sales channels. Most potential readers will only see them as thumbnails; so unless they capture their attention at that size, the opportunity for a sale will be lost.

 

We therefore put a great deal of effort into selecting cover images that were crisp, clear and professional, with a central element that would stand out clearly at thumbnail size. We enlisted the aid of our friend Oleg Volk, who’s a well-known photographer and graphic designer. We outlined our clarity and readability requirements, and provided our chosen images. He then edited the images and added fonts, colors and other design elements. I think he’s done a great job with my first two books, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s got up his sleeve for the next two.

I’m very pleased to report that even at this early stage, things are going well. My first novel, ‘Take The Star Road‘, was published in mid-May, and had sold about 3,500 copies by the time my second novel, ‘Ride The Rising Tide‘, joined it last week. As I write these words the second book is selling an average of over 100 copies per day, which is very satisfying for a previously unknown, independently published author like myself. The third book in the series will be published in the mid-November to early December time frame, God willing. As anticipated, my blog readers and those of my blogging friends provided sufficient sales impetus to lift both books into the ‘Hot New Releases’ and ‘Best Seller’ lists within a day or two after publication. I’d like to keep them there as long as possible! There have also been reader comments at Amazon.com praising the quality of editing, which makes all that hard work worthwhile, as far as I’m concerned. Print editions of both books are now also available, although I don’t think I’ll sell as many of them as I will e-books.

 

In mid-September, I’ll publish my memoir of prison chaplaincy. I have high hopes for that one, too. It’s in a completely different field, but it conveys an ‘insider’ perspective about a hot-button issue in the USA today. I want to contribute to the discussion about crime and punishment, and provide a rather different point of view to those normally encountered.

 

I hope that by the end of 2013, I’ll have published four books in a seven-month time frame. If they all sell as well as the first two, I should be looking at a solid foundation for future growth. My 2012 business plan had forecast that I’d sell at least 5,000 books (across all titles) during my first year on the market (i.e. through May 2014), and hopefully up to 10,000. It turns out I’ll hit the former figure by the end of this month, and probably exceed the latter target well before Christmas! I’m very happy about that, as you can imagine. I’m now hoping to make at least 20,000-25,000 sales during the first year that my books are on the market.

 

Most exciting of all, I’m already approaching the sales and earnings figures of a typical mid-list author, and I hope to do even better in future. If so, I can foresee the day when I’ll earn enough from my writing to be able to terminate my disability pension. That means a great deal to me. I was raised to believe that one shouldn’t ‘suck on the public teat’, as my father rather picturesquely put it, except in dire need, and then only for the shortest possible time. Back in 2004, a neurosurgeon predicted I’d never recover sufficiently from my injuries to earn a living through my own labor. I may not have recovered any better than he foresaw, but nevertheless, the prospect of proving him wrong is very satisfying!