Defensive memory: if we remembered the worst parts of having children, the human race would be extinct. It is something you can say about writing as a profession too. If I think too often about editing, I may take professional tiddly-winks instead. There’s more money it, less hours, and much less rage.
But there are nice parts. You get to mix with a better class of people than tiddly-winks professionals. Well, maybe. I don’t know if tiddly-winks professionals show their support for Communist China, but possibly some would if they got a free ride, and kinda like totalitarianism. It was very amusing to see the usual suspects having kitten hissy fits about the Chinese hosts for Worldcon (Do you really think it happened without the CCP?) having their thumb on the Hugo scale. Don’t they know that is the privilege of the right people? (It is always a shock for the useful idiots of various socialist/communist revolution to discover that they will not in fact be the commissar of the inner party intersectional poetry appraisal collective, complete with dancing boys and peeled grapes, but be the first to have their backs against the wall). However, it is pretty irrelevant, and a shrinking subset of the writing world. There are very many writers who give great support to their fellows – and to their readers.
The point about a positive, non-crab-bucket set, is that we do pull each up. No one writer can write fast enough to supply the super-readers (the subset who get though at least 5 books a week – and while a small percentage of the total number of readers, are lot of the market). It’s these readers that dominate the word-of-mouth sales, as they tend to friends with other super-readers (and, um, if they breed, they tend to have super-reader children. Reading runs in families remarkably often). Everyone dreams of conquering the huge 1-2 book-a-year customer market. It really means a lot of sales — but the truth is without extensive marketing and a level of luck (or connections, or an existing public persona) this will not be you – at least not without conquering the super-readers, the next tier down, and the next tier down etc.
This arena is the easiest to penetrate, because they are willing to try anything to feed their habit (I speak as one of these, although my numbers are down in later years). But for them to try you, you essentially have to get into their ‘customers also bought’ list. This happens best if their readers also know you – if you’re part of their social media and haven’t been a PITA with overselling yourself. Besides, I have learned a huge amount from my peers.
So: I’m on farcebook, and X. So are many of the MGC crowd, as well as a lot of other writers. Make the effort, make those contacts – unless of course you feel the only way to success is to denigrate and sabotage other writers. Besides it is a great way of telling how the current book is going – if they’re on social media a lot (if they’re me) the writing is struggling. When I doing well on the words (55K today) I am not doing well on chit-chat.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “The nice parts”
***if they’re on social media a lot (if they’re me) the writing is struggling.***
Bingo!
But also true that this group is a non-crab bucket set. ; )
I take the Fifth Amendment on that one.
I’m not on the major social media because 1) my employer at Day Job prefers us to limit our presence there and 2) Facebook frowns on pen names, as of the last time I checked their TOS. And 3) it can be a time-sink, and I don’t have that much time to spare.
Agreed on facebook-it wants to know too much about me. Twitter I gave up on because it seemed to be encouraging a more curmudgeonly, combative side of me. Blogging I have trouble staying on top of because it seems to take energy away from fiction writing.
I am one of those super-readers. I have even managed to monetize my reading by writing reviews. I just laughed when someone on another forum I inhabit challenged anyone to match the 87 books he read that year. (I write almost that many book reviews each year. Plus a weekly blurb – now two. And that excludes pleasure reading or the books I read for review, but reject reviewing because I cannot write a positive review.)
Freer is right. No one author can keep me in books. There is nothing I like better than authors cooperating with each other to produce new books. How many fewer books would there be if Eric Flint had kept the Assiti Shards universe to himself or David Weber kept the Honorverse a closed garden, accessible only to him.
More than that, fostering other, new, authors tends to create more sales for your own books because it keeps people in a genre when you cannot write fast enough. There is always room for one new author, because the pie isn’t fixed. It grows.
On a complete tangent, do you know if Australians, in general, likely to get annoyed or amused at a scifi domesticated egg production platypus?
Now that, right there, is one of the glories of this sort of readership.
Well, I would be amused. I daresay some hard-core probably vegan greens woulbe horrified
That should be fine. This thing has enough in it to horrify everyone that a few vegans wouldn’t be an issue.
It was very amusing to see the usual suspects having kitten hissy fits about the Chinese hosts for Worldcon (Do you really think it happened without the CCP?) having their thumb on the Hugo scale.
I heard about that. It turned out that the totalitarian government acted like a totalitarian government. We should start a gofundme for those who need smelling salts to recover from this terrible shock.
This has been a gift of traffic for some Hugo-winning fan sites, who are Viewing With Alarm the obvious censorship by the PRC, imposed without even pretending it wasn’t state censorship. Many charts and graphs have been displayed, you know. So much data and discussion!
First support the catastrophe, then watch as the train falls off the bridge, then deny the train fell off the bridge, then decry it all in high dudgeon after the smoke clears.
So classy.
The only social media you should do as a writer is the one you like enough to do anyway. For me, to my vast surprise, that turned out to be Instagram. I like kitty pix, gardening pix, and vintage garments, which abound in Instagram.
What I’ve learned:
I post regularly (lots of quotes along with aforesaid kitty and gardening pix).
“Buy My Book” posts should be kept to a minimum (once a week for us and we’ve got 34 books to choose from so it’s varied).
Book Love for other authors is always a plus.
If we’ve got an event coming up, I advertise it!
I make the posts in advance so it’s not spontaneous at all.
Respond to anyone who comments, other than trolls.
If I didn’t like Instagram on its own, I wouldn’t do it.